 good day to you wherever you are. If you're watching us right now, you're going to be watching us later. Thank you for coming. My name is Tywa Falabi. I'm really excited to be having this conversation again today. This is the second episode of Decolonizing Dramatogy. Theatermakers in conversation from from Africa. I'm so happy today and that's because we have three amazing guests and I'm going to be introducing them shortly. But I'd like to first of all say I am dialing in today from Regina Saskatchewan and I love to acknowledge where I am. I want to acknowledge those that passed the present in the future. I'd like to also mention that wherever you may be coming in from or dialing in from that would like to thank you for being here. Also special thanks to Howround and of course our partners of Pan-African Creative Exchange, Safe World, Thietem's International, and the University of Regina here in Canada. For bringing, you know, bringing all of this together. I'm really excited about this conversation today. Thanks to Brendan. Brendan is there behind the screen co-producing this with me. And of course, Sarika, interpreter and Adam, a captioner. Thank you so much. Today, which is the second episode, we're really considering dramaturgy and dramaturgical processes from Egypt, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe. And that means that we have three amazing theater practitioners from these three countries, which is great. I'd like to introduce quickly Wale Ogutokun. Wale Ogutokun is a theater director, a theater playwright, a dramaturg, a theater practitioner, and it's really a privilege to have him with us. He's worked internationally, and then I know he's going to speak more for himself, but it's just a privilege to have Wale with us. I call him Mogawale, so he permits me to continue calling him that. Also, I'm Adam Afiz. Adam is a theorist, an artist, a curator, and Adam writes on contemporary art history outside of Western paradigms. On choreographic systems, climate change, and post-colonial legacies. I also want to add that Adam is a PhD candidate at York University's Performance Studies Department. Adam is going to speak more for himself, but I want to say something about Adam is that I'm really amazed by the kind of work that Adam does. The fact that we actually have a representation also from that region. When we were talking earlier on, I did say that many times when we talk about the African region, there's always that inclination to graphite it towards West Africa, East Africa, South Africa, and many times there's always that voice that some of us are yearning to hear from North Africa. I'm not homogenizing North Africa, obviously, but I'm just saying that it's really beautiful to have a presence on the series and on the episode, on the series from that region. Finally, I want to introduce Lloyd, a friend, a brother, I've known him for over five years. He's now, he's from Zimbabwe Theater Director, a playwright and an actor, and also Lloyd is the founder and the principal of Zimbabwe Theater Academy. He's also the curator of Midtambo International Festival and really exciting to have the three of you with us today. Thank you for taking this opportunity. We're going to go straight into this conversation because I think earlier on, before we won't start it, we started talking about really critical issues that I'm hoping that we're still going to go back to them for. I like to start with Lloyd. And I think my first question goes to all of you, obviously, is that how do you, how do you conceive dramaturgy? What does that mean to you and what you're joining into the land of dramaturgy? I'll start with you. What does dramaturgy mean to you and what's your journey into that? How do you conceive it? How do you think about that in your own work? Over to you, Lloyd. Okay, well, what we can also do is that in case it might be network there, then lagging and all of that. I just jump, I just, I just go over to Adham, what, you know, the question to you and then anytime Lloyd is back, we'll just allow him to chime in. Go ahead, Adham. Thank you, Tywell. Well, my, I first got introduced to dramaturgy when I started working outside of North Africa. I was in Europe and I was working with several performance artists and theatre makers and dramaturgy was the buzzword back end of 90s, early 2000s. And I kept thinking, is this something that we do anyway back home and it just has a different name here or is this yet another new thing that we're going to have to learn about in order to be included in the art market with its dynamics and its politics. And for us, because the company that I work with, Haruka platform, we create work that doesn't always necessarily depend on text. So very early on, we define dramaturgy for ourselves as basically it doesn't have to be a person doing it. So dramaturgy is the process of generating meaning and making sure that all the different aspects of the production are in conversation with one another, allowing this meaning that we're trying to work with to emerge. And then when we started working with a dramaturge as a role and as someone fulfilling this function, it was very clear for us also from the beginning that it's someone who, his stakes are the actual work that's being made. So it's not asking the light designer, the costume maker or the video artist who do have other stakes in the production, but actually it's someone who's soul function is working with the quote unquote dramaturgy. And throughout the past 17, 18 years of the productions that we've made, the person that fulfills this role has changed greatly from one person to multiple people. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I think it's the network he spoke long time ago and it took a while to get to us. Lloyd, Adam, Adam is about wrapping up, let's allow him finish and then we'll pass it on back to you, right? Okay, okay. Go ahead, go ahead, Adam, sorry about that. No, so just wrapping up that my interest later than was how different people can fulfill this role. We worked with a psychoanalyst in that role. We've worked with a political scientist. We've worked with an architect and an urbanist. I can talk more about this later, but I'm interested in how different kinds of people from different backgrounds can fulfill this role. Away from a theater tradition, away from the Gotthold Defraim Lessing kind of story of origin of what dramaturgy and the field of study has historically meant in a Western canon kind of sense. Interesting. And we're going to come back to that because your definition is the process of generating meaning and how other folks in other disciplines can actually fulfill that role. Who do not necessarily identify or have the profession that we can call them theater artists. Is that what you're, yeah? Yeah, that's interesting. We're going to come back to that because I think that's an interesting lens. Let's go back to Lloyd. If your internet permit, do you want to, you know, speak to the question? What do you consider dramaturgy? How do you conceive it? And then what your journey into dramaturgy? Lloyd, are you there? Yeah, thank you so much, Tayo. I hope you can hear me clearly now. Yeah. Yes, if you can hear me, can you hear me? Yeah, you know, go ahead. Okay, thank you so much. I would say for me, because I'm coming from a devised background in terms of creating work. For me, it will be the, you know, the provocative, whoever's provoking the exploration in the creative process. You know, of analyzing and probably packaging a play into a dramatic or theatrical experience will be the drama, will be dramatized to me because we use the body to investigate and to provoke whatever that needs to be. So other than probably other approaches where you have to submit a written two page, sit down, analyze it within the historical, political and social context. We are saying, can you please, the body is space and where is the dramaturgy? I know Wally was thinking about it. And who becomes the writer of the process to go into love? Who wrote this thing? So I was coming from a devising collaborative, you know, kind of, for me, based approach to writing and also the dramaturgical processes. Okay, I would try to kind of, I think what I'm hearing him say is that he's coming from a devised background, and so he works collaboratively. So for him, how he conceptualized or what he conceived as dramaturgy is whoever that has the prerogative of, you know, provoking the creation and the structure and the processes of making that collaborative creative process to all come together into a performance. I hope I did justice to summarize that. I'll hand over to Oga Wali now to hear his thoughts in terms of what does that mean. Both from a professional lens, because I know that he's a playwright and he's done a lot of that, over to you. How do you conceive dramaturgy and what's your journey into that? I think for the interpreter, it might be good to say Oga means boss, and I don't know why he's always calling me boss, but so Lloyd said some interesting things there. He said it's about putting a work, putting a piece of theatre in context, whether socially, politically, culturally, that would be the work of the dramaturg. If we use the textbook definition, it says dramaturgy is the study of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on the stage. For me, it's calling a specialist. It's calling a specialist to come, adapt a piece of work for stage. That's how I see, that's how I see it. Now before this fancy term came, before eggheads like Taiwo and Ko brought dramaturgy towards, I had a practice. My entire cast often acted as dramaturgs. We would sit and we would put the play in context. We would read to understand it, to make it workable. When we adapted Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart for the stage, the entire cast acted as dramaturgs for it. Well, I would be the lead dramaturg in that matter, but it's how I said, because there's no point in putting up a work if you have no real understanding of its roots, of the cultural inferences, of its cultural anchors, of its historical anchors. That's how I would say that. For me, that's my work in definition. Interesting. Well, saying Orgai, it's just me going back to my cultural inclinations here. Interesting way of looking at it though. And maybe that's going to pose another question, because then you're taking it away from the lens of an individual to that collaborative process that Lloyd is talking about. Yes. So what does that look like? Maybe in that example you cited, could you give us an example of how that process went from that dramaturgical process? Well, let's take a play. The Nobel laureate, Professor Waleshawinka's madmen and specialists. Now, I was blessed with a highly intelligent cast at that point. It was a repertory body. We picked up work, we made it ours, and we delivered our own interpretation of those things. When we did that play, madmen and specialists, we had to break it down to its true meaning. Because for those who might have read it, it might be one of the most complex things ever written out of Africa. But because we had able cast members, I would give my thoughts on what the cultural or social context was. But it was a beautiful thing to have cast members who would not enter into the role of actors until we had finished the dramaturgy. People like Suncombe Adebayo, who was the best graduating student of his class in the University of Ibadan. Shola Roberts of the Lagos State University wrote to me, faculty, Lagos State University. There were actors, there were brilliant actors, but there were drama talks as well. And so we sat and we would break it down. We would come to an understanding, an explicit understanding of the work, and then we would make it happen. If you enter some things half-baked, not ready for the script, for the work, it never comes out right. So I'd say that's our reflex with René Guittier. That process of interpretation and meaning-making, that provocation happens together as a collective. I'm going to come back to that idea. I want to hear Adam's thoughts about that process for Adam. Adam, who says that there have been other folks who are necessarily not actors, but they've taken on that role. What does that mean? Adam, over to you. Well, I mean, as I said earlier, when we started using the term dramaturgy, I mean, maybe I'll start the story differently from another place. When I first tried to translate the term dramaturgy to Arabic and translate texts that deal with dramaturgy in Arabic, we had a problem because we don't have a term such as dramaturgy in Arabic that I can use. So we started, there was transliteration. So you just say dramaturgy and you write it in Arabic the way that you say computer and you write computer in Arabic. And I was thinking, maybe that's enough. Maybe sometimes you just take the word and do this. But then, in our company at Harka, we like getting into these problems. We like getting into a place where you cannot translate something. And you cannot even easily explain it to the practitioners who are doing it, like explaining dramaturgy to people that have been making theater and have been choreographers for decades. And it's there that we started wondering, is this some foreign practice that truly is foreign? So it's like explaining classical ballet to someone that has never danced classical ballet. Or is this something that we've always been doing under different names? But this is just another way of formalizing it. But of course, the minute you start using the word dramaturg or dramaturgy, it invokes the history of the Western practice. It invokes the fact that in Europe, theaters, a theater building, would have someone who is the dramaturg of that theater, of the national theater of whatever. The very first job given to someone as a dramaturg of a theater was in the 18th century, given to Lessing, Gotthold Efrain Lessing. And that was in Hamburg. And he wrote this book called The Hamburg Dramaturgie, which is seen as a founding document in understanding what dramaturgy means. And his position changed title. So in the beginning it was called The Dramatic Judge, Dramatischer Richter in German. And then from Dramatic Judge it became the dramaturg. And if this was happening in the 18th century in an affluent European colonial power, what was happening in the 18th century across the sea in Egypt? Because at the same time, we cannot assume that we all went through the same parallel genealogies and that we all share one art history because it's not true, it is false. What was happening is that many different other theater and performance practices that cannot be contained even in the word theater or in the word performance as in performance art have been happening and are still happening. And therefore, when I use that term dramaturg, this is why I take it with a grain of salt because I take it thinking of its very specific institutional Western history. It's developing at such a moment of colonial affluence. And I also take it while thinking of the many specific genres and conventions that some of them don't even consider themselves to be art. Like when you think of a practice like Tsar, which is a form of dance and theater, but it's also deals with exorcism and it deals with spirits. When you ask the practitioners who are some of the best musicians and theater performers you'll ever meet, they don't even consider themselves artists. They think this is the thing that serves a function which is talking with the spirits. So they're not even, they don't see their practice in the context of the art. So when you see people working with the aesthetic regime of power who do not define themselves as artists, of course you have to ask yourself, what the hell does this term dramaturg mean to these people? And if you're going to work with them, what does it mean to engage in a dramaturgic process? For our specific needs of dramaturgy, I can give you anecdotes. So when we worked on a performance that was dealing with psychosis and I did not want to create a performance about psychotic disease, we wanted to really delve deeper and understand. So the dramaturg was a psychiatrist. We worked at a hospital with a doctor. And the doctor was walking us through what does this mean? We worked with patients under the doctor's supervision and other nurses. And for us, this was a dramaturg. Another time we were working with how when urban planning happens very quickly in a city, how we move changes. You know, if a street is cut shorter and you have to turn around, you physically change your movement. So we hired an urban planner and the urban planner was the dramaturg for this production. So this is what I mean by it's that for us, I focus more on the function and how this person can, yeah, like contrary to the older way of understanding dramaturgy, it is about making a text adaptable to a certain moment in time or to a certain group of actors, because we do not start from a text in our creations. For us, this is why I'm talking about meaning and dramaturgy in this sense of someone that is serving a certain function. Not sure if I answered your question quite more. No, thank you. I think you've sort of raised a lot of interesting ideas in terms of unsettling, unpacking the disruption around the term self. So that we move beyond the nomenclature dramaturgy to really go deep and to start talking about really bigger issues. I'm going to come to that. You know, one of the things you talked about, the question, one of the questions you did ask is, is this a term, western term, or is it that this thing itself, it's something that we have been doing before this term was invented. And then these are big issues that we're going to come to those things, because the purpose for all of this is, you know, for me, are there other issues or big ideas that this is giving us as a way into to actually have that conversation. Before we come to that, because that's going to be like the other half of our talk today. But before we go into that, I would like to ask the question for the three of you in terms of, you know, for you Adam, you know, you've worked in Egypt and now you are in the U.S. Lloyd is in Zimbabwe, Gawale is in, has worked in Niger, some of the places in the world. What's the role of the place that you've worked at, or you are currently working in? What role does he play in how that function of, in how you define the role, the function of dramatogy, you know, comes to play? What role does that play, you know, plays based, you know, practice of yours, the three of you, you know, what role does that play in performing, or whoever that is performing that role of interpreting, provoking, generating meaning and things like that. I'd like us to start with Lloyd, if his Internet would permit. We'd like to start with him and then we'll shift to Agarwalian and we'll come back to Adam. Lloyd, are you there? Yeah, I'm there. Yeah, I think the place for me is a significant role as Adam was speaking about that, you know, in Arabic, they would not find the term dramatogy, but then they're taking the bits and pieces of what they define dramatogy as to then translate to the actors. So for me, dramatogy or, you know, the place, or where we are best, which I link to the culture of our people who are probably working with, then says the foundation of understanding the context of the play or the words. So maybe in Zimbabwe, if we say, let me give a name who translated to our local people who know this, but again, you know, when you're working with, you know, what Karishima spoke about, the Glocal pedagogical, the Glocal understanding is that locally, how we sound is strong to the thing that we want to speak about. So if it is in the, as we say, the political, social, economic realm, the place then is setting us to have a strong foundation so that even if you go to Nigeria, to Egypt, to the United States, that the dramatage does not serve only the aesthetics of the presentation, but then the inherent important meaning of what we want to convey, not only to the public, but to ourselves, what we believe in, because for me, just about the aesthetics of the show that has been paid in, the actors that are coming are believing in the work that they are going to produce, else they need to have been provoked in this exploration to understand, but this is based on the, in the space that they were in. I did my training in the U.S. in California. It's a small place up there in Northern California. It's blue-legged, and the reason why they put the training is that it's so far away from urban settings, because their pedagogy is strongly in putting people in nature and close to nature, hence all our activities are connected back to nature. So I'm saying place like Harare being in urban city affects the way and the work that I'm going to produce. So I think place has a critical role. If I was going to do a show that I'm doing called Zandis in America, it's going to have a different meaning if I originated there, even if I was a Zimbabwean. But now I'm local, I understand the Zimbabwean prison system or the people that have been imprisoned and out of prison here, even if I was... I think we're losing lost Lloyd again, but that's fine. I think he's sort of... I hope that we've been able to, you know, his perspective is the fact that, again, trying to summarize here that the rule, that that place, the locality place in the entire piece around that, around, you know, function as a drama. So you did the context of production. I'd like to come to Agawale now to really speak to this question and maybe also put in mind as you think about, as you discussed dramaturgy in the context of production to also speak about the institutional understanding of dramaturgy, because I know also for Agawale and for Adam also, you're not just in the realm of production alone, but even in that institutional sense of audience, you know, education, programming, curating festivals and things like that. Those are things that you've also done, the three of you obviously. So over to you, Agawale, and then we'll pass it on to Adam. Thank you, Tywo, for this particular question. Firstly, I have some background in law. I have a master's degree in law and I have been called to the bar. But what I do is theater. That is what I'm known for. That's what I practice now. Now, I want to say something. The reason I spoke about law is because as an African lawyer, you have to learn law in Africa and also learn the law of the developed world. It is the same with literature. We learn our literature and we learn the literature of the developed world. We learn our literature in English often, literature in English, then we do English literature. The 400 year old man, Shakespeare, is still relevant to us today because they make us study him. You want to go to Shakespeare's Globe? It's a Shakespeare play you take there. Now, some institutions have, they have living dramatogs. They have dramatogs who work for the theater. I don't know, maybe some of these festivals, I don't know, Stratford here in Canada, Stratford Festival, or maybe the Shaw Festival, they might have living dramatogs, but we know people have this. But it is impossible for a Canadian dramatog to practice his dramatogy on an African play. I make bold to say that. I was dramatog for Death and the King's Horseman here, put together by Soul Pepper and the Stratford Festival. And I knew there was no how a Canadian could have been a dramatog in that play. It was so specific, culturally, it was so localized. One of the greatest plays ever written, in my opinion, Death and the King's Horseman. It was so localized that you needed to understand the culture to be able to profess on it. Same as another one I'm a part of here, my life in the bush of ghosts. If you do not come from a certain area, so my boldness now is that the African, because he practices from both sides, can be a dramatog for a westernized production, but he doesn't flip the other way. I cannot be a dramatog on Arab culture. It's impossible. It's not my way. I do not understand the cultural influences. I do not understand the anchors. I do not understand the little meanings that make up the whole. And when we say the institutionalized dramatog, or the dramatog that comes with the institution, can there really be such a thing, even though others practice it? Can there be such a thing? Because if I speak about the Yoruba culture here, probably only Tywo can ask me questions about it. Questions of meaning. Can say maybe I think, because this is where I come from. This is what I was born in. This is what I was immersed in. So that's my view of the institutionalized dramatog and the dramatog engaged for certain productions. There are some things that you cannot blanket dramatogy on. That is what I think about that. I do not know if there's still another part of this question I haven't touched on. Interesting. By Canadian, just to put a caveat, I think what you're referring to is, I can't be a Canadian and be a dramatog to Nigerian please. What you're referring to, just to put a caveat, is that what you're referring to by Canadian is someone that is not cultured in that African sense of culture, right? It could be an American. That's what I mean. If you're not immersed in that culture, it is impossible for you to profess dramatogy on that work. Because you do not even have an understanding of even the names. The significance of the names. The significance of the songs. Even the significance of meeting at a place where four paths meet. You have no idea about it. So things, all the connotations that are there are lost on you. Interesting. Thank you for your thought. I'll pass it on to Adham. And Adham, maybe you're also speaking to this. I want you to also chip in. Ogawele kind of started us on that institutional drama again. And the limitation of what that means within the context of is even possible at all and all that. I'd like to also speak to that. Apart from, you know, in contrast to that place based that we're coming from, because the original question is place based. What is the role of that locality, the culture, the place that you're in playing that in that whole functioning of the drama. Over to you, Adham. Well, I mean, I agree with everything Ogawele just said. If I'm thinking of place and what that means, some people believe that the place matters and others believe that the place doesn't matter at all. So when I look at how my practice is dealt with, when it's framed as Egyptian work or it's framed as Arab, which is something else, and then it's framed as African when there is an African festival and they want a North African maker or then as a Mediterranean, because Egypt is part of the Mediterranean world. And Egypt is also part of the Muslim world. So then there's that. You're a Muslim artisan and so on and so on. And every time this frame, this curatorial frame is put on the artist and the artwork, a place becomes the protagonist in the story that matters the most. That this is what they look for. They're looking for the Egyptian ness in the work and they're looking for the African ness in the work and the Islamic dance in the dance, you know. And this is interesting because it doesn't happen the other way around. When there's a Spanish choreographer or a Swedish theater maker coming to present in our countries, no one is expecting their Swedish ness, you know, like no one is expecting, I don't know, and it's really, I will, it sounds very banal when you say it the other way around, but it sounds very typical. Like I don't expect a Swedish person to talk about the forest and make meatballs on stage, but then we are expected to talk about the politics of food and hummus and falafel and the Palestinian issue and sand and deserts and camel. So our places are charged and the work by people like myself and like others on the panel today are seen as national and ethnic representatives to a formation of things that might have happened and things that actually maybe don't exist at all. So there's also the fact that sometimes you're asked to represent a fantasy that does not exist, or you are asked to represent a country that truly sees to exist, it doesn't exist anymore. What people think you might represent today might be something they saw in the news 10 years ago and in today's world, 10 years as a century, things move very fast. So when I moved to New York seven years ago or more now, I can't even remember how many years, but at least seven years ago I was at a conference without naming the conference and the expectation of me to represent everybody in a country that has 100 million citizens was unbelievable. I don't understand how one person with their practice could represent 100 million people. So that's one part of the problem. But then the other more important and more insidious part of the problem is that you have people that believe the space where they are does not matter to their practice and that their practice overrides any geopolitics. I find it very alarming when there is one man as the dramaturg of a theater, say a theater in Berlin, major theater in Berlin, and there's one person as the dramaturg in this theater. This is the person that claims they have understanding of anything basically of a company coming from Nigeria, a company coming from Algeria, and it's this person who might be Spanish or German or British or whatever that they believe that they can have the dramaturgic insight. And then it makes me wonder, do we believe that there's such a thing as theater that is purified from any national and political and geographic information at all? It's just, it's like saying chemistry or saying biology, even science itself is rooted in politics and it's rooted in political consensus. There is no scientific or artistic consensus without the political consensus to start with. But then I find it alarming because Europe is creating an image of itself as a monolithic culture that one German dramaturg can work with the Spanish company, even Spain itself between the Basque and the Catalan and Madrid as many countries. But on our side, and this is not we are better than you or you're better than us. It's just a colonial history. Like Pauli was saying, you study theater in Africa, you study your theater and you study theater of the other. When I go up studying dance and theater in Egypt, I studied Shakespeare, but I also studied Syrian and Egyptian and Moroccan playwrights. And this, it's funny how the story gets written because then we're constantly the ones that need to learn, we're constantly the ones that need to look up to Western theaters to be updated and catch up with modernity and postmodernity as if it's a train that will pass us by and we have to run to catch up. While in fact the story is wrong because we know more about the history of both places and the practices of both places than a strictly Western practitioner does. But how stories get written is another conversation that we can keep for another question. Thank you, Adam. I'm happy both of you. You started us on an interesting course here because you're unpacking and unsettling that idea of institutional drama talk, the limitations, the realities, the inherent fairness of that idea itself and the political realities that surrounds it. I think my question to both of you, I know that we might have Lloyd at some point and apologies for Lloyd being back and just because of the Internet, the realities of working in the part of the world. My question to both of you then is what are those big ideas? And by saying big ideas now, I'm not necessarily looking in the context of size, but those ideas that the idea of decolonizing dramaturgy can help us to start talking and thinking about. You started bringing them up one after the other. I know we had an interesting session before we started a live stream today. What are those ideas from your own work, and both of you, and of course with Lloyd, you traveled internationally and you worked internationally. What are those things, those subjects, those issues that you think that the idea of decolonizing dramaturgy call us into our needs in the context of your work. And we'll just allow you to answer to that, and then we'll come again after that. Maybe you can start us with that. Okay. So I could use a play. I could use Death and the King's Horseman as an example again. So this play is specific to a geographical area. It's specific to Oyo state, to Oyo, the Oyo kingdom in the area now known as Nigeria. It has a king. The king, when he dies, is supposed to be buried with another high chieftain, the Elesion. That play, except you are immersed in that culture, or except the dramaturge has traveled there and has gone to learn, cannot be, it cannot be, you can't do dramaturgy on it via Bluetooth. It's impossible. It can't be done long range. You have to be there. So like Adam said, you have one man and can, it's like being a dramaturge for a play that's written, let's imagine a play is written with Islam at its core. I can't walk on it. I can't walk on it because I do not have an understanding, an in-depth blended understanding of that religion. Therefore, I would make a mockery of it. I would not, that's my contention. That's my contention. But if I can do Shakespeare, it means I have the upper hand on you as an African dramaturge. If I can do George Bernard Shaw, because I was made to read him, I have an upper hand. I can fix both sides. It's what I'm saying. Whose dramaturgy are we decolonizing? It is the view of the western world that dramaturgy stems from it. In my opinion, it is the view of the developed world that it is the source of dramaturgy for the rest of the universe. That's impossible. Because if you come into my culture, I will tell you, child, be silent. You have no understanding of what is going on here. It doesn't matter how many years of experience you have. I read something by Wilbur Smith a long time ago, and this one was dressed as a spy somewhere in the desert in Arab land. And when he urinated in the desert, and that's how they knew who wasn't real. I will never have known that. It's impossible. How do you know that if you're not immersed in it? You just... So that sort of things like that then, if they're written in a piece of work, are lost on the institutionalized dramaturge. You know, you're reading. It's not... You have to... Now, now. I'm also going to say this. The reason I do not profess... The reason I do not profess to be an authority on African-American work is because I have not walked in their shoes. I do not understand the concept of a policeman pointing a gun at you. It is alien to me. When I'm in my country, I'm king of my country. Policemen do not point guns at me. Therefore, I cannot tell that story with empathy. I might know it. I might feel the horror of seeing a man kneel on another person's neck. But I know it can never happen to me. Where I come from. Therefore, if I tried to tell that story, if I tried to tell that story, I would be telling a non-truth. That's me. That's done. Thank you for that. Over to Adam. And then we're going to go... I just want to say thanks to our audience because we're engaging. You know, Brennan is getting us all the chats. Thanks, Brennan. We're going to engage with the last chat on dramaturgy and curation. We'll come to that. But let's address these first. Over to you, Adam. I think I'm muted. No, I'm not muted. I mean, it's not just dramaturgy. You know, when I was... I'll tell you another funny story, funny and sad story. When I was doing my postgraduate studies in Amsterdam and I was studying choreography in a contemporary dance program. And then I was surprised that as someone coming from Egypt, everything that we're studying was European. Maybe one or two North American references, but everything else was European. And no one from the professors was factoring in the fact that I am a man from Egypt who's making work that is specific to that place. Sitting there truly baffled. I didn't understand why the program is just called dance when it is specifically Western European dance. Why don't we give things their names? Why isn't it called Western European dance department? It's just called dance. But then when I do my dance, then it's marked. Then it is called Arab dance or North African or African or Middle Eastern and so on and so on. So why do I have to be treated with specificity? But then the work that was created by the Western and West is such a big word. But you know what I mean? My colleagues from Serbia and from Spain and from the Netherlands, their work was just dance without any word that comes before it. It's not called Serbian or Spanish or Catalan dance. It's just dance. My work has to be marked. So this was one of the first things. And then I spoke with them and I said, I don't even know if I start teaching in this university. What would I teach? I mean, I don't know why would I need to teach this? And then they said, well, we should introduce you to the director of the African dance program. I mean, what is African dance? So they sent me to see this thing thinking because I'm from Egypt, I would understand about African dance automatically. And I don't even know until now what African dance means because what I see in an institution like this, it is a kind of dance that is a mishmash of different things that is presented primarily to a Western context. And if you're in Africa, in any African country and you say African dance, what this is meaningless? This doesn't mean anything, you know? Because how many dances exist in every African nation to just take all these hundreds and hundreds of dance forms and put them all under one term and call it generally African dance, the way that we can say African theater and African heritage. So I'm not sure, like Wally said, who are we decolonizing or what are we trying to decolonize here? I generally have been having a hard time with the word decolonize itself because it sounds to me almost as if something is over and finished, an event that happened and it's long gone and now we're just decontaminating. You know, it's a party that finished and we're just cleaning the house after the party. But I don't think the event is finished. I don't think colonialism is finished for us to decolonize its impact. We are engaged in an active, anti-colonial struggle. Colonization is ongoing in many ways and it just keeps transforming in a very treacherous way. But it's practically ongoing, whether culturally or economically or in terms of the sweatshops that are owned and run in places and countries like mine and other countries in the Middle East or in Africa. And that's why I hesitate a lot when I use the term decolonize because I think it's important to highlight that the act of colonizing and of sustaining colonial empirical interests and interventions to use a nicer word than the words we should actually be using is still ongoing. So as I said earlier, we can think of the place because we are made to think of the place and it's so easy for things to be confused like what I was saying. It's so easy to think that if you are an African man, then you can speak also on the African-American cause or the other way around. If you're an African-American writer, then you are speaking about blackness in general. But it's very different being African immigrant and being African-American. It's very different being black in America and being black in an African country. These things are not the same thing or being white skinned in an African country. So this nuance, maybe this is the dramaturgy that we need to think more of this dramaturgy of nuance or a dramaturgy of curiosity and humility which I end up practicing and I really think it is an exciting and a generative place to be a place of curiosity and a place of thinking also of specializations like I was saying. For me, I'm less concerned with a dramaturgy that comes and looks almost like this magic person that knows everything and dramaturgy is D, it's apolitical, it's non-geographical, it's non-specific and it's almost like a car mechanic coming to just do things. I don't think there's such a dramaturgy but for me it's a very specific person that I need someone that understands better about neurology and psychoanalysis then that's the dramaturgy for this project or I need an urban planner or an architect then that's the dramaturgy for this point. I appreciate the nuance that you both are really bringing into these now and the complexity and unpacking of whether decolonizing itself and dramaturgy itself. I'll come to Lloyd, I want to know that I know that the fifth episode is around dramaturgy as a curator and programmer. We have a comment here again going back to institutional dramaturgy and the fact that the principle of shared leadership comes to mind and I'll read all of that at that point but without really giving much into dramaturgy, dramaturgy as a curator and programmer and this is for Lloyd. I wanted to ask you Lloyd in terms of your work at Midtambo Festival how does that what the impact of your what's your curatorial approach to that within the context of dramaturgy that even if you think about this from that standpoint anyways but is there anything you want to share because I know that Midtambo International Festival in Zimbabwe has been ongoing for two years now and you are the curator of that Lloyd and also we've been part of other festivals and seasons and all of that. Do you want to speak to that Lloyd in terms of you being a curator and a programmer for a festival? Thank you for that story for breaking up. I think this is the third year we did it and it was quite interesting because we made eight African guests from eight different African countries and then one of the participants I loved so much the place this time and I said why did you love the place? Because they were not western they spoke about probably things that I could relate to as an African but with an international within the Midtambo International Theatre Festival so I think it was only this year we were enlightened about the importance and significance and power of coming back to the basics of knowing who we are and speaking what we know and not probably just based on imagination so in terms of curating over the years we wanted to mix in terms of aesthetics and also stories from all over the world how they meet in a pot and then people share their different perspectives and we're bringing everyone from Asia, Europe, America to be part of this so I think it has not really been one of our priorities to say we really want to speak to this but I think after this year our comments I'm thinking we should have a segment an African segment which is specifically dedicated to our work also if we want to speak about decolonizing and not only I just said last part and also Adam what are we decolonizing ourselves from and who is it but for me looking at the example of the academy is decolonizing from the western structures and some of our students who go into universities are taught that this is the structure of a play this is a well written play this is how you should speak you cannot speak your own language in a play because the international audience might not understand so I think decolonizing ourselves from these approaches and structures and also thinking that you can't talk with a play that is half your local language understanding what we spoke about the various things I remember thinking that in terms of gestures there are certain gestures that are peculiar to Zimbabwe that are so important that if I put it in a play not only the people playing they are so comfortable in achieving the vision of the play that it is we are trying to portray in this performance but they are so important that we need to preserve them wherever we go so I know it makes a lot of things because I've been breaking enough but in terms of curating in the festival we are curating it so we are in charge so whenever we feel this is the right moment to drive probably let me say the African agenda then we are going for it because that's what we're feeling at that point in time to only do Africa but because it's an international festival so hence we need different international dramatages if they are will come their point of view to this particular festival Thank you Thank you Lord I will just read some comments here and hopefully again the three of you are listening what ideas come out for you just respond to them so the first comment and some of the comments we've addressed them some questions some are yet to great conversation I feel this concept and these ideas also relate to curators basically any gatekeeper the principle of shared leadership comes to mind more and more platforms venues and festivals are looking at more guest curators to break down this single point of view perhaps this is also something to think about with regards to institutional dramatodes and Lloyd and Adam and Wally and Lloyd if any of you have any thoughts to any of the comments just let me know I'm just going to read them please just let me know and you can chime in the second comment very true Adam just think about the colonization happening right now online so many digital platforms are heavily colonized the colonize is in embedded comma comments thank you for this conversation it is so deep another comment dramaturgy of nuance is a great term can we extend to contextualizing contextualization in presentation and how is this important thing in Ted Ateef or performance exchange I don't know what that is but what I said earlier on is that dramaturgy of nuance the three of you are really saying that it's not we need to stop boxing ourselves into these idea of this is what it is and knowing that you know it's not just one straight jacket and really understanding the complexities and the of some of these things so okay so the three of you the question is dramaturgy of nuance is a great term can we extend to contextualization in presentation and how is this an important thing in all african exchange maybe the three of you can speak to that can we can I say something so someone put a comment up there and said how can there be I'm going to read it now how can we think of decolonizing art when the largest african political institution has not worn african official language I'm talking about the african union now so there are three of us here now there's adam who's from north africa there's loid who's from the south and there's loid who's from the west of africa we do not share languages the language you share is a colonial language and someone actually thinks that us not having one language I hope it's a metaphorical language that is referred to someone actually thinks that not having one language makes us less legitimate this is our uniqueness this is our beauty this is how we are massive this is how we are who we are the fact that we are different is the magic of africa Nigeria has 250 languages 250 that is the magic of africa why do we need one language if they interpret spanish and whatever to people interpret africa as well the truths the truths what's happening in the american constitution these truths are universal the truth the truths are universal they are the same across the world they are the same across the world in humanity a man kneeling on another man's neck is the same all over the world it is murder a man saying countries in africa all countries is the same all over the world it's bigotry it is racism it doesn't matter what language is being spoken when I see a mosa in football it is one language it is africa so we do not need one language the difference in our tongues is not a difference in our humanity it is not so when I saw it why does the african union need have you not seen the dressing of those people have you not seen I was thinking of something I bought a second tv because my son troubles me so I got a smaller tv for him to watch and by some chance al jazira came with it and I could not believe the difference between the music being told by al jazira and cnn we are talking about colonization that is colonization what cnn tells us is colonization there is the rest of the world is legitimate africa should have a place we don't have to we shouldn't have to defend ourselves I will quote from death and the kings husband child I am not here to help you understanding africa does not have to explain itself you take the languages you take us as we are you take the ghanian you take the zimbabwean you take the jibshian as we are and this is what we say about the colonization the fact that you do not understand something does not mean you have to be afraid of it this is who we are as a people and this is what we fight about every day so adam says that the fight isn't over this is what we have to face every day all the time hidden in nuances but it's there all the time the person who says african theater is fused therefore it cannot be real theater who made you the lord and judge over us who made you we are the ones who feel the rhythm who made you this is I can see you really reacting passionately to this comment because I know there is another comment that I do not mean this not one language only korea languages but I think it's also important the place of language culture and the whole idea of homogenizing I think it's really critical too understanding that nuances should be allowed at every point in time in human existence and I think that the more we think people's culture is less than the other or the more we think that their language does not because they don't speak the general language and then intellectually they are not up to standard and things like that I think that all these ideas coming together are big ideas that I think that this is giving us way into this conversation over to you adam maybe the language maybe the dramaturgy of new ones as you know and really contextualizing that in presentation any thoughts to this comment and of course we come to Lloyd over to you one of the comments was talking about colonization online and I just will quickly jump to that because I work a lot with different technological tools as ways of practicing dramaturgy one of the performances we were doing we wanted to examine texts in court in relation to Arab and Muslim immigrants to America from the late 19th century until the mid of the 20th century so that's a lot of texts, how can you explore all these texts in a way that truly pulls out certain moments in history and politics of the words and certain terms that are used so what we did is that we decided to take all these texts and put them in data analysis programs and use language processing tools to figure out what was the most common word that was sent and what was the most pairing of words like when you say this word what comes after it and from there we started with dramaturgy and so we started the performance thinking we are creating a work about Muslim immigrants coming to America and how just a brief history from the 19th century until 1940s it was illegal to be both Muslim or American and Arab and American, you could not you can immigrate but you cannot acquire the American nationality because the law does not allow Americans to have the Muslim faith and does not allow Arab and North Africans to be Americans point so this is why we started the project now long story short is when we started using this technology something funny happened was that the word that was most commonly used was the term white person and the least common word that was used was Muslim so Muslim appeared only eight times in 60 or 70 years of history and the term that was there all the time was white person so by utilizing this technology our dramaturgy became upside down and we realized we are actually making a performance about the creation of a category such as white man and the white person and what it goes to create and sustain whiteness as an important part of the American identity and so in a way while technology is always used against us and when coding is made it does not imagine an African face or an Asian or an Arab face it imagines a white male face when you're talking about face recognition and so on and some way I'm like I'm happy face recognition does not think of people like us when it's being designed but there's also ways of using technology to flip it on itself and use it to discuss the hegemony of a certain race or the hegemony of a certain regime of power at the same time something really interesting that's happening now is how a lot of people are turning to the blockchain as an alternative technological solution in order to create and organize decentralized communities online that are truly decentralized as in there's no one company that owns the data things happen between all these supercomputers spread around the world it's denationalized so it doesn't belong to another country or another and there is already African artists that are creating a blockchain based platform that is just for African and Black artists I'm working as the creative director of a platform called Wizara which is specifically looking at the meeting between Arab Asian and African artists so we're really interested in this shift of perspectives and how we bring people into conversation so there are initiatives here and there where people are trying to look specifically at the colonial power that technology has historically had and it's of course colonial and capitalist because they're both related to another today and from there trying to create something else so I would yeah I think there's interesting things that could happen Thanks Adam I also want to say that thinking about you know nuance I think we need to really I really want us you know I don't want to go over commit myself here I think really bringing in that dramaturgy of nuance is really something that's really interesting because even when we're talking about digital platforms and technology we also need to change to understand that the idea of this thing itself it's not just a white person sitting down to do it alone now we have best brains in the world who are necessarily not you know white they're of different nationality and all of this that we have today is not just one single pressing it's a brain work of different people regardless of their nationality also so I think those are also those are also ways to really start rethinking all of these ideas that it's not it's not just you know one white person sitting down to just create all this it's a constellation of ideas from different brains all over the world regardless of where they're coming from let's not go into this rabbit hole let's come back to this also and say two comments here I guess this idea of nuanced dramaturgy as well as dramaturgy of place becomes particularly interesting to further explore when we look at international exchange or presenting work internationally since then two cultures come together either from different artists collaborating or artists from one culture and audience from another here's the question I think do you feel there do you feel there are two dramaturgs from both cultures should come together as well to collaborate what is your experience in these with regards to dramaturgy and any of you the three of you can pick that up I know that Wally talked about your work here in Canada with Shaw Festival and other festivals Adam also and of course Lloyd in Zimbabwe what do we think about collaborative dramaturgy you know dramaturgs coming together to collaborate from different cultures have you had experience like that before what is the dramaturgy process in that entire arrangement yeah maybe I'll just share a bit that I think the word that has been used is quite good to collaborate so I think within the context of decolonizing like sorry to just put you back again you know there was Ruth Fingard who said there was never theater in Africa you know it starts from there so the idea of collaborating who is initiating the collaboration that's where my point is it's you in Canada telling us Lloyd there's guy coming for you to work with or it's us initiating that there is this thing that we have developed and we are working towards so there's an idea of imposing and collaborating which there is a very thin line there because you might say it's collaborating and then there's the superior being or force that is coming to then oversee or mentor or give advice because it has been done so for me it can be done I think but it's also contextual in the different context to say where is he starting from how much time has it been put you know it can't do that in like a month or two weeks like collaborating on what that's the line that's just putting names to a particular project for us to give it relevance so as brother Wally was saying long ago it doesn't start just from the paper but it's a lived experience that I'm sharing in this encounter so it cannot be just said within two minutes of us meeting together it should have been like way before so I just thought of popping in there in terms of collaboration thank you Wally do you want to speak to that in terms of your experience working across these regions yes please I am curious as to how two people can be drama talks on one project like Lloyd just said one has to step down for the other so one is actually they might be saying collaborating but there will be a voice that drowns the other out how do two people so maybe some institution already has its own in-house theme and they say let's bring in a specialist someone has to back away someone has one of my most horrendous experiences trying to write a play with a French writer a writer from France who will use Google translate you know we spoke different languages and even though they use the term generously writer it was it was I feel nauseated sometimes when I think about how stressed I was with it you know so I do not think two drama talks can work on one project like Lloyd said whose project is it whose project who's the one who's the lead drama talk there who's the one who understands the nuances the one who actually is the drama talk we like we like we like titles on paper you know and saying this is a collaborative work and like the gatekeepers like that kind of thing as well so they tell us gatekeepers being let me offend Taiwee a bit here British Council Goatee French cultural center I will call their names gatekeepers people who say you are the ones who can get through this funnel this bottleneck you are the ones who are permitted so they say this is the system we want now we want a combination a collaboration if a play is coming from Britain to Nigeria and they say they won't be on the team it is either I am leading the team or I am not leading the team you understand let us not pretend a collaboration in drama in Dramatogy you know it's either I am there or I am helping out I understand there is nothing to matter with helping out but don't that collaboration thing people people make awkward marriages that's fine Adam what is your thought first I just wanted to pull out an old comment from the messages to clarify a little misunderstanding the person that was speaking about the African Union languages clarified and wrote saying he doesn't mean or they don't mean one language only for the entire African Union but they meant to say that the African Union only uses the colonial languages and does not use any of the languages of Africa and the African Union claims that it's using English, French Portuguese but also but actually when you do go on their website the functions do not work so you end up reading everything in English and French so in a way yes while they do announce that they are using other non western languages and here only Arabic and out of the thousands of languages possible you end up only getting the text either in English or in French maybe sometimes it's in Portuguese when the meetings have to do with a certain locality in Africa so that's just because I understand Wally's passion and I fully supported but the person just wrote a correction for us to understand what they meant thank you for that Adam sure and as for can you have two or one it really depends on what you're doing as I said I don't think of making theatre or making performances as this monolithic experience that can be reproduced exactly the same every time you do it and therefore yes I've had moments where there was more than one dramaturg involved in the process each fulfilling a certain function and again like you can think of the dramaturg if you want to think dramaturgy is this abstract apolitical thing that happens like electricity then the dramaturg is just the mechanic that comes and fixes things in a car and if you think of it as something more specific to what you're doing and therefore specific to a given moment in time and a space and culture then of course they have to also have the nuance and the understanding of these specificities but then you can also as I said think of the fields of knowledge you want to invoke with your practice that maybe you don't have access to and that's why you need a specialist and then it's really it's about scientific knowledge sometimes and it's about a certain philosophical or political knowledge or understanding sometimes I can't say yes or no but I personally have worked in one production with more than one dramaturg working collectively towards something because I don't it's not black and white that's yes or no there have been and I think also perhaps we're talking we're coming at this conversation at different some of us are coming at it from a geopolitical perspective geopolitics rather perspective some are coming from that international collaboration also from an institutional standpoint so I think that we I think of what I'm putting on the table today is with that idea of nuance dramaturgic nuance that it's voiced really understanding the context where we're coming from and how all of that really plays out within the political within the aesthetics within the humane components of that I know that we have just seven more minutes to bring this to an end I'd love to give the three of you to ask yourself questions any questions from our viewers please put that in it will get to us thanks to Brandon that is doing that for us if you have any questions you want to ask Adam and to Lloyd I'll allow the three of you to to do that if you have any question or any thoughts as we start to bring this to an end I'd like to say that the that thing about the African Union my response was not directed at the right of that thing it was it was a general response you know I said as I said metaphorical but it is the very idea of us of course we shouldn't be I mean English and French we know what they've done with it I get very passionate about this I get worked up any question for Lloyd do you have any question for Adam or Adam any question for Lloyd and to Gaweli any question for me it's not a question but I think just a great unpacking of the two ways decolonizing dramatics or starting from where if we go down again decolonizing from the gatekeepers before we even go so for me it's quite interesting how also Adam and Lloyd were trying to unpack this that it's not just a small ball that we can start bouncing and pulling back and these are quite several balls that are in this sec that we're shaking and trying to rearrange but we know they're there but I think it depends on how you want to address it and articulate it or decolonize it so it's just a a point I wanted to put out there I have a question for Adam so my question is in the collaborations Adam how did you was there a lead drama talk was there someone who was a lead drama talk or was it you know or were there different departments in which each drama talk was a lead for specific areas I'm curious as to how it worked having different ideas come together well it was a very long process and in general most of the work that we do takes a very long while like it takes two years to make one piece it takes a lot of time and it's partly because we like to spend time really thinking and researching and digging and partly because it takes a lot of time to raise the kind of money that is needed to put a production today especially when you're working with people living in different countries and in different migrational routes but time is one thing like I think spending time together to settle and work and another thing I think difference is that these people truly come from very different perspectives and in that sense each of them knew what to say and what to do that is specific to their knowledge and the others did not have that knowledge so they were curious and they would listen and I don't know I think because we've done work that requires us all to collaborate and have a shared authorship in a way we sort of accept it in the process we've had difficulties with people that have not worked with us come into the group so we've been working together for around 17 or 18 years now and when we invite someone that has not been part of the group from outside to come and fulfill a certain function sometimes it immediately works they plug in and everything is beautiful and sometimes they come in and they're totally destabilized with this very collective authorship and once it's a funny story but it's actually true once they said so how do you write the credits when you're writing in the program notes you just say everything by everybody or on their functions and we said you know what it would be lovely to actually say everything by everybody because a lot of our work is really created this way but then there comes moments and again it's very technical that the person that is really a musician is the one that finishes the sound score and she's the one that signs that sound score the person that knows how to create film is the one that creates our media score and then it's that person that signs the media score so the signature of authorship that happens at the end comes from a technical knowledge and a technical and a practice based perspective rather than an ownership in the sense of this is my intellectual property and I don't know I really think it's about spending time a lot of time Adam for that for giving us more context because then that sort of also helps us to understand where you're coming up from thank you for that because then thinking about you know collaboration within the context of what you're talking about if you're working with someone for 17 years obviously I feel that that kind of collective you know Johnny you know can automatically come together versus just having somebody to come on and then in two weeks you have to do something you have two, three years to get it done I'm very mindful of our time here we only have one minute I want to really stick to ensure that we're on time just in few seconds any last thoughts from Agawalee to Adam to Lloyd any last thoughts and then that will bring it to an end any last thoughts about what we've talked about today your dramaturgical process or decolonizing or language I think we kind of spoke about so many things today any last thoughts we happy to chime in quickly Lloyd do you want to go any last thoughts let's continue decolonizing dramatize wherever we defeat and interpret thanks Lloyd Agawalee oh no I'm good I've enjoyed the conversation thank you Adam well I wish we could all meet within one or the other African country of the countries that we work with and come from well we have strong folks in the series so maybe we might reach out to all of you say hey do we have anything to plant together and all meet because it would be nice to connect together I want to thank you to the three of you thank you for the opportunity to have this conversation with you and I think for me one thing that I'm going back with is that another idea of nuance, dramaturgy of the nuance and what that means as we think about decolonization as we think about working across different geographies specific geographies and locations and cultures and different things like that I want to say thank you to all our partners for an African creative exchange around safe world data mission international and the University of Regina and thank you to to Sariqa to Jay and to Brendan over there and to Thier and of course to Alexia and to everyone hopefully you can also join us next week Wednesday for the third edition for the third episode from me here I want to say thank you and thank you so much for connecting and for being part of this today thank you so much bye everyone thank you general