 Angle 4 co-curators are very pleased to have you guys back. Many familiar faces. Welcome to the ongoing conversation that is allowing us to figure out how to think of theater, transcend theater, do everything that comes from the roots that we all know as community into this great unrehearsed future. And today's talk is led by Moenya Kapoi. So I will leave it with her. Welcome on and all. Just quickly, if you go to the Drama School Mumbai's website and you look at unrehearsed futures there, you will see that every single talk is put up, the video recordings of, and Falguni who runs these and holds space for us writes these beautiful reported pieces, which are about three or four pages that kind of summarize but with mindfulness and meaningfulness the conversation in case you don't have time to listen to the whole one hour conversation, you can read the reported pieces. And there's a whole season of talks from last season and the season of talks from this season is now building up and becoming quite the body of knowledge. So Moenya, all yours. Awesome, thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much for being here, everybody. Particularly in light of everybody's COVID pandemic contexts, I know that many of us are taking immense strain under the demands of the pandemic in our homes and communities and with our students and colleagues. So I really want to just say that up front and thank you for making the time to be in community with us today. Those of you who have been to these sessions before know that the four curators are questing in some kind of way. And through this questing, we have the honor and privilege of inviting our friends and colleagues and networks to be in conversation about a range of things under how we respond to these new and evolved and old circumstances we find ourselves in as practitioners, educators, artists, thinkers, all of it. And so the conversation today has come out of a particular quest of mine that is similar to Jehan's, I think, in that I'm interested in how the skills and tools and techniques of theater and performance get leveraged and adapted into a range of different settings. And one step back from that, I find myself asking how to train, who to train, what kinds of legacies of training to think with and through. And then one step back from that, I think about how these legacies are identified, how they're adapted when they migrate from one context to another, how they're practiced, of course. And then a step back from there leads me to ask questions like what exactly are we talking about when we put terms like decolonial and fusion performance and pedagogy together. So out of all of that musing, I have invited two very dear friends of mine, Kyla and Manola, to be in conversation with us around this stuff and to help us think about decoloniality in our context by example, if you will. And this is through Kyla's work as one of the founders of a brand new, beautiful school called the Johannesburg School of Mask and Movement. And many of the other co-founders are here as well. And also through Manola's work as a somatic practitioner who works through a range of different feminist and decolonial pedagogic tools. And how we're thinking this is going to go is that they will introduce each other. And then I will open with the question to each of them. And then we'll open it out to the floor soon after that. And then come back together and they will ask each other a question. And then we'll open it back out to the floor. And that's the kind of loose format, but we'll also see how this goes. Again, those of you who have been know that it's like, the idea is that we are thinking in community and together. So at any point you have a contribution to make a question, a comment, put it in the chat, raise your hand, and we will put it in the mix. So that format is really very loose. Yeah, that's my preamble. So I'm going to ask Kyla Manola to introduce each other and maybe starting with Manola. OK, so the topic is serious play. So we've started with a bit of play here. And we've got each other to write little knots, which I'm going to read to you. I'm reading Kyla's knot. I'm a theater creator and a homemaker caring deeply about the earth and the interconnected relationships between people and ecosystems. I believe in a just transition to a more sustainable future where life, human and non-human, is valued about profit. I am moved by the potential for theatrical processes to inspire hearts, radicalize minds, and mobilize hands towards a more empathetic and caring world. I am powerfully drawn to choral work. I enjoy experimenting with the endless possibilities for play within an ensemble where there are no leaders and no followers, but rather a hive mind of hyper-present performers. I also love to make masks and puppets to take outside and cause a ruckus. Thank you, Kyla. Thank you, Manola. I wouldn't have anyone else introduce me. It was beautiful. And I will introduce Manola. Manola is currently spending her time writing poetry, a play, an article on breath and trauma, teaching, analyzing dreams, whale watching, seed dipping as much as humanly possible, as well as co-holding the matrixia spaces for being amidst the pandemic these days. She likes talking to experimental traditional healers who enjoy working through performance in different ways and collaborating with visual artists and musicians and historians. She is inspired to continue to find new ways for our hybrid subjectivities to emerge and she thinks it's important for questions of decolonial interest and transformation to speak together. Lovely. Welcome, both of you, Devane. Thank you. Thank you. Great. So I want to start by asking Manola if you could just open by sharing some of the particular questions that you work with and through. And this is by way of setting up some loose guideposts and framing within which this conversation can occur because, of course, there are a range of different ways we can come to this. So that's my opening question to you. If you could just tell us what some of the key questions are that you have churning at the moment in your work and in your practice. OK. So I'm going to speak from what I... from the work that's happened over the last few years, but that's kind of coming together in a particular way this morning today here. And since we were talking about physical theater and then embodiment and then pedagogies and then thinking around the serious play, one of the questions linked deeply with the question of decolonization is the question of what happened as dehumanization and also then the dehumanizing of the body and the dehumanizing of the mind in various ways. And being extremely mindful of what and Lovogad Shani talks about, that the question of decoloniality outside of thinking about the politics of it needs to come in terms of the freedom of our epistemologies and the freedom of our thinking and the freedom of our knowledges. And this so epistemic freedom almost necessarily involves new forms of knowledge and new ways of approaching that knowledge. And it's my sort of strong, and I think a lot of us who believe that these knowledge forms have already sit in the bodies of performers and performance traditions, especially in the South, in the global South, there are also philosophies tied in with those knowledges. And somehow this epistemic freedom that's sought as part of the decolonial question is deeply linked with this relationship to practice in the body and finding a way to open up that cellular wisdom that belongs within tradition but is also present in memory. And finding practices that unlock that to say that just in the context of questions of decoloniality, I like Eve Tuck and Wen Yang's work that decolonization is not a metaphor. They say that we cannot talk about it in terms of academics only, it is a question also of land, which for me comes back to bodies and how we see them. It comes back to Wen Yang, your work Afro cartographies for me is deeply feminist, queer, decolonial in ways that I think it should work for me. That's another example of practice of the work, which I really love. I think that the question, I mean, there are different inspirations including practitioners that I learned from, Binapami, who said, who in theater research and the laboratory is like we can't go back to a past imagining it's pristine. We can't only look to the West which is another move that happens. So kind of trying to look at a mix. I mean, so that was that whole, and I was curious and informed by her practice. I was informed by both Kanaylals coming back to the Manipuri body and Manipuri tradition in terms of kind of finding a practice which also linked him back to theater of the earth. I'd like to kind of, yeah. And so I think these different things including just practices and healing wisdoms that also had performance sort of informed where I was trying to find space in theater and performance scholarship and drama training. I was like, how do I hold all these kinds of questions and come in? And over the last two years, I think the question for me that sits very strongly is that one has to look at trauma and loss. And this for me again has resonances for us in the pandemic and what happens with that loss of control. It's such an epic huge scale. It's epistemology is lost. It's connections to that that is lost. And that's in terms of colonization, but in terms of also just immediate memory and loss that the question of decolonization is type has to look at the relationship of trauma and loss. And therefore the practices need to hold how we work through trauma and loss. And that's part of what my work does which moves into both embodied knowledges which moves into spaces like the matrixia to try and believing that creativity and pleasure open up both the knowledges and allows for this new subjectivity to emerge. So that's in a sense some of my background with that. And to say that when we say physical theater we've discussed this in our preambles a lot the nomenclature and the naming of both traditions and people. And Amy also talked about, I think she mentioned Susan as coming up with certain of the practices. I mean, she can say more about that but kind of revealing some of those histories which is one part of one kind of scholarships work. But the other for me is also about just naming and where does a practice sit in the practice and how important our names. The whole first conversation happened without me mentioning any of my teachers. But connected to that in terms of saying physical theater is this other interest within academia which is with taxonomies and classifications and how the cultures of the global South really escaped those. So you have scholars from each from the continent saying but Sanskrit theater is actually dance drama and African theater is not just storytelling. And we have huge articles and scholarship work that where the lengths of even drama and theater is inadequate for these forms that are already mixing. So to just, I think if we're speaking about the language I wonder, would we call this really when you're making space for Manola to be curious about Kyla's relationship to LeCocque? You know, like how do we name the talk? Which for me is about making space coming from all our multiple histories for me comes back to the relational. And which was why I was really excited when Kyla took me through like a LeCocque exercise on our first meeting. And that went into my body and opened up my spaces to listen. And which is what I did a little bit this morning again before I came to sit here. And to say that just as an offering that I do keep coming back to my breath and to my table and things outside the screen. As I registered that everything that we hold in our heads and talk if we're not paying attention to what's happening to our body creates a stress. So I keep trying to come back to it as well. So I'm just doing that right now and I'm going to pick up a brush and paint and catch my breath while I listen to the next bit. Thank you so much Manola. I feel like the invitation to get your paintbrush and paint and your coloring pencils and your yoga mat out while this talk is happening is very wide open. It is anyway, but it might be worth it to have that said upfront and explicitly. Beautiful, thank you. There's so many things there that we must circle back to as we proceed. Kyla, I want to ask you a similar question actually, which is about what some of the questions are that you and your co-founders have been asking yourselves in these early stages of developing your new school. Thanks, Mwanya. I'd like to also just start my little section with a couple of acknowledgements if I may because I think they're important. I first of all want to acknowledge my co-collaborators in the room, Daniel Buttend and Mlindeli Zondi and Roberto Pombo, who's not in the room, sadly. He wishes he could be here. I'd also like to acknowledge my elders and teachers, some of whom are in the room, some of whom are not, in physical and movement theater, some even who I have not been taught by, but I still consider elders and that I have learned this practice from. It has come through them. And then the last acknowledgement I want to make is that I am not a scholar in either decoloniality or anything, really. I'm not of the academic world. I'm a maker and a doer. And this is how we come to the school, really, is that my collaborators and I, led by, guided by Roberto, who trained with Giovanni, who's also in the room, I see him. We, the school has been born out of a need to develop an ongoing physical theater practice. So all of us have become really frustrated. We've been collectively teaching for many decades now in various contexts. And all of those contexts have been quite bitty. So just to give you an example, at WITS, I think the physical theater module is three weeks and it'll be situated depending where and maybe when you could talk more to this, but I don't have intimate knowledge of the curriculum, but my experience of teaching there and of having peers that have taught there and at other institutions is that it's very sporadic and it's very bitty and it is very much an add-on to the curriculum. And often we get approached or have been in our teaching experience to do a physical theater workshop and then you're sort of expected to come in and flex your physical theater muscles because you're a physical theater practitioner and it all feels and has felt quite a surface for over a decade now, I would say. And then coming from this training, we know that this work is not bitty or sporadic or surface. It really is a physical and emotional spiritual even. Some might say possibly even therapeutic journey towards yourself and towards the ensemble as well. And so we really, Daniel and I had tried to institute a kind of weekly training session for theater professionals to come and move together and make things together. And we did that over several years. It was called La Club and a performance came out of it called Swarm Theory, which we can talk a little bit about if there's time, but still there was this thing of it being very much like in between stuff and as and when. And I think the school has been born out of a desire and a need to go deeper, to commit real time and real space and real thinking towards what a long-term pedagogy looks like in the South African context in terms of movement and mask theater. So I guess it has been born out of a dissatisfaction of just skimming the surface of this work. So I mean, in terms of how the school came together, Roberto attended the Helikos and also did the postgraduate pedagogical program. And with the intention of coming back to Johannesburg and beginning some sort of training program. And because Roberto and Daniel and I have worked frequently together on mask projects and other projects, we were sort of his first, his go-to people. And because Dan and I have worked a lot together in trying to gather an ensemble, a physical theater ensemble. So we were sort of his first stop. And Lindele and I have worked together a lot as well over the years. And so all of us were like, we need to bring this person in as well. So the school was formed thus. And how it is going is that we are, we spent the COVID year meeting every week and going through the pedagogy and trying to bring ourselves onto the same page in terms of what it is we're actually speaking about. And we've really started with fundamentals like the 20 movements, for example. This is, we began at the beginning. And of course, it was slightly dissatisfying, not that fun to work on a physical theater pedagogy online. But the, what's the word? The circumstances dictated that we had to do that. And now the idea is that we're moving into offering in-person workshops in small groups. And those workshops will get longer and longer until we can offer a full year program. And I feel like I'm getting away a little bit from the question. So what questions are arising during this process? Sorry. What questions are arising for us is, I mean, the biggest question and why I was very excited to be invited by Wenya to talk about this is our context is where we are. We started off by calling it the South African School of Mask and Movement Theater. And then we felt that that was extremely precocious and presumptuous as well. And so we narrowed it down to the Johannesburg School of Mask and Movement Theater. But even that is sounded to us quite presumptuous. So we really are in a process of acknowledging who we are and where we are. And where Manole has a lovely word for it, the lineage of this work is coming from. I also have, personally speaking, a vested interest in the feminism of this work as well. I mean, if we can just name it and say that this work as much as I love it and value it and it has formed me as both a human being and a maker, a theater maker, it is a predominantly white male European led practice with these almost guru-like teachers historically. Or at least that's what it looks like from the outside to anyone who is approaching this work. So we are definitely tackling those kinds of perceptions that come up and acknowledging where we sit and what questions it's going to raise to start a school of this nature called the Johannesburg School of Mask and Movement Theater run by these particular people. Yeah, I think I will leave it there. That is the biggest question. It's like we have to acknowledge where we sit. We are not starting a school in New York or Paris or London or Berlin, which is a sort of more of a crucible of international. I mean, we just think about the kinds of students that these schools traditionally draw to themselves. It's very international, you know? Whereas in Johannesburg, that's not going to be the case. Maybe one day we'll become world famous and everyone will say, oh, I wanna go to the Johannesburg School of Mask and Movement Theater rather than Le Coq or Lisba or any of the other wonderful institutions that share so much knowledge, but they'll wanna come to us specifically for our flavor. And so I guess we're asking ourselves, what is that flavor? How do we plait these pedagogies together along with our context, along with who we are and what our bodies as South Africans bring? Let me leave it there. Thank you. Thank you. I love these metaphors on the table already, flavors and platting and makes me think of ice cream and getting my hair done. It's nice. Let's open it here. Let's open it to the room. And I want to ask if there are any general questions, comments to the space, to each other, to Manola and Kyla, other questions that are being thought through from the other co-founders of the new school? Yeah, does anyone have any contributions to make at this point? Things that are bubbling for them that they want to put on the table? I had a question, I mean, both an observation and a question because in the genesis of the drama school Mumbai, I don't think we were nearly as mindful and thoughtful about who we are and what we're trying to do the way that you went from South Africa to Johannesburg. A big question, and this is kind of an observation because even from what Manola said, I'd been to Adi Shakti, done the source of performance energy work. We'd had worked with Thomba and Kanhai Lal from Manipur. A lot, they'd come to Bombay to do some of our sort of precursor workshops. And there was always this question about what is the flavor? What is the blacks? What is the thread? And honestly, I didn't have an answer. I just, at that point in time, it was just a very immediate need for formal, solid theater training and some kind of pedagogical rigor of training and understanding that theater is deep practice. And so we literally jumped into it and we bought all the ingredients to the table and then decided what would, what the, we didn't decide what the stew would become. We just knew that we needed to be sustained and fed from it. So we threw everything into the pot. It's come to bite us in the bum later on because for example, at the beginning of the, but it's also, it's a double edged sword. It both acknowledges every single pedagogical, the lineage and the elders that have come and contributed to who we are. But at the same time, it's not allowing us to, I'm very comfortable with the fact that we don't know who we are and we find out based on what has come out of it. And I don't know if that feels blasphemous in some way to be so deliberately unconcerned by it. But I think that that's the observation and I'm more interested now actually because I think of Mumbai as a crucible space like New York and London, et cetera. But I also realized that like in our school we've got all of these European theater pedagogies. We've got a lot of the physical theater work. It's all happening on bodies that are cosmopolitan bodies in India, in Mumbai, I guess. But I lament the fact that we don't have some kind of a strand going back anymore to say Kanhai Laal's work or the work in say Kudi Atom from Venuji, for example. And these were things we were playing with in our prototype courses. How can we mix the tradition into the contemporary? How can we bring this in there? But that has gone for sure. It's not there anymore. And I don't quite know how I feel about that. Thank you. Thanks, Jihal. Any responses to that? I have a response to that. And it's also tying into our conversation yesterday, Amy, when we were talking about why Lakok, why, and you mentioned it in your intro as well, like why do we have to name it thus? And I said yesterday that it's useful. It has been useful for us. That's why. Not to worship at the shrine of Lakok or his lineage, but to say this is a useful framework. It's also a useful code for us as practitioners in that we can gather around this pedagogy. So I hear what you're saying, Jahan. I understand. I guess what I would want for the future of the school is the best of both of those worlds. I would like to be able to say, here is our journey that has already been tried and tested. And we as practitioners and as teachers have seen the universality of it, how we can teach it in various contexts and also how powerful it is as a teaching tool. But at the same time, we cannot keep it in a pristine, we can't treat it as the Bible. It has to move with us and work with us and we have to pull it apart. When we met with Giovanni, we talked and Lindele had a question for him about African masks and where they fit in the pedagogy. And Giovanni was like, well, you're crazy not to put them in there, you know? And we absolutely intend to because again, where we are and who we are. So yeah, I hear exactly what you're saying. And I just want to say that, I guess our hope is to take what we need and use it as a scaffold from which to grow. I think my associative response to that, Giovanni, and it strikes an extremely deep chord for me because in a sense, I suppose, any of us from the global South really grapple with the complexity of the lineage and how to visualize it. And the visibilizing of a lineage that, also coming which we're not quite surely sure how much of it we actually inherit or really know to speak of. I mean, there's that question too, right? Like when are you blessed by the guru to speak? Cause you're not sometimes, but you have been informed by this. And I think the kind of deft move of the drama school to just claim the name of, this is the drama school of Bombay or Mumbai and start and then sit seven years later with this, be in a space where you can sit with the complexity of the question in terms of the pedagogy is, it sounds to me exactly what needs to happen and what needs to be done. For me, that's a decolonial pedagogy question. It's not to answer it and then create a homogenous lineages, but it is to say, but it is to sit maybe sometimes with what will stay as a discomfort because it's, you cannot solve the problem of caste in a day, but we, it's impossible to not think about what's happening to the dehumanized body in practice. And if we're doing this as the drama school of Mumbai, you know, like how do we hold it even if we cannot solve everything, but how do we keep the space open? And how does that show? And I think always in practice, it does this. I mean, it shows in work, which is what keeps transforming us in our lives and the city itself. And to also say that when you spoke about this need that was felt, I also just think about Mumbai and the Bombay industry and about like the milling population of everyone in India that's there. And I think about how necessary it is to have this lab that is becomes at least like your practice becomes a space of connection and of sanity and of making sense and not just feeling precarity and not just feeling, you know, the existential crisis or what am I doing? Am I performing brilliantly? Am I the best actor in Bombay now, you know? But to have a community that's just kind of holding in a sense the emerging subjectivity of the contemporary performance practitioner. And I think to sit with some of that weight and that depth, including figuring out when can we call Tomba next for a sound thing or how do we speak back to what Veena Pani has said or where somebody else said or if an actor has come having done tal work for so much, you know, where does that pedagogy that's already in their body, how does it find a language in? And of course, through exercises it does but for it to not just be personally dismissive but to take on the epistemic weight of a lineage and legacy and how to, in a sense, create inside people the permission to do that. And that is, I think, the epistemic freedom that Glovo Guccini talks about. Where do you give yourself permission to visualize and own your lineages and your legacies in the creative way that doesn't tie you to them but allows you to be present to the becoming future? You know? So, yeah. Manola, can I ask you to share if you have a ready link or something to pop in the chat reference to Guccini and the work that you've been referencing? I can just put his name down. It's a book. Perfect, yeah. But I'll do that. Yeah, I can do that. Thank you. Does anyone else want to come in at this point? Thoughts, questions, things that are percolating for you? Resonances with your own teaching work? Mli, please. Yeah, welcome, welcome, everyone. For me, most of all, to respond to the question that has been asked is that I'm looking at how chocolate cork looks at the world as a poet, as performers become a poet and very being observant to your own world. And that's where your first point of finding your own poetry to create work. And I realize that also coming from your surroundings at South Africa is the question as we always had between my colleagues. We've been asking that, yes, as much as chocolate cork is like very European kind of centered guy. But in these factories, we find a language and a universal kind of language that speaks the world. Because somehow these factories came after the World War II came into the place. And I can imagine how they were grappling of reconstructing themselves as a community through the landscape of politics and economy and all that. I find that also in South Africa, in the state that after post-apartheid, we still finding ourselves in that sense. And for me, the language is encoded that the body speaks and how you see the world come as a coded form that is within a unique performer. I cannot move like Kyla, I cannot move like Roberto, I can only move by myself. And somehow that is influenced by my surrounding and how I relate to the world. So we find like the coding, like we find lines into how we can express that. But now we have to find our own color and dimension into that through that is informed from our surroundings. So I'm actually looking at actually the ideas of rituals, you know, like ritual, as I practice ritual, the world is coming from like a close like that, you know. And I was looking at how we look at the mask that can come into Africa that is like their very ritualistic. And how can we bring that as our own flavor? So we're constantly asking ourselves from our past, our present, and how we look at the world, the perspective and try to find the universal link within that. And I think I was always drawn to the people who were practicing chocolate cox pedagogy and physical theater in the sense of like the work kind of draws you in and you start asking yourself, what is it in a sense? And then how it draws you in as a practitioner. And that's how I got to the club and to finding and exploring those ideas. So but the initial thing is that the coding of who you are and how you move uniquely brings, it gives you like a certain base of some sort. Then you start finding the code within that. I don't know whether that makes sense if I can answer to that question. So I'm thinking the answer to the driver is that also people who are coming to practice in that school, it's which is good that in the moment that they didn't try and decide this is who we are. But also looking at the product that they practice and can give you a little glimpse within that because as teachers also coming with your own code, we cannot teach the same even if you're teaching something at the same course but the way we devise is the way we deliver it to people is different. And I think that can be another code of looking at it. Okay, this is it. I think I'll leave it there, I don't know what the answer is. Beautiful, thank you. Karla, were you gonna come in? Yeah, there's so much. I mean in what Manola and Jahan and Lee have now said first of all, I love this thing of just starting, just go. That is exactly what I was trying to say with my acknowledgement that I'm not a scholar, I'm a maker and a doer and I absolutely believe that these are things that cannot be figured out purely theoretically or intellectually, they've gotta be on the floor in collaboration with your body in that moment. So I love what you were saying there. And I just wanted to share a little story that maybe also can highlight the kinds of things that we've been talking about or that have come up rather in our conversations which is about mask and the neutral mask and the idea of neutrality which is kind of central to the Lacoc pedagogy. And we're really having to confront that as a concept, this idea of neutrality. I mean, for hundreds of years neutral ballet shoes were pink and nobody ever thought about that until suddenly there were brown ballet shoes. And then it was like, well, who's neutral? And I know that there's that's a little bit of an oversimplification of the idea of neutral. It goes much deeper than that. And there are people in the room, I see Giovanni and Norman John like incredible teachers who can speak much more about neutrality and maybe they want to, but we've been talking about this in terms of, do we even call it the neutral mask? And Roberto was like, no, I think we should call it the silent mask because just the term neutral mask is enough to be quite triggering, I think, in our context. Or the quest, I mean, Mlee was talking, I guess I'm thinking of this because Mlee was talking about how nobody moves like anybody else, you only move as yourself. And what we are doing here is not trying to sculpt little homogenized chorus of drones. We are trying to make space for performers to emerge with their own poetic voice or their own theatrical voice as their own makers of their own things. And so we have to look very carefully at the idea of neutrality in that. And I mean, just we've had a long discussion recently about the mask itself. Is it a very Eurocentric mask? And we don't have answers, it's an ongoing conversation. I wish Roberto was here to talk a little bit to that, but I think that probably, and please correct me if I'm wrong, I wonder if those kinds of conversations are that have been had in more global North classrooms, Lakop classrooms, or we're needing to have those conversations now because we are on the move. We are on the move with this thing and these questions are coming up. We are being confronted with them and so we must delve in. Can I say something? Yes, go ahead. It's great there. The neutral masks, that's what we say. The 20 movements, that's what we say. The question I have is, do we each have our 20 movements? Do we each have our own neutral mask? And then coming back, the silent mask. Neutral is a very unfortunate term, right? And I tried to call it a few years, a few years ago, yes. Here I am, I get into RP English occasionally because I know where we come from. I know where I come from. I come from the lower classes in England, right? I know, and it just batches back to me occasionally. See that, I tried to call it the mask of reference once and then people said, what the, is that, you see? I said, neutral mask, oh, neutral mask, okay. So I tried to get towards, like you say, the silent mask. Yes, but it's a silence that really resonates, resonates. You can be silent if you have nothing to say, right? You know, someone who doesn't say anything either has everything to say or nothing to say, you know that? So even the word silent, it has a resonance if it's referential. So it's a very potent term for that mask. The neutral mask, is it European? But I guess the ones we use, very European, you know what? I had a great conflict because I was asked to go to Beijing and do a neutral mask class. And they said to me, can you bring neutral masks? And I said, no, yeah, but there's no point, is there? You see, because you will, and the discussion, this discussion is absolutely essential, vital and phenomenal. And, you know, I'm not trying to say anything gets what they say, or what is being said because it is very important to say it. And, you know, if you are worth what you do, I'm not necessarily what you are, if you work what you do, then it is inevitably universal. So I'm trying to get back to this, the idea of neutrality. I love that term. The idea of neutrality, because it is only an idea, it is only a reference, we can never be neutral, is that? We can't. And if you do one of these exercises, or Le Coq exercise, you know, if Giovanni Fusetti leads a class, you know, and we do the exercise, I prefer to think of it as a Fusetti exercise, right? Because I remember Le Coq saying in a class, don't move like I move, move like you move, right? So he was within this universality. I'm not saying anything against this discussion because it is absolutely vital, right? And what do you call in your school? Well, why not African school, South African school, Johannesburg, you know? Everything has to be situated somewhere. Now I'm going, I had a clear line of thought through neutrality. And now, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, he's coming, he's all sorts of, he's all sorts of ways. So the silent mask, the neutral mask, I called it the referential, the mask of reference. How do we call it? And do we each have our own neutral mask? That's the question in my head at the moment, you see? Now there would be how many billions of neutral masks? And it wouldn't be the neutral mask. I tend to talk about neutral masks, masks. Each mask maker has their own way of viewing the world, viewing neutrality. And who said, how do we see the world? Where do we see the world? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I'll read it down. How do we see, oh yeah, how do we see the world, right? We look at it, but can we see it? And the neutral mask, the silent mask, the mask of reference, or calm and harmony can help us or give us methods of seeing the world, of being able to look at it anyway. I'm going around the houses now, but it is absolutely vital in this discussion. And it resonates deeply within me, because I was always against this decodalization. Because in a sense I say, well, why bother? But I surely and sincerely understand why we bother. Because there's these two things. You do your own thing, yes, there is the pedagogy, that method gives us, can give us a way of exploring the world and ourselves. Life can be pedagogical, life can teach us about ourselves and about the world, you see, and, oh dear. I've had a sign of, another thing, you see, a Western European, white Western European, yes, that's what it was, but one of the 20 movements, I'm a little bit against the 20 movements, right, you see, I'm a bit against that. I am totally against gurus. And you talked about gurus, you know, why and gurus have nothing to say, in fact. So I was brought up partly in May, 68 in Paris, see where there is no gods and no masters. There are no gods, there are no masters. If you need a master, well, that's your problem. What some of us do, and I need one, you know, and perhaps he still is, but see, and the movements, the movement in Massique is the French word for that. And I have heard it called the Indian clubs, we, it's the Indian clubs for us, if you're British, you see, right? Hello. And so, you know, the exercise I just happened to have, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Hang on, don't go away, don't go away. Are you doing a demonstration for us, Momin? And in French, it's called the Massique club. And in my generation, we've got the Indian club, so that, you know, it is universal. I'd better stop, otherwise, once I start talking. So, Michael, sorry. Thank you, Naa, saying thank you so much. But since you have paused, let's, John has got a question and there's some lovely things in the chat. Please respond, also this conversation can happen there. And I also want to pull it back to the question that Kyla and Manola have for each other. Can we take John's question? And then there's also something in the chat that Amy has put in about trauma and loss and violence, this director to Manola. So I'd love to not lose that thread either. John, come on in. Thank you. Thanks. I'm interested in, so I'm coming from a perspective of Western European in London. London's been mentioned, very interesting the perspectives that some of the contributors were bringing to that. The idea of London, Kyla, you're talking about the naming of your school and so on. And we had this thing about the naming of our school, London Clown School and the symbolism around it and who might be in that school at the time of pre-COVID. Basically, people who are passing through the metropolis and I'm very diverse. But I'm really interested to know more about what seems to be very positive takes on Lukok coming from the global south. And I have to admit I'm really surprised in a very positive way because I'm got used to out here where I am, our kind of thoughts on decolonizing our practices are pretty negative about that legacy because what we see, and this is from a white male European perspective, is an ideology of individualism, uniqueness, everyone is different, yet universal, blah, blah, blah, which is kind of the ideal ideology that underpins colonialism in the first place. And in my field, which is clowning, which is a little subsection of all of this, particularly the emphasis on vulnerability and the personal, which we, I say we because talking with a lot of colleagues here in the north and in North America as well, as well as Europe, our concerns are, as a pedagogy, which works fine for the white European, well-armored actor, but as vulnerability as understood as something which you reveal, something of yourself in the workshop, in the studio and then you go out back into the real world and you're fine, you have nothing to fear because you're in a very privileged position. And this is very exclusionary assumption that we can all come into the studio and be vulnerable with each other and be ourselves and be unique and show our true selves and then somehow go back into the world and everything's fine and that just isn't true. So that's our kind of struggle at the moment to grapple with dismantling that privilege. So my question is, does that make any sense to some of your contributors or is that purely a very, perhaps a very, that we're stuck in there as we're trying to examine our history? Here, there's one of the sources of colonialism. Is that resonate or is that just our little battle? And also I'd like very much to hear more positive outlooks on taking Le Corp legacy forward. Manola, Kyla, either of you want to respond? Do you want to, shall I respond to John specifically and then we can go to Manola, the question for Manola in the chat. Is that OK with you, Manola? Great. Because I do have a lot to say about that. And in fact, I always found in my training, which was in London and touches a little bit on what Nono's saying now, this idea of the individual. Yeah, this is something that I personally really would like to pick apart. And in answer to your question, you're surprised that the positive response to the Le Corp pedagogy in the global South, all I can say to that is, I feel like it's our turn to be given an opportunity to pick it apart. I feel like there has not been, I mean, with and I want to make reference to this a little bit later, but I'll say her name now, Jenny Resnick and Magnet Theatre in Cape Town, with the exception of those guys who've been going for decades now. And I think it's the closest to the kind of school that we wish to build, with the exception of that and possibly the lab in some respects. There hasn't been anything like this that I'm aware of, certainly not in Johannesburg. So I really feel like it's our, we want to have a go at it, you know, and then let's see how we end up. But at the moment, it's still this thing that draws us together and that we find value in. So I think that's part of an answer to your question. And the second part is there's absolutely, I always felt a huge gap in terms of a choral work and ensemble work in the Lakuk pedagogy. It always seemed to me to be maybe it was just my training, but I feel like at our school, we will be focusing a lot because I think that is a real difference between Western societies and, let me say, South African society is this idea of the individual versus the community or the collective or the idea that I am because you are, you know. So I think that this is very much something that we will be looking at in depth in our pedagogy. Dan and I have a particular interest in choral work, having worked on a piece called Swarm Theory. And I feel like this is somewhere where the pedagogy does fall a bit flat. And I would like to look at that in more depth with much interest. Lovely, thank you, Carla. Manola, did you want to come in? Yes, I think to respond back again, associatively to the mix of questions as well as what I just saw. Just being kind of giggling about, you know, the flavor because it's like what the South African flavor was a London flavor because there was I mean, just the idea of the flavor. And of course, in Rasa that it's got and, you know, that it's actually a lot more than flavor. There's because the flavor is in the gut and that's the intestine. And there's just a lot of a lot more shit going on there. Actually, it's just this sort of ethereal thing that's in your nose and in your mouth. It's it's intense. It's and literally there's a lot of it. That's quite shitty in the mix as well. Or that's processing what one keeps and what one processing essence in multiple ways. And wondering about because I think something that emerged also was that how does one go look at something as an entry point rather than even as a flavor. So where where is this common relational meeting point of LeCocque for the four founders and entry point into into this question of pedagogy, you know, rather than deciding what is that legacy. So that it's just a question around. And I like the entry point as flavor, because it still sits on your tongue. But then it goes down. It enters more than the tongue. It goes back into the body. It goes back into everything else that must be rigorously dealt with and worked with through the body and the neutral body. I wanted to to respond back to that and to this question of neutrality, because when I started my research work on breath is because I thought that would be the most neutral thing to work with bodies anywhere. I mean, that was my they want what apart from wanting to look at the connection of body and mind. The other thing was like, it doesn't matter where I go in the world. Everybody's going to have breath. You know, so it was there was definitely an interest in that. And can I also wanted to was interested in the earth and the neutral body. And he said, well, you know, whatever we say about everything else, we are flesh, we have a relationship to the earth and that can't change and those things, except to say that actually the breath is contextual. It depends if you're sick. It depends if you're on the mountain. If it depends if you're a mother singing while carrying a child on your back on the mountain context is so important. There's four for any for any body. And I think coming back to the two these relationships in some elemental fundamental ways is is I suppose a part of the work and part of the practice. And it connects me to. It connects me when I'm thinking about the collective to Heisman Sabitri, who was who's can I last partner and performer and actress and trainer. And can I have developed also a pedagogy and a training method? You know, there's movement, there's breath work, there's eye work. There's all of that. And so there's the collection of training style. And then there's Iman, I went to look at how they worked with breath. And I think in my third visit there and I and I was spending weeks and weeks and weeks living there. And I think in one of my final things, she sat with me and she could just see me trying to find what I was calling the creative autonomy. And she said. Gayatri, sans kaha kaha akele dundo, which is to say, she said, Gayatri, look for your breath alone. Look where it is. Look where it goes. You know, look for it on your own. And I mentioned can I last training because can I last and told me Sabitri doesn't attend any of the training. She's not any of the seconds. She's constantly playing. She's in the bedroom on the back, on her back, trying this, trying that. There's a lot. There's a constancy of play. And this connects me to decolonial pedagogies around both intuition and solitude and developing, as Jihan said, that the permission of the internal voice to cohere and that one does that and it can be a lonely practice. And that's part of the work. It's part of it's part of the work to do that. And yeah, and then I suppose, come back to how does that come back to some chronicity and other things. And Amy, yes, absolutely the rhizomatic. I think when when this when the idea of the matrixia is co-developing, you know, when Delos speaks about the rhizome, it's in terms of it's in terms of a structure. And yes, that's true. There is that sense of the rhizomatic, which is to say it's like a ginger formation, you know, it's not just a tree going up. It's going in multiple directions. And that's what that's what we're structurally saying when we say rhizomatic. But but I guess in embodied practice and this what's also happening is that's one's aware that the rhizome is also sensual. It's relational to the other bodies and the other thoughts and the things coming up inside. So perhaps that's and I love the word that you use their radiance because it is connected to that that the livingness of the rhizome in them in this kind of work is I think what opens up the possibility for the radiance and to touch back to Jihan not knowing whether we name or not. And it's still difficult to know how and when we name what or if we just sit sometimes in the radiance of that performative utterance at that time, which actually has multiple things activating in the present body. So that's sort of my response to that, I think. And I'm hoping it's touched on the things, yeah, yeah. Beautiful, thank you. Yes, go. I think very specifically to what John was saying and this again I spoke about, I think in one of the pre-questions with Amy is that I think, so I said that a lot of us practitioners are actually not even interested in the word decolonial so much because it keeps us in a dialectical lock with the colonial. And at the same time, discursively and in other ways it's being informed by that, but the practice is another paradigm. I mean, but we're also many of us artistic researchers or performances researchers. And also that the global South performance practitioner scholars work that could be seen as decolonial is a different kind of work of opening up the third space. Whereas maybe in the global North, part of the decolonial work is to go and re-examine practice and scholarship. For me, it makes no sense to do that. I mean, I don't want to either pull down the cock or bring him up. I mean, that's not the interest. I'm interested again in Kyla's relationship to Lococ and how it's opening up something in South Africa right now, that's exciting for me. And I value the legacy and the work and Susan as Amy mentioned and all the other contributors and the unpacking that's rich, that's feminist, that must happen. But that may be that given context, given political histories, the work of decoloniality is different for different scholars and for the different contexts as well. Thank you. Thank you, Manola. Beautiful. Jen, let's just put in the chat that isn't the global North and a dialectic relationship with the global South. Can I quickly make a response back to that by just evoking EFTAC and Wayne Young here when they say that decolonization is not a metaphor? And I think this connects back to land, it connects back to resources, it connects back to how global economics work. And that's an important thing that you cannot decontextualize either. And so the fact that I'm okay with when you are introducing me as a decolonist and introducing me as a decolonial scholar is also to kind of recognize the nuance but not be limited by that. A lot of my co-thinkers and practitioners emerge from everywhere, but there is something specific about the global North, there is something specific about the global South, what's available, what's not available, what's available in terms of legacy to a white South African, what's available in legacy to a Cosa South African. And I think these are, it, so for me the university cannot come with the dismissal of the context and the rest, including that, yeah. So we have just over five minutes left of the formal session and then as you know, if you've been here before, there's an after party. So this conversation can must and can continue once the recording has stopped, but while we're still going in this formal time, I really want to give Kyla, Manola, an opportunity to ask each other their questions and maybe it'll come with a brief response before we close formally and then we can go into a bit more detail after quarter past. Can we go there? Kyla, do you want to start? Sure. Oh, I've got so much going on in my head. I know. And so there's so much going on in the chat and it's so, and I just, I just want to talk to Melissa, I want to talk to Manola anyway. Let me not waste time. So I guess not a question of provocation or a point of departure, just like this conversation I think has been, which is that I think wherever we diverge in our thinking or which I don't think is actually very much, but certainly somewhere where we meet very strongly in my experience with you so far is at the body. And I love how you've spoken about beginning with something simple but complex like the breath, this idea that everybody breathes. And I have the same feeling with the spine. This is where I begin. When the first scan that I had of my pregnancy, of my child, this is the thing that struck me the most was this little spine inside me. And when you asked me to share some of my practice instantly for me what came to me was the undulation that we did together. And even this conversation in a sense, the poeticism of the undulation, this idea of an unfolding that one thing has to come after the next and it's consequential, you know. It seems jarring to start with the head if the action has started in the knees. And I guess I, my provocation or my, I would love to discuss that. And I think it does touch on the body as a site of healing as well. Mlie mentioned that Lacocque has come from, came from after the Second World War, bodies in trauma. Jenny Resnick who will put her MA thesis in the chat, but she also talks about this idea of, if I can just read it quickly, very quickly. I don't wanna paraphrase it. I argue that my own practice influenced by my two years of study at Jacques Lacocque continued this tradition by responding to what I propose existed as a culture of violence in South Africa from the period of colonialism through the apartheid era. So she was also coming to this work as a response to a culture of violence on the body. So I would love for you to speak to that and to speak to how we can meet at the body as a potential site of healing and understanding ourselves better. To say that I think we did meet and we're sort of still in the meeting. And I guess my response is to say that the, is that there is a hope of the meeting and the moving away and coming back that continues, that it does continue that things that opened up both in the conversation, even in this last hour, things that were dropped into my body, things that went into my mind but are now sitting in different parts of my body. This will inform my practice. It'll inform the language that emerges from me. And if there's a moment when we meet again, in terms of, I'm not going to respond to this in terms of the larger question of, what is the framework of witnessing the body in trauma? Because that's really a second talk and we can go there. But thinking about the time we have now, I think this is what I'm saying that in trauma work, I think what we really know is the question of boundaries and openness. So it's like, when do we open and irrigate whom I love a lot, things of space as not what's contained, but space is actually what happens when one opens up, when actually boundaries open up. And yet we know in trauma work that containment and the skin in the body is a certain kind of container. And how do we listen to the internal? This is the amount of provocation I can take. This is the amount of stimulation I can take. This is the work I can do now in this minute. When do I pause? When is enough? When is enough for this? I will not complete it. We're not going to solve this, but is it enough for this hour, for this minute, that this body can do this much now? And sit in some peace with that. For me, the question of decolonial, both erotics and desire is around also the question of, when is it enough? This is a perfect place to pause so that we can formally say deep thanks and then continue as soon as the recording has ended. So I just want to say that to both of you. All of you, thank you so much for this incredibly rich beginning of an undulating conversation. And yes, as you say, it feels like it could be the first of a whole series alone. There's lots of stuff in the chat to continue to respond to. Maybe we can quickly talk about what is coming up next week's unrehearsed futures in a week after that. I don't know who's next on the line. I don't know if it's Bong-Eni or Amy or Jae-Hun. Go for it. Do you want to introduce your topic for next week? No, thank you. Embarrassingly, I've actually forgotten the precise title for next week. But it's going to be, in some ways, a continuation of today's conversation. We've been talking about Le Coq today and that kind of inheritance. We're interested in thinking about what it means to conceive of something that we might begin calling a classical African drama. So on the one hand, we're looking at how emerging forms are engaging with these legacies and histories of Western form and Western stories and fascinations with what we get, with the West and the global North, but also how we can kind of crack apart those kind of embedded structures and fascinations within the dramatic form to imagine what we might call a decolonial drama, what we might think of perhaps as a decolonial aesthetics of the dramatic. And I'm using a lot of rising inflections because I'm trying to kind of reflect the insights with the use of even those terms, right? Yeah, so thank you for this beautiful conversation today and it's certainly wet my appetite for the continuation, I guess, of this thread in next week's conversation. So I'll be with Manjam Bortre and with Mark Fleischner, I mean, it's going to be my two key interlocutors. I look forward to seeing all of you. That's perfect. And I'm going to, and I'm going to take that thread even further and I'm really going to solidly request if Manola and Kyla could rejoin us for that for sure. And Tushar, who's an alumna of the drama school Mumbai and has experienced the training of the people of the teacher involved, Shankar Venkateshwaran. And the reason is that one of my quests is exactly, this is like, how do we negotiate between like the universal and the individual? How does Kanhaela's work coexist in the same space as Benjamin Samuel who was right here? And I think I will start that talk with a small story two weeks from now of what gave us the internal permission to go ahead and say, okay, we're going to start a drama school Mumbai without even knowing who's going to teach what at it. And it was a moment, it was a Eureka moment where Shankar was present, then Samuel was present. Tushar was present at a previous question of it. And it came around the idea of the Lakak Otakor. And so Shankar has moved on in his deep intercultural practice to almost say there are no universal truths anymore. And I'm going to let him challenge me heavily. And I'm hoping that everyone over here will be part of that conversation because this for me is part of a quest to see if we can have a rhizomatic drama school, a planetary drama school, a school that has, and Amy and I have spoken about this, but this idea of a banyan tree canopy with roots coming down at different places. So there is this ethereal in the sky thing, but then there are these rooted things as well. And how can this coexist so that there are 20 sites across the planet looking at neutrality, but each one is unique, but yet it's a quest for the same thing? Or is it? I don't know. So that really is the conversation that I'm going to very, very pursue very hard with Shankar two weeks from now. And I think I'm so looking forward to adding to the thread that Nguyen is going to take forward right now. So really let's have an ongoing conversation and see you guys both next week and week after next. And one more thing, I don't know if Moenya was going to say that, but we're happy to have you guys come in and body curate with us. And if there are people you want to speak to, if there are people you want to throw into conversation with each other and think that it would add to this ongoing conversation, just email any one of us. I'm going to put my email in the box, but I'm sure everyone else is going to as well. And