 and some chat. In the world of puppetry a lot of our collaborators are without brains and feelings and I won't name names but you know who you are and I want to look at this this absence this vacancy as a kind of asset and in fact a defining asset of realism by its nature. If you've heard me talk before I apologize in advance for some redundancy I'll be talking about Thomas Merton and Hamlet yet again but given the very few crayons I have in my in my box I'll try to draw as new a picture as I can. If it gets really tedious there's beautiful artwork on the walls behind me and feel free to wander as the winds. Okay I timed it out this morning over 40 minutes which seems like a long time if objections arise throw things. Seriously. Puppetry's value to activism through a very particular kind of empathy ideas and agenda and then if there's some time sources talking about some sources at the end what follows immediately is owed to Father Radmar Howe's homily last Sunday when I was in Boise Idaho from the letter of James chapter 2. My brethren show no partiality as you hold faith for if a person with gold rings and in fine clothing comes to your assembly and the poor the one who wears fine clothing and say have a seat here please while you say to the poor person stand there or sit at my feet have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts you have dishonored the poor is it not the rich who oppress you is it not they who drag you into court is it not they who blaspheme that honorable name by which you are called what draws me to this passage is that it slips between two processes of discernment indifference followed by a careful regard for that which calls you to your prime nature and this indifference is a first theme of the speech the value of indifference looking at its values and its culture its means of organizing our productivity from Saint Ignatius the principal and foundation the human person is created to praise reverence and serve in Ignatius but you can elide that in the interest of art if you if you'd like the person is called to praise reverence and serve and by doing so so to save his or her soul one must use other created things in so far as they help towards one's end and free oneself from them in so far as they are obstacles to do this we need to make ourselves indifferent to all created things provided the matter is subject to our free choice and there is no other prohibition should not want health more than illness wealth more than poverty fame more than disgrace or a long life more than a short one but we should desire and choose only what helps us more toward the end for which we are created namely as he suggests we're created for praise for the sake of praise praise as I understand it is the restoration of language to its source the exhaustion of language a graduation to in articulation our origin destiny and purpose is in silence is in the great giveaway of speech each leaving the body deep feelings and progressive outcomes arising from an activism fueled by empathy and guided by a consensus on order these are not necessarily relevant to puppetry at its best indifference irrelevant outcomes and disorder as tools for becoming as the equipment of agape also need our attention especially here since the anarchy of silence its black flag is flown by puppets so diligently a play a performance and experience a transaction a game of hopscotch or even the game of hopscotch is not so important as playing itself playing forever risking imbalance and forgetfulness paying attention the play after all work in in the play Hamlet Hamlet demonstrates that it's the conscience that catches the play the script is nothing but a skein for drama Claudius walks away from the play in a play the thing of the play this sort of puppet play that exists in the larger play he walks away from that the drama is in the structure of thinking how the mind heats cools surges and revolves and not in its discoveries we are tipped early to nearly every plot point before it happens in Shakespeare's play the way of the conscience and consciousness and sometimes cautionarily the anti-way are visible in the dramas that they snare but real in the structures of consideration those soliloquies don't add up but that's just fine it's it's the revolution of thought inside those soliloquies that's the real subject of the play not their propulsive qualities they're active and unresolved Hamlet's got a bad Zen his way is lorded with appetite his mother calls him fat not for his bed therefore collapses down from the eternity that is his and our right as royalty into the arms of Horatio Horatio Hamlet the bad monk collapses into a Horatio who's a better monk he's charged with telling the story tell my story and then never tells it or never finishes telling it is still telling it Hamlet's salvation is not in acts but in playing not in deeds but in playing he's much more than his deeds he is never happier than when he is discussing rehearsal protocol or performance technique he is quite happy puppeting the head of York whose jest is infinite achieves nothing play it's where the poetry is a line of poetry is so rich it's playing into white space into nothing it celebrates nothing the individual is saved by ceding to the other by ceding to the friend the stranger the earth by quitting plot by near obliteration in action itself rather than acts current activism sometimes measures itself against the rubric of specific tactical achievements occupy Wall Street the various occupies and the Arab Spring are sometimes critiqued in these terms but maybe these movements are pressing for a change of heart and new eyes a public heart and a social vision rather than new monuments or mile markers those who call like Adonis is one of my favorite politics maybe it's going is on a different frame of time perhaps this is the kind of revolution Martin Luther King was pushing to after the legal successes so I'm saying that plays are a symptom of theater not the end of theater theatrical action is in the translation of the single to the plural the breaking out of plays of the breaking down of plays the giving away of plays a silence and stillness and disappearance that enable the generous donation of the one to the many it is the pause that makes the rhythm when I die I won't have any plays to show I'll be dead what am I going to do I won't have any plays to show I'll leave it all on the court and destiny I will have played and I will have kept playing itself alive by playing in concert so we're looking at this emptiness and stillness of puppets the importance of indifference the importance of indifference to vocation and the relation of vocation to justice market forces drive in the opposite direction toward the transaction toward the experience toward the discreet and the owned toward wealth and they try to convince you that you can have a wealth of experience fame and status are not so cryptic means by which to celebrate private property and private property at apotheosis is the ownership of all by one whatever else they're trying to sell you about the free market the the the logic and they try to tease you into believing that you're that person but it's rigged against you meaning personality and the primacy of personal affections and tastes do the same they play into the into the idea of market so there's a kind of empathy a kind of appeal to feeling that builds direct that plays directly into capital forces pausing for a minute capital isn't all bad but I'll also say destruction isn't all bad we can work through and work with misery and capital I would say is misery Blancheau Maurice Blancheau and his amazing book writing the disaster comments with great wisdom on disaster even admitting that disasters character as an absolute even Auschwitz can't be dismissed as a source of wisdom the terminal point of wisdom perhaps because it can invite us to deep discoveries about the universal quality of reality and can illuminate our relationship to it the blankness of it can draw us forward endlessly can move us from ourselves but he also admits that as a terminal phenomenon destruction is passive and uncreative not Simone vays Decreative so plays aren't all bad and empathy isn't all bad but I'll say they're printers along the way and scenic overlooks but this appeal to feelings is so often co-opted as a vehicle for sales at the opposite end of the spectrum away from privacy and passivity and towards the ownership of one by the all my how I am owned by everyone the self loses sense in witness of the holy we go blind we lose memory understanding and will we can't love fully and live if we love fully we lose our lives we may receive perfect we go there's the absolutely passive and the absolutely active with caution tape stretched across both positions passivity and activity at absolute extent are actually next to one another one another simply still and dynamic stillness disaster is infinitely reductive action and is infinitely expansive actions conundrum and this is this is where art wants to live in this region at the at the at the lip of of actions absolute problem it action is dimensionless infant earth puppet is still small relative to the earth it's as in Buddhism some Buddhists I've talked to have said that nothing means anything but be a little bit happy it's absolutely but it's that little edge of but that keeps us in this world absolute action is still is is still but is a voice a still small voice a silence that contains the word how to get there how to get there and maybe it's through puppet stillness a puppet is that which is not in dialogue with you has nothing to do with you has nothing to say to you you may do and say it's composed of maybe like a prayer petition of his death is the holy other it in therefore it invites the fullest reach of our personal effort and when we're lucky as direct collaborators or as audience if there's a distinction puppets frustrate us absolutely swiftly they exhaust our usefulness this is the way the positive faculties of love work love that makes us useless puppets in light of last night's performance I would say puppets never break or malfunction they form new parts or perform new functions that the what we call the breakdown of a puppet is just the puppet inventing a new thing to do it's puppetry or puppet events that break or break down and that's the goodness this celebration of breakdown is the juice of puppetry they are the ha of joe ha Q ha in Japanese harvest and rely upon this breakdown steady on all the will we have every wish I have and wishfulness is a tool of marketing cease desiring and love is is the phrase of Lorca's quit wishing all the wishing that we have will not make a puppet live independently the more independently it lives the less it is a puppet and the less the drama the drama of our failing the drama of our failing will the drama of our rupture our breaking out beyond ourselves if the puppet were able to walk away into its own existence we would merely be ourselves again after the performance and too many plays with people in them ignore this the self-directed expertise the personal capital of talent and decisiveness is a display of independence and many times I'm at a professional theater production with live actors and I feel walked away from I actually feel acutely lonely with these people in front of me because their expertise is wholly independent from me and my investment more I feel more lonely with these people on stage than I am with a stage full of puppets because in this case I am not needed there beyond my ticket purchase I'm there don't have room for I am in the audience to be over with there to go away snip curtain call your you're done not to be destroyed just mopped up and squeezed out the theater needs me to come back and pay again later I am perhaps educated to some new behaviors but not lost or confused again in a healthy way I'm cleaned up redirected but I'm not remade the empathy markets advertise our gulps of independent sense sensations as sufficient to a rule of breathing as if by having my feelings I'm finished we drown in consolation living according to cap back a prison system that profits from recidivism and that's how I define much of regional theater position to be acted on rather than poised for action if you see a puppet as an independent self as an alternative or irresponsible you rather than an exercise in radical ecological interdependence and what do puppets teach except into interdependence or if you see yourself as yourself not expended beyond yourself through the puppet then you're being robbed you're ultimately numbed so because it's not enough one will never be in the place of another I can never understand you or feel you or feel what you're feeling accurately and a one-for-one exchange is zero-sum to use a difficult example to pull the refugee crisis into the space of one drowned three-year-old is very significant but it's not for the many thousands and more the unlovely even the felonious those who have no tender recognized by our emotional bank we do not serve that child merely this cuts the child from its full indication turns the child shamefully into a bad puppet and that child was puppeted almost immediately by the media we serve the human not just the child but the human in that child which is bigger than that child greater than that child we love and serve as human to human I love and act as a plural in a plural not according to my preference but because we are in common because I become through you empathy is of course a boon binding one's feelings to another using compassion as a vehicle for passion see that I'm talking about and the technological over deployment of identification is massively corrosive I I'm embarrassed at the way I've cried over Pepsi commercials you know that my feelings have the science of manipulating feeling has become very evolved these these these events affirm the act of feeling as a terminal reward a circuit completes with the consolation of my reaction like pellets for monkeys a performance that ends with what we say in the specie of emotion suggests that life is about me and my experience and assessed by the roster of my preferences empathy may be co-opted as a path to commerce empathy with a return with a reward can lead to empathy that returns where the experience becomes all about ourselves but our lives are not ours at their most precious Simone vague and you are valuable as a human loved absolutely as a human your distinction is is your vehicle for getting to your humanity but humanity itself is your end not your brick a brag without the other you have no location Leslie Scalapino has a great epic poem called tango which I recommend to you we are most perfectly a point in space when we have no dimension hold no judgment are wholly absorbed into the area arc line yet are good without the other we are not alive and I would say in these times we are not much alive it seems in this especially in the season of political debates incarceration is a sterilization ethnic cleansing and there is a kind of referring back to an earlier comment there's a kind of incarceration of our desire in maybe in Blake's terms it is the clarification of our and incarceration I would say is a clarification the product our predominant idea of the human it's not about crime it's not even altogether about race it reflects our idea of the human a prison is built on the meme of the cell cell is a homonym but it points to something the connection between cells CELL and selling like SELL exchange inclines to the disaster of passivity not change but into changed places the transfer of values I am here you are there as if that seals you from me altogether that the transaction of place putting you out there is finishes anything imprisonment is in prison the other is kept close and kept useless is known is owned a landscape opposite of diverse diversity exchanged for the monoverse and in what ways do contemporary treatments of audiences resemble incarceration how our audience is incarcerated treated as cells and sold to treated as if they are in a terminal location apart kept apart from the land of creativity divorced from creativity and not even in exile they can't even get together while they're out there in the dark and makes bleeds through nearly every aspect of commerce that I can think of and is owned by our culture adopted by our culture the world may be white male and American a landscape where ethnicity is unregarded the political expedience of a post-racial society and I refer you to the book that got that great book the new Jim Crow that's everywhere now I in my class and race and here I am hitting this microphone which I promised not to do I in my class and race but eschewing class and race legislate and profit from a globalized environment that battens on difference exploits difference but also hides or solves difference the age of incarceration invites me to be simply myself in ways that may be mine completely like a move like when I go to the movies and where my privacy is confirmed by the over-determined image of the prisoner objectified he's a class is centered on an individual we are stirred to a bad empathy that feels into overtakes and disregards the nature in itself of the of the other so we are not much alive now we are awash and easily executed preference we build our lives customizing all stimuli to our particular tastes and the puppeting of imagined perpetrators is the opposite of indifference bad puppetry the manipulators feel into their objects they pour their fear into the objects they're full of feeling it's not about a numbing of feeling there those videos in those videos the terror the fear is very alive there's there's abundant feeling on all sides of the equation but it's an equation an equation built on exchange I pour my fear into you to get rid of my fear and to cure my fear and to defeat and incarcerate my fear that is a bad kind of empathy mass incarceration is bad puppetry cops have a very hard job and I rely on the police I can empathize with them but empathy is not enough odds justice is superior to empathy if we are ourselves in relationship to others if location is social we are most ourselves in relation to the most other namely in relation to everything and nothing action and passivity in relation to absolutes we are smallest we are most ourselves when we are most still and small like puppets good feel and let feeling have no end okay shifting gears here a bit justice is the uncovered and acknowledged to our will justice surpasses our will it lives on a plane above our will beyond our preference justice is blind but could really be lacking any sense any one sense the blindness underscores a leaning in a reaching past justice is a very careful reader aware of difference but preferring what is most favorable to diversity to each according to its nature some contemporary performance then fails just empathy and justice moving moving on I think we're hitting our marks here more specifics on the trouble or potential trouble in puppet nation a misunderstood empathy yields a magic puppet sort of like the magic Negro which is imbued with human qualities so it can operate for us operate on it without guilt a bad puppet is a stereotype or a cliche a stereotype is a type whose repetition may be purchased or taken away or owned or made private that to which we relate the stereotype is located relative to us and not the reverse we have no guilt we are the cartographers we will not be misplaced to be guilty is to be out of place to be a point out of position without the option of guilt in a theater or system of justice or a culture where guilt is bad we imagine that we are innocent in trade we are asking for characters to empathize with us which is also an impossibility we want to be the paradigm that the show itself imitates bad empathy makes bad puppets meaning cliches which promote a bad innocence meaning the world is relative to us and not the reverse when Blake says little lamb talks about his little lamb it's not little lamb you are very cute it's little lamb who made the the lamb is the dividend of an irrational equation a complex and volatile consequence the same symmetry and abstraction Blake rushes right past personality and etches the abstract line Blake focuses on the math of character and the shape of the story pushing from role to role model the model not the singular character this loss of innocence forestalls wonder wonder in the sense of all we've traded all like all isn't that cute for all like oh goodness we've said we've cut the e off of all and settled in a terrible way wonder in the sense of all but also wonder as in to be unsure if we have a theater of wonder it must include I wonder what's going on we must lose our heads so to some specifics what to do point of death puppets the best among them now teach empathy to the point of death death into the other so an agenda I recommend we all quit work in the sense of nothing should be work except for the serious toil of becoming who I am and you should show no loyalty to any other work this is less about me than about the human which is less about the human than that which is the source and site of the concept bleed out success in plot and career and take on uselessness first be useless quit work abandon energy I habitually reconfigure myself as a source of or a consumer of energy I enslave myself to various sugars throw myself on the fainting couch of possession scenarios regarded invited addictions I mysteriously envy slaves rather than atoning for the frame of mind and keenness of will that puts faith in objection and the power to objectify I correct an imbalance caused by bad food with more bad food I correct my bad will with more bad will may I find soulfasting and head silence like a puppet fail time let me always be on time but not to absorb light and admit the most be rich in darkness and waiting like the inside of a puppet quit work abandon energy fail time let light in be dark inside and go into the darkness inside of others quit yourself and all you can do quitting yourself form groups like puppets do puppets are ontologically social they cry they cry out every second of their existence to be picked up to be manipulated to be handled by groups making presenting and watching puppets promotes the excellence of self and rightly desperate need we don't feel as rampantly as we could to a revolutionary degree because feeling has become enough has become satisfactory wanting replaces yearning in the sense that wanting can be satisfied by getting but there is a kind of longing that no recompense can address because the object desired is very specifically larger than our having whatever I want from a puppet and whatever I give from a puppet it will never be enough and that's the beautiful point there's a yearning or a loneliness in the form of a gerund meaning like running or struggling it's an ing word we don't arrive at meaning we are meaning in a process we suffer from an excess of meaning as we suffer from an excess of arrival we are beginning always performance teaches beginning I will rush to a conclusion here I'll take about five more minutes and then we'll chat are we okay great there's space in the back for napping good I'll go to here the motions they goose the heart but they do not break it to be human we must each have a broken heart a heart broken wide and I see some of the most effective heart-breaking performance in puppetry lately in live action drama or a drama with people the way it's been psychologized and monetized I see people on stage who are merely very unhappy and sometimes in surprising ways I'm merely surprised or I merely acknowledge their unhappiness I may even feel I walk away from it and forget the bond that I formed I have no bond with what's what's on stage but the demands of puppetry the the puppeteers investment and my investment is so inexhaustible that I have to break to get anywhere holds the mirror up to the individual but Hamlet suggests we hold the mirror up to nature not it's not speak the speech I pray you hold the mirror up to yourself and have a good look it's hold the mirror up to nature and when you see your face in the mirror you're not seeing yourself you're seeing the nature of human of the human this puppets are okay when we see ourselves in others we are not able to love the stranger as ourselves so a kind of identification that says I feel just like that or you must feel just like me that kind of identification that narrow identification that kind of recognition is too small too small we have to see see others as strange and then learn to welcome the stranger puppets frames and symmetries of things they have no mechanism for stopping my investment what leads some to dismiss puppets as childish because children are geniuses of this kind of loss the etymology as as the people in this room must know the etymology of the word pupa and child therefore doll but also pupil in the sense of student but pupil is in the apple of the eye puppet and pupil share a root and the reason for that is that the self is reflected as if a small doll in the mirror of the pupil that's where that idea came all circumscribed by the other ourselves remade there beyond us and with just a couple of minutes I'd like to point to some sources for this these lines of thinking these lines of thinking of Borges like to talk about mirrors mirrors seem to be the only thing we can really see out in the world when I look out into the world I'm looking at my own perspective looking through my own perspective I'm looking at a kind of reflection of my mental capacity to get anywhere to get lost to really get out in the world I need lots of mirrors or problematic mirrors or distorting mirrors to create space in a sense of infinity the closest we can get is a sense and we need to accept that we navigate this as terms we can architect anything but an exit but we can get pretty far in mirrors from by Borges Claudius king of an afternoon a dreaming king did not feel it a dream until that day when an actor showed the world his crime in a tableau silently in mind place worn out repertory of every day may include the illusory profound globe that reflections scheme God has created nighttime which he arms with dreams and mirrors to make clear to man he is a reflection and a mere vanity therefore all these alarms according to him a mirror is best when it troubles us reverses us discovers us in the world not as we see ourselves but as our image leaves and is admitted into the presence into presence in excess of us puppets are this kind of problematic mirror Merton follows the same sort of thread this is a couple of chunky paragraphs but really is nearing the end Thomas Merton in being and doing the reason to be themselves is that they do not really believe in their own existence the loss of faith has involved at the same time a complete loss of all sense of reality being means nothing to those who hate and fear what they themselves are therefore they cannot have peace in their own reality they must struggle to escape their own true being and verify a false existence by constantly viewing what they themselves do they have to keep looking in the mirror for reassurance what do they expect to see not themselves they're hoping for some sign that they have become the God they hope to become by means of their own frantic activity in vulnerable all-powerful infinitely wise unbearably beautiful and unable to die when a person are her own acts their spiritual double vision splits them into two people and if they strain their eyes hard enough they forget which one is real in fact reality is no longer found in either oneself or one's shadow the substance has gone out of oneself into the shadow and they have become two shadows instead of one real person I will go to yeah these last two I want to get Salon in and then I'll wrap then I'll wrap up radix matrix by Paul Salon as one speaks to stone like you as one speaks to a puppet like you as one speaks to stone like you from the chasm from you that long ago you in the nothingness of the night you in the multi-night encountered you multi you at that time when I was not there at that time when you paste the plow field alone who who was it that lineage the murdered that looms black into the sky rod and bulb root Abraham's room root Jesse's root no one's root oh ours yes as one speaks to stone as you with your hands grow up into there and into nothing such is what is here this fertile soil two gates this growing down is one of the crests growing wild so in conclusion I'm saying we need much more nothing we need more undiscovered world we need a piece that passes understanding available to wonder as awe and wandering puppetry is well set up to teach the stranger to teach us to oscillate between self extinction and self assertion this oscillation sustainable as a permanent state is a changed life a two-valve heart Bridget Pigeon Kelly a poet I've recently discovered blessed are those who stand still in their confusion blessed is the field as it burns an example of a recent effective puppet performance the nice woman with whom I stayed recently in Boise told me about the password for her internet connection which is a variation of North light I won't tell you what the variation is in case you you're in Boise and you steal it and the reason where she got this word north North light was one of when one of her grandchildren would get obstreperous get bulky and and say the kinds of things that young kids do like I hate you and I never want to see you again she'd just stop the action for a minute and she would she would ask the child to get a paper bag go get a paper bag child would get a tooth brush now put them in the bag now take the bag very carefully out onto the porch and wait for one minute and she'd let the child wait with the bag out on the porch just steaming she'd pick up her phone and she'd stand near the door so the child could hear her and and she'd say hello North light orphan removal company yes I have another pickup for you and the child would generally then say well I don't want to go and in this object performance empathy is limited the the participants are not asked to feel like each other the plot is very simple the performance permeates the inside outside boundary and its peak moment is invisible north she's not actually calling the North light orphan removal company it enjoys the kind in and around a house and it leads to ethical action and conversation so this is a great example of how puppetry is well suited to an activist theater that transcends empathy that goes beyond empathy there is no audience the makers are are the audience and this is perhaps the next great surge in our practice across performance disciplines that there is no there is no more audience and that's one way to get over this empathy problem that we're all just making stuff together the last element and I've gone two minutes over is is one more from Merton it says very well-known moment of clarity from conjectures of a guilty bystander in Louisville at the corner of fourth and walnut in the center of the shopping district that I loved all these people that they were mine and I theirs that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers it was like waking from a dream of separateness a spurious self-isolation in a special world the world of renunciation and supposed holiness then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach the core of their reality the person that each one is in God's eyes if only they could see themselves as they really are if only we could see each other there would be no more war no more hatred no more cruelty no more greed I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other and here is to our falling and who falls better more absolutely than a puppet that's it that's sort of the brand of the conference this you consume this and now you can enjoy the crudities and snacks what happens now what you may be inspired to talk about by the things he said but also if you want to say is there if you may also still want to talk about some of his work and experiences that might have led him to these insights in this expression I think that's fair game absolutely great yes sir I guess my question is kind of the moment of self-reflection when I direct I really enjoy adapting more than working from a play and as I was listening to there I was thinking maybe it's because as I when I adapt I allow myself to become the puppet because of my imperfect range of movement or limited ability I am able to take things from the larger work and then transform them through me and I need them allowed myself to become a puppet in a way that when I'm working from a full gas I am not so I was wondering do you ever when you work and look at that blank page you consider the blank page of public do not even consider that in that form or when you're adapting something like the way you were with Frankenstein you you know how do you approach that great well yeah I often think of a blank page as a puppet stage and it's interesting how many forms of puppetry involved reaching through some kind of barrier you know either in bunraku where the the self of the puppeteer reaches through a veil or or reaching up into a puppet or a marionette stage not always but there is generally we celebrate a kind of division or barrier last night the Paul's great work had a very contemporary joyful work with a sense of spontaneity but carefully managed also had a careful frame this this a couple of careful frames so adaptation is a way of reaching into another space setting things up so that you reach into another space in that way I would say that all writing is a kind of adaptation or a kind of puppetry where you celebrate this kind of a kind of blindness or indirection you want to reach but but not directly so you want to keep your hand that reaching hand available to nuance and improbability rather than this equals that it saves you from denotation so the obscurity and otherness of an ineffectiveness of an adaptation process translates to the necessary ineffectiveness of every kind of writing slide over in perfect formation and dials comes back from working in the city the market happens he sees a snake on the ground with a toe cup and he just smashes it just to monsters too strange but the whole center of the book is this community is a rural community putting on a play there's villagers wearing and they're using pots and pans and totally improvised and people of them in their individual cells and at different times of production breaks down and the cows in the middle are moving so they become part of it and they leave no longer themselves that part of something larger and they're saying what does it mean what does it mean but there's never any answer so it's just a really strong I like Wolf a lot and I would say that it's because the production breaks down that the self breaks down and a lot of contemporary performance like a lot of like hula-hooping or frisbee playing everything is professionalized to the point where it's not permitted to break down and a breakdown is is a big disaster but it's this possibility of breakdown that that is what the theater event is teaching we may all break down and in fact may we all break down I love the breakdown of theater it's nice when by accident it all goes right but it has to remain an accidental correctness I think this idea of betweenness is so important and that's exactly what the market is trying to squeeze out that there's no creative space no space for that which is in between no liminal space or ludic space so maybe I've walked into a nest of Trump supporters I don't know I mean you know offense if you're all gonna vote for Trump but this his fixation and many people's fixation with the wall the idea of a wall is of grave misunderstanding of architecture there is no such thing as a wall meaning a perfect geometric line that has no dimension between spaces the wall itself is a space and his in fact is where he means us to live he means us to relocate our imaginations to a barrier or to a wall which is a very bad drama a very bad game a drama with only one outcome it will break down it will be accidental but it'll break down towards passivity and ruin not not towards creative play so watch for the crushing of the space between and for expertise watch out for expertise pundits this political season experts everywhere scary there's something else yeah so so I took notes so this one says the deeper reality of being human is to be broken open by our suffering and love so recently there has been this exhibit of Van Gogh going on at the Clark Museum which is an extraordinary extraordinary curated show of his his work without investigation of his life but with the life present in the room and it strikes me that there is in that this thing that you're talking about which is that the immense suffering is part of what we're here to be about and when we when we can give witness to it which he does we know the story but even in the paintings you get there's something so it's like we don't often go any of us to the place that he has gone where you're sort of sitting in your your you're moving from that aliveness which is about the suffering yeah and that's a that's a good note that gee I like Van Gogh I better cut off my ear is not good thinking that there are different kinds of suffering he found in his suffering away for the great giveaway he he was able to move into suffering and work with tremendous generosity and that generosity spilled on to the canvas snipping his ear or that kind of suffering his the self-hate in him is the opposite kind is an uncreative act he's trying actually to stop something or to finish something by snipping his ear so those of you who want to suffer don't worry there's plenty to go around it'll come your way it'll come you don't have to trick up these you don't have to gin up your suffering or qualify with your suffering plenty to go around more questions yes sir so after we make the t-shirt that says corporate incarceration is bad puppetry I know one of the things that happens to me every time I hear you speak and I think this is about the fourth time now apart from conversations passing is that you change for me the meaning that I think some words have that I it's Orwellian is what it's Orwellian yes but without the evil there's a recently came across a quote from Eddie diesel in which he says the opposite of love is not hatred is indifference the opposite of life is not death it's indifference and several other very very poignant equal statements and yet you have taken this word indifference and and given it in some ways a positive let's say meaning but also perhaps function and I wonder if you would just I mean you've just been 40 minutes talking about that or perhaps you could take another minute and just talk about this idea of of taking a word in which we have so much investment and making it something that we first of all see differently but also that starts to resonate in the way we relate to the ways it has been used by others to other poignant that's thank you so much for inviting me over first of all thank you for our conversation over time you and you and your wife and your family have been very kind to me and my family so thank you for that about about indifference the genius of humans is that they can misuse anything more than any other creature on earth more than any other natural phenomenon they could find a way to make anything good bad and even if you see like a two-year-old they'll take something like a q-tip and figure out how to make it fatal they'll anything from the earliest age we figure out how to make how to misuse things so indifference can be misused I'm speaking there are two different let's say there are two broadly speaking two different kinds of uses of indifference one is the uncreative use of indifference where indifference lets me step back into myself let's me step back away from the world there's another kind of indifference the indifference of puppetry where puppets are in different creatures that are designed to stride without fear into the public into you into public use so you might think of it in medical terms and you you don't want a doctor or nurse to be weeping over every patient you want them to have human feelings to be alive but they have to have a kind of indifference otherwise they'd never get all the way down the line of beds oh my gosh what oh you look terrible that if that if that one person stayed with that one person in this web of empathy this this feedback of empathy the job wouldn't get done so there's a kind of indifference that's important to get the job done a kind of indifference that lets you move into other people without and survive and survive so that's what I'm talking about a kind of puppet indifference not a not a wicked indifference mean indifference not a cold not a coldness but actually that that which lets the arm of you into the sleeve of the world again we're saying that there are extremes between good empathy bad empathy but what I'm thinking with me is the the co-opting in political commercial and other ones of empathy that is really allowing us to discharge all of our bad feelings or whatever you know at what point does is there also a good empathy or the role of empathy in the indifference of a puppet that may cause that kind of breakdown and loss of self and understanding and other things that might be a positive right well I left feeling like I can't use empathy anymore no no no I really wouldn't want that to happen and that's that's where I want to I want to really insist on love the idea this idea of love without limits it's it's limitlessness that I'm pointing to and there's a way of manufacturing and selling empathy that has explicit limits it's all about limits it's all about ownership and treating feelings like property but I want feelings that go that go but go unowned so feel deeply but without attachment give to you can't live in this state all the time you'd fall over but as you can give whole whole heartedly and in fact broken heartedly your your love won't be at the scale that your love requires if it stays within the map of your heart it has to break those boundaries so if empathy is defined as the transit of feeling away from oneself towards the other I just don't want it to live in a loop where I feel this in order to get something that I get back I I look at those laughing people in the Pepsi commercials to feel good about myself I better get me a Pepsi it's can I just love what I see without expecting something back or needing to purchase something or to have a souvenir of it can I just love can I just love that's what has propagated theater that people when they they look at the stage and they want to run away into it they don't want to necessarily repeat what happens on stage I don't want to live out Hamlet's life but I want to be playing like that play plays so it's it's a going out into so empathy as a going out into is terrific is necessary so I'm not saying be without limits I'm saying specifically love without limits so it's really it's tied to feeling um maybe but they also say it is also said that one can pray without ceasing so ideally I'm praying right now ideally I'm loving right now so I don't want to make it sound too fancy either that you can be walking through the mall or having your coffee in the morning and and be engaged with the world in a loving way yeah that's what I'd say that's right a lot of people get defeated in prayer practice for example when they they'll have a moment of the light and the angels crashing through and if you're not getting that it's odd a hell with this prayer stuff man where are my angels it's not you're not always going to be consoled by your own prayer you won't get yeah prayer can be day-to-day moment-to-moment yeah yeah so theater should be should be and is ubiquitous I think constant we should be theatering constantly yes what about it again there's this idea of spectrum but they're anything disruptive I'm in favor of sort of any disruption anything that promotes a kind of anarchy or in the sense of chaos because chaos is a creative space chaos was the first of the gods all gods came from cast it's where that looseness is where things happen so anger can sometimes be useful to opening things up but if anger wants to be its own endgame like if it wants to reward itself if it wants to win then it's it's real trouble and I've seen a lot of rehearsals and tech rehearsals especially go go very wrong because there's a desire to get it right now we have to get it yeah we all love each other yeah let's put on a show and but it all goes out the window and tech rehearsal because we got to put on this show that I want now by 10 o'clock that's when anger is is not so useful and is frustrating but anger to yeah anger anger can be healthy it can jostle things you know rehearsal I've said this a few times too but rehearsal comes from the idea of hearse which comes from the idea of the harrow or to plow up so rehearsal is related closely to the idea of death and specifically to troubling the soil rehearsal means to trouble the soil again and again to let's let's make this grave again and again so that that negative capacity is attractive to me that's what I'd say but but I have a preferential option for happiness myself I prefer not to use anger but I can't be categorical I can't be angry about anger so maybe maybe one one or two more yeah so you talked about putting energy and putting yourself in the example of the northern the north light or from removal service there can be no audience we can do things together and I think one of the things that I'm reflecting on maybe this is a conversation for all of us at some point during this festival I am I live in Baltimore and there's been a lot of destruction and creation there there's been a lot of a lot of anger and a lot of trying to find ways of a lot of sorry a lot of artists I think in our city are thinking about how do we utilize our energies in a way that contribute to meaningful and very practical social change in the times that we live in and I think when I sit here I think in some ways I'm very grateful for having new ways of thinking about performance in theater but I'm also always really troubled by the amount of energy time and effort that it takes to make a thing in a theatrical space and the amount of energy time and effort that I could be utilizing in other ways such a seemingly critical time and I am curious about how you've made sense of that tension in your own life like where do you keep your energy and effort and the time to when the times that we live in we feel so pressing thanks for that again it it's not it's no one answer and things should exist on a spectrum so I'm really glad for frozen and for now I'm not so glad for Adam Sandler movies but there's a kind of the you know mass entertainment that that's good I'm not I'm not too snobby maybe about about art there there should be Mrs. Warren's profession at the Cleveland Playhouse there there should be plays put on at 8 o'clock by well-dressed people who've memorized their lines that stuff should continue to happen but my own interest like further down further down the spectrum I like plays that promote confusion or meditation or contemplation a kind of disordering of the senses I like theater as a tool first for convening people so if the production itself falls away and all we have are a series of dinners and rehearsals then that's all right with me I run something called the tenderline opera company in Providence Rhode Island where I work with people who are homeless and homeless advocates to make to make theater sometimes the play goes away and it's really just about sharing stories and that what rehearsal does for dignity that's that's enough so losing the idea or losing or changing the idea of outcome can be an important to to the arts but I'm also very drawn I think it's the next it's where the work is all going projects that are massive that where there is no there needn't be an audience so in some ways I think it shares something with bread and puppet where you're just to be there you're part of the production and this audience divide doesn't really matter so much so I did solography for example which was 17 plays produced by 17 companies that all converged and I don't even know if there was an I have no I didn't count the audience but it had a cast of over a hundred so there were always plenty of people to watch what was going on and I'm working on a puppet project now that involves will be fine among ourselves so theater as a theater making as a tool for for causing community is is fine and community that's looking not to win anything or conclude anything or do it or to satisfy a personal appetite so there are riot they're good riots and bad riots there's some riots that want to finish things I want to put something down at someone else's expense I can understand some of those impulses but I would prefer we've got to wrap it all up that's it thank you all so much I I'll be here for another you know enjoy the buffet I'll be here for