 Good evening. Welcome to the final sign-off from the final night of Folda 2020. Wow, it's funny to say 2020 because 2020 has been such an intense year so far and it's only June. My name is Adrienne Wong. I'm Artistic Director of Spiderweb Show Performance and I'm here tonight with the co-curators of Folda. I want to do a quick description with myself. I'm wearing kind of a pink collared shirt. I have dark brown hair that's swept off to the side and cut short. I'm half Chinese Canadian, half French Canadian and if you were to meet me in person I would be small of stature. And I'm going to pass it over here to one of my co-curators just immediately to my left. Hey, thanks Adrienne. I'm Sarah Garten-Stanley and I'm one of the co-curators and I am a white woman in my early 50s with a hoodie that I sport daily. Usually a hat but right now a COVID cut that is about to finally cut. I just felt like I wanted to let all the hair out before it disappears for another bit of time. And that I think is me. So let me move it over to the third person in the room. Hi everyone. I'm Michael Wheeler. I'm the third co-curator. I'm a very tall white guy in his early 40s and I'm wearing my Raptors jersey because of course this is the one year anniversary of the great championship. And I feel important to represent that today. So one thing that I want to point out is that I'm here in Banff, Alberta right now and Sarah and Michael are not. The two of them are in Kingston. Sarah do you want to talk a little bit about how it's possible that we're all together in this foldable room tonight? Yeah sure. Shout out to Frank Donato who's been doing our backdrops every night and getting us into the room. CDN Studio was created by Joel, Adria and myself a few years back with the support of Spiderweb Show Performance and Joel isn't a technologist and a video creator and a super star guy who not only had to know how to figure out how to make this work but also was able to revive it when the pandemic hit and make some adjustments and shifts that have made it possible for us to bring it back into your view. We've found it to be really a great space to feel like we're in the same room together. It was developed initially for artists to be able to work at a distance and to be able to gather in a shared space and to look at the body and how the body interacts in a shared space. So a tool and we're finding now doing these talks each night which has been really great. And that is also a terrific space just for people to actually meet and for audiences I think to feel like they're getting to see people more in their natural habitats in a way. So yeah that's CDN Studio for asking and thanks for watching and it's in it each night. I think we should just take a moment to maybe slide to the side so we can display this this backdrop to its fullest extent because there's some surprises in here. I'm just going to slide down. There's some things. Oh, oh, just empty sky. Not what I was expecting at all. Now listen before. So this is the fourth night that we've gathered this way. This has been an intense day of performances but also like, yeah, just again so much heart. Thank you for talking my screen with my hands up to my face because I just was feeling so much emotion in all of the shows and different like different emotions different ways. Michael, like, what's your, like, what's, what's the thing that's kind of at the top of your, your brain right now after watching this whole night. Honestly, I'm so proud of our, like our tech team, like, I don't understand we, we have a theater company that turned into a geographically distributed television station. And that's pretty wild man. And so right now I'm just kind of in awe of all the people who know how to do things. Know how to do who made this happen. How about you, Sarah? Thanks. I, I guess I want to say that I feel like our technicians have become real artists of the now, and they've met artists of the now and created something truly magnificent and while I take Mike's suggestion of kind of a TV studio at a distance. I still revel at two things and two things. One is that everyone pretty much technician and artist has been in their own segregated space, and somehow managed to bring this story together into a shared space, which has been remarkable for so many reasons and such an incredibly vital and liveening response to what we've all been trying to understand with the pandemic and see that we were able to bring this digital space to real theater tonight to be able to watch. I'm very emotional about watching Iskway in such property to those players and to hear a sound that was made in a space that we were all here in our own separate spaces. Very moving. I mean, incredible performance. Just unbelievable, but that we were able all together to do that. I am truly an awe of so when Mike talks about the tech team, 100% artists and yeah, there's a real crossover that's happening in this moment, which I'm so thrilled by. You know, it's funny. I feel like I feel in a strange. Well, I feel like the audience gets more out of this like mode of transmission. It's unfairly weighted towards the audience because as audience members we could kind of gather on zoom or chatting with each other and there is that kind of sense of being together. And I felt really conscious, especially with Iskway as a musician and and because I guess because there's songs and that at the end of the song if you're there with her be like shouting and cheering and clapping, and I felt the impulse to clap at home so I feel satisfied with that gesture. I don't get all of the sound feedback of my fellow concert goers, but I was so conscious of the those four musicians being in a black space by themselves and not getting that. And I feel like we see back from us back from us in the audience. And, and I feel like that's the next. I don't know. That's just my dream of the next CDN studio is a way of like, throw love back in some way I don't, I don't know but how do we, how do we complete the circle right because that's the. Like, the moment that it transcends is when it does the circle closes and we are there together and I felt like we're almost there we're halfway there are three even three quarters there. But the feedback loop back to the performers is not there yet. And I missed it. I really felt it not being there. Okay, that was when we made a play using this technology that we're on right now, and we have performers that were across the country. They gave us that same feedback. And so actually one of the hacks that they did was we set up a Google. I think that was before zoom so it was like Google Hangouts, I think. And just so they could see the audience from time to time and they get read real time feedback from that audience because they couldn't have two streams opening and feedback and all sorts of stuff like that. But just so that they could like see the house come in and understand like who is in the house even was very helpful. That makes a lot of sense. I think I think we should thank we have a bunch of people we want to thank tonight, people and organizations who made it possible for folder to to exist. Who came with us on a really intense journey, as we've all been on an intense journey since the pandemic shut down our our theaters. We want to thank these folks for shifted the focus of the festival from being in live in person live in Kingston to being in computers live across Canada and beyond. So I'm going to start here talking about our funders and I'm going to talk about the Government of Canadian Heritage, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council celebrate Ontario and the City of Kingston Art Fund. Thank you. Our partners on this festival are including the National Arts Center, Howl Round, Fix Point, the Bamp Center for Arts and Creativity, Queens University to Departments, the Dan School of Drama Music and the Department of Film and Media, the Isabel Bader Center for Performing Arts and Tricia Baldwin, Plank, the National Theatre School, New World Theatre and Theatre Center. And that brings it to me with the tech team. Yeah, I just saw was dubbed the artist of the now and it's true. So, Martin Jones, who has been Command Central and made unbelievable magic happen. Charles Ketchaba, the live stream director, Jesse McMillan, our technical director, Andrea Lundy, our production manager, Ellen Brooker and Rachel Shane, two of our technical assistants and associates and Frank Donato who brought the brought this CDN studio room forward to us. I want to give a big thanks to our communications team, Christine Etchampong and Steph Brown. Thank you. Also big shout out to our development intern, Deborah Maitland. And the access team, Clayton Baraniak and the electric company, and Carmen Alvarero and Kat Jermaine. I don't know if you got to check it out, but there was some really wonderful access and and artistic sort of movements forward with talk to me and just some awesome stuff. So shout out to Clayton and crew. Thank you. Absolutely. And to our access partners inside out theater and deaf spectrum. And as I mentioned to Joe Agia for CDN Studio. Last but not least, big shout out to Mariah Horner and Madison Limer. Thank you. Thank you for holding this all together. We really, really, really appreciate it. Absolutely. And with that, a sign out of Folder 2020. And we hope, well, hey, I have one last workshop that never ends. Next week we'll be having a startup workshop featuring live labs, which is like zoom, not even 2.0 but 3.0 is anyhow check it out. And we'll see you in 2021. Thank you.