 And I'm going to drink my very strong coffee. Please do. Please do. And please, thank you so much, Jehan. And please, everybody feel very free to wander on and off screen, drink coffee, do whatever you need to. It really is so intimate that there's really no need to. Obviously, you can turn your video off, but don't feel you need to. It's a very intimate context. And we're just basically chewing the fat. That's the whole spirit of Rehearsed Futures is that of a conversation. So with that, I'm going to begin rather formally with the presentation of our two wonderful guests and our new fellow curators by giving you their brief biographies. So I'll start with you, Moenya. Moenya Kabue is a Zambian-born maker of theater and performance, facilitator of creative processes, a performer, writer, arts educator, and scholar with migrant tendencies. Her creative practice is focused on contemporary African theater and performance, immersive and site-specific performance work, live art, collaborative and interdisciplinary art-making, and re-imagining African futures. She's lectured and taught performance theory and practice in the drama department at the University of Cape Town, Wittes University, and the Market Theater Laboratory, and is a PhD candidate at the Center for Theater Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town. Now, Moenya, you submit it, but you're the doctor now, aren't you? You're a doctor. OK, soon. That's very good. So hopefully, lots of this. It's very close. We're all holding it back. Thank you. OK, so I'm going to ask you to speak much more about your specialties and fields of interest. But I'm going to now introduce our second collaborator and curator, new collaborator, Mengenny Machali, who works across a range of performance disciplines, including dance and movement, composition and performance, animation and puppetry, and site-specific performance installation, among others. He has earned a PhD in performance studies from Northwestern University, as well as Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award, and the Fleur de Cape Theater Award for his achievements in directing and performance making. Mengenny is primarily interested in Black queer farm performance in South Africa, as well as Africa and its diaspora, turning towards queer genealogies of African decolonial world making in the Caribbean, South Atlantic, and Indian Ocean. These research interests frame his practical and theoretical inquiries with unreached futures as another venture into understanding the broader landscape of global theater practice. So welcome to you both. And it's really very, very thrilling to be part of this expanding team with you. And so today, really, it's a chance to look at your interests and your fields of interest as determining curatorial trajectories for unrehearsed futures, and then opening that up to everybody so we can all talk about what we have in common around your interests and around the theme of planetarity, which I think remains to be discovered, what that means. I don't think anybody's taken the class on it. So it's a really, I think, a great, great topic to be discussing together, all of us. So can I start with you, Mengenny? And just can you please tell us a little bit more about what exactly you're doing, what your passions are, and what they look like when they come to the stage? Sure. Hi, everybody. Greetings from Cape Town. Thank you, Amy. Thank you, Jehan. It's lovely to be here. Thanks especially to anyone for whom this is not a time of day that you would ordinarily be awake. So yeah, just to share a little bit about my theater-making practice comes very much out of my biography. As my bio indicates, I am Zambian. I currently live in Cape Town. My home base, though, is really Johannesburg. And I've done my post-grad studies here. And before that, I lived and worked and studied in the US. And before that, spent many years of boarding school in a very small part of the southwest of England. And as a result, my theater-making practice really centers very much around migration and migrancy and movement. And I have a particular interest in African women's migration narratives. And then a few years ago, when I was doing some research for a production that I was working on with students in the eastern Cape of South Africa, I came across a rather colorful character in Zambian history called Edward Rucucan Coloso, who some of you might know, who was a Zambian schoolteacher in the 1960s. And he was convinced that Zambia was going to beat the Russians and Americans to space. So much so that he started a space training program just outside of Lusaka with a small group of young people. And they trained by swinging each other in tire swings attached to trees and rolling each other down a series of bumpy hills to simulate weightlessness. And Coloso himself wore a cape and a standard issue combat helmet and boots. And he had a crazy moustache. And when he was asked to identify his rocket, his spaceship, it was two oil drums stacked on top of each other. So needless to say, he continues to fascinate me to this day and what happened as a result of doing this research coming across him, making a work called Astronautus Africanus, which was this mad immersive in and out of all of the nooks and crevices of one of the main theater complexes. I have become really interested in African futurism and particularly where the relationship between migration and African futurism meet as a dramaturgical strategy, if you will. And what else can I tell you about my interests? I work really collaboratively. I enjoy the less traditional, more site-specific, experimental ways of working and showing. And yeah, I think that's a quick summary of my interests, my theater making interests. I feel like there's more, but it will come. OK, yeah, please feel free to interject. Yes, great. So, and Ginny, you want to tell us a little bit about, yeah, give flesh out for what your field of interest is. Yes, sure. Hello, everyone. And thank you for joining us. I'm going to repeat what Manny said and congratulate some thank people who have come in at weird hours from wherever they are in the world. I'm super excited about this conversation. Wenya and I actually come from very similar, and I guess this is a consequence of being on the African continent and being of a particular age, I think, as well, come from somewhat similar backgrounds and have similar fascinations in terms of performance making. But whereas Wenya's work is animated by migrants and that's the kind of touchstone that comes from the personal right that feeds the work, mine also takes off from similar concerns 100% driven by my own experience of being black and queer in South Africa, growing up in a very quote unquote traditional Zulu home in the kind of mid 1980s between several states of emergency when the country is going through these major ructions where debating the state of the nation as it were, being the last of five children, the first to go into a private school, and this would have been in 1989, when private schools weren't generally available to black students. I was the only black kid at that school when I first arrived. Didn't speak a lick of English. You have to say hello, thank you, how are you? And then went through this period which I would love you to call my pygmy in years where I was acculturated into the appropriate language, into the appropriate comportment for a student at St. Charles College, which is why I sound the way I do, which people find surprising given they find out where I'm from and then they're OK, that's where it comes from. So from a young age I was hyper aware of being embraced within specific cultural communities but also being aware of my difference to those. I've always been aware of performance being a fundamental part of how I locate myself in the world, just from the practice of learning how to speak English in particular way in order to disappear within the school of kids. So that informs a lot of my thinking. It's questions on identity, questions on blackness, and more broadly conceived as questions on nationalisms in the plural. So my work takes off from the personal. I'm really interested in this question of black queer and black femme performance specifically and the kinds of tactics that queers of color use to push back against destabilize and perhaps re-narrate what it is to belong to the nation and to belong to a black community specifically where a lot of these questions are really fraught. And as a consequence of that thinking, it necessarily has meant kind of beginning to think outside of the fixity of borders and kind of national spaces. And to imagine, much like when it does, what it means to migrate across those borders, whether they are conceptual or literal. So over many years, I've, you know, in various forms have played with the personal as, and the deeply intimate kind of personal story, right, as the side for a broader politics or a way to explore and engage with the politics that touches all of us. The last kind of major work I did was called In Skin and looked at that period in school but was kind of thematically built around language and intelligibility and then playing with masculinity and gender and all these other things within that. And yeah, I think you also mentioned that I've begun expanding into Caribbean and into Latin America, South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean because my PhD work was mostly focused on, you know, Black queer and Black feminist performance in South Africa and Africa and I became troubled and again, this is these geographies, right? Increasingly troubled by the over-determination of all stories about and of Africa and about Black people in the transatlantic slave trade. And I began asking how else Africans have entered into global presence other than as objects for sale as commodities. And the work has taken me in various ways, you know, using performance that we're thinking through, you know, how, for example, dance practices, transmitted ideas of African-Africanness within colonial spaces without necessarily having to have arrived in those places via slavery. So I'm really interested in kind of syncretic kind of modernities that emerge in Latin America, partly as a result of slavery, but also the other stories that emerge. I'm also interested in, you know, how Africa's moved elsewhere into the globe across the Indian Ocean, which is somewhat less explored, I think, in a lot of thinking around post-colonial Black modernity. Yeah, at the risk of yapping away for far too long and then getting too wrapped up in my own theoretical kind of world. Yeah, so it's very, very loosely framed by queer and kind of feminist theory and practices and effectively how we can mobilize those to strategically intervene in these kind of politics of respectability and these kind of national repertoires that come to define who we are as peoples in the plural. Can I, I'll just stay with you, Gany, to discuss your particular interest in the curation of unrehearsed futures, which is a topic you've identified as voicing. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and how it might connect to what you just described as your fields of interest? Yeah, I guess voicing is a somewhat awkward term. And I was saying this earlier on, you know, it's about the voice as both an actual kind of material thing, but also thinking about voice conceptually and voices in plural. So I guess maybe the vocality might be a more accurate term and more specifically polyvocality. So I'm really interested, again, because I have this fascination of language. I'm, you know, multilingual home. I come from a multilingual community. And again, this is the experience of lots of black people in this country is that we are multilingual. We are polyglots. So this idea of language and the voice and what the voice sounds like has always fascinated me in some ways, although I'm not a voice practitioner out in terms of theater. I mean, I sing, I do all sorts of things, but I wouldn't consider myself a voice theorist or practitioner, but the idea of voice is interesting. And the sense that voice can be quite deliberately attached to questions of identity. So not just the texture of the voice, the kind of sonic texture of the voice, but also how to locate you within a particular cultural space or within particular kind of economic categories and various other things. And then I'm interested in what happens when multiple voices occupy whether by choice or forced to the same space, right? What happens when you're speaking with one another, speaking across one another, what other kind of sonic possibilities become available when we play with all of us speaking at once and not necessarily with an interest in hearing one another, but just what it is to sit with multiple voices at once. And what if anything, are we as humans but screaming into kind of these collective spaces together in all our multiple different voices? And I think that there's already interesting kind of node one can think through there around the strategic uses of voice as a way of positioning oneself within the world. Yeah, so I guess it's voicing is a somewhat messy way of grasping at these ideas around identity, around intelligibility, around polyvocality, our capacity to either speak at multiple voices, but also what always attends to me and attention to voice or to sound which kind of sonic texture is listening to, right? And practice of careful listening. So how do you listen to voices in a way that reveals perhaps points where we meet and diverge as well without, yeah, without over determining our understanding of our encounters in this need to achieve anything particularly, right? But just the ethics of sitting with other people and playing to a voice or the multiple voices in which we speak because I know I could switch and we all do, right? So there are multiple ways that voicing kind of plays out. Certainly, the first session that I've curated is obviously driven by this idea and you will see it when it comes out to the flyer, but you know, Fabulous South African actor, Tony Miambo adapted Franz Kafka's A Report to an Academy and the work is called Kafka's Aid. So again, I'm interested there in how this quintessentially Eurocentric European white man's voice produces a text that can speak multiple and has been sustained or that circulates in a way that's enabled that story to kind of emerge over and over again over time. And I'm fascinated by how Tony as a Black South African can take that text, translate it into a performance and it's specifically the dissonance between our knowledge of where that piece comes from, confronting his body and his voice now, where that piece does its work, right? But also I'm interested in why that particular adaptation of that work has just achieved so much global traction. It's a voice that is obviously being heard in really substantive and compelling ways and in distinctly different global spaces. Yeah, so voice in a broad loosely formed sense, but as a way of thinking through speech conceptually, speaking and being heard and strategizing ways to find different ways of speaking, different ways of being heard. Marvelous. Well, we have a voice technician in the room, Simon Rackler. Oh, yeah. Here, yeah. So hopefully we'll have a, be able to engage. Later on. Great, wonderful. Okay, and so thanks for that. And Wenya, would you want to then perhaps flesh out for people what your interest is in the topic of transcendence which is your designed arc in the upcoming sessions? Sure, sure. Also feeling like it's a slightly awkward term to use, but something that I've been interested in for a while and that has come into sharp focus in light of the pandemic is how our particular skills and tools and languages of theater making can be applied and put to use and repurposed in different settings outside of academia and outside of making creative goods per se. And part of this comes from an interest, well, it comes from a particular course that I'm teaching at the moment at UCT in professional practice, you know, which feels at the best of times teaching, you know, fourth year theater makers about something called professional practice feels contentious and awkward, but now especially on top of the global pandemic, South Africa is experiencing artists are protesting at the moment all over the country and our National Arts Council has made millions and millions and millions of brands owed to artists disappear, which is not necessarily uncommon but the scale of it this time is extraordinary and what is equally extraordinary is the kind of national response that artists have taken and continually, you know, we're still sitting with a sit-in that is now, I'm not even sure how many days old at the National Arts Council offices in Johannesburg. And so in this context, it's wild to be sitting with students who are about to graduate with undergraduate degrees in theater and performance and be, you know, talking about what it means, what their skills are going to do and also how they can meet this new and continually evolving context as opposed to have it surprise them as it has us or certainly me. So it's a really, it's a fascinating time to be teaching theater and performance at all I think and I'd be really interested to, you know, when we open up this conversation to hear how others in the room are doing it, you know, like what your practices look like, what your teaching is looking like, what kinds of moves you're making with who and how. So this professional practice course is partly what has gotten me thinking about how to think about teaching students, how to think about preparing them for some kind of post-university work life. And it also comes from my own practice as a freelancer between university teaching jobs. I've done a lot of process design facilitation work and particularly with a company called Ingenious People's Knowledge that is based in Cape Town and also in Geneva. And it's been a kind of no-brainer in my mind that the languages of process design facilitation and the languages of theater making really go hand in hand, you know? I'm like, yes, of course, process design facilitation, theater making, here we are. But I've really had to become much more articulate, thoughtful and articulate about what exactly, not even exactly because God knows what that is, but to just be clearer in my mind and in my speech about what it is that I bring to the table as a person who is trained in theater and performance. And yeah, what my skill set is outside of the context of making theater. So some of the kind of principles of this work that I do with IPK are things like to serve the human spirit, to leverage complexity and to, to handle complexity and to leverage diversity. And, you know, these are things that I resonate so much with some of my core principles, if you will, of making theater, which if I have to articulate them are about my role as a theater maker person, making a space for the people and the non-human and the environment to be as generous as possible in our work towards bringing something new into being. And, you know, in the theater making space, so much of the stuff feels taken for granted in a way. We get to the floor, we have a shorthand, we know what to do, process, scores, work is made. But yeah, just to reiterate, it's been so interesting and I think useful for me in particular to have to re-articulate how some of the stuff that is taken for granted in one setting can be applied and leveraged and thought about and put to use in a whole range of other settings. So I'm really interested in speaking with people who have theater and performance training of some sort, but who don't necessarily make theater or teach it, but definitely draw on those skills very directly and have really figured out ways to be clear about what those skill sets and languages and tools are and use them in ways that are really interesting. So transcendence is the term, but it's really, my interest is in having conversations with people who have, I don't wanna say transcended theater and performance because that sounds a bit odd and it's not what I mean, but who have applied their skills broadly and continue to, and I feel like there's some interesting site guide posts to be learned and taken at the moment in this particular context where it's strategic on one level, theater and performance jobs are few to begin with and will definitely be fewer in the coming years, at least in South Africa, I'm feeling that quite strongly. So some of this is, it's definitely also about thinking about how to adapt the teaching space as well, how to think about what students should be leaving with in their minds even as a kind of headspace, if not actual skills or actual ways to think about how their skills can be used. So yeah. Marvelous. Well, I mean, I'm really impressed by how we're sort of continuing the direction of unrehearsed futures from the last season in that generally we're asking what are we doing with and for people when we make theater with them? And perhaps particularly as teachers or pedagogues. So it's in general sort of voicing and transcends what is this for? What do we, as you say, bringing to the table? What do people walk away with? What is the agency of this? That was very much our preoccupation in the first season as well. And I'm just curious, I mean, in the time that we have just remaining just in this smaller conversation before we open it out, one of the preoccupations in the last season was what it is to be doing this now online, you know, what's the digital space? And I'm wondering if this connects to this term, planetarity, because it seems to me, you know, again, when you're talking about migrations and so forth, it seems that we are on some level, perhaps doing a bit of an imaginative migration whenever we go online and into this space that is sort of between us globally. And just sort of that perhaps is the second thread from Unrehearsed Futures is what does the online, the digital, these international connections, what does this open up for us as theater practitioners? Can we call that an emerging planetarity? What would that be for us? I'm just wondering if you have anything to say about that before we open it out to some questions. You can just hop in if you want to. Unmute. Go ahead. Yeah, I guess in very obvious ways, it's the big question right now, for us as teachers, it's an occasion with that. I guess one of the things that I've been going to in my thinking around planetarity and performance specifically, is that I'm immediately struck by, and I think we've spoken about this in terms of presence, right? I'm struck by that kind of jewel thing that's happening is that this kind of affords us an approximation of proximity, right? But it's curiously disembodied in some ways. I'm not even standing in a room at a podium or walking amongst people. I'm literally sitting at a desk in a room that's been conversed for the purpose of allowing me to connect to a world that I can't physically enter into as a part of my teaching too. And it really has got me thinking also about, if we're thinking planetarity, it's the tension between the impulse to step outside of these kind of globalist frameworks to something that perhaps decenters, humans, right? That is not anthropocentric. And yet performance ironically is one of those things that relies, if anything, on the recognition or the capacity to recognize other humans. So we're kind of stepping out into this kind of scale that exceeds the global. That is its excess maybe, but we're moving simultaneously into this deeply intimate space that relies on the recognition of our fundamental humaneness, right? So it's both a kind of de-centering of an anthropocentric worldview yet at the same time has to emerge from a grounding perhaps more explicitly in the body than in any other than in any other moment. Yeah, so it throws a whole lot of these assumptions around performance, around body, around presence, around materiality, into complete disarray. But I don't think that that's a bug. It may very well be a feature. I'm still trying to figure out what the feature is and how to leverage it to do critical work as well as kind of actual making performance work. Yeah. Great. Wenya, do you have anything to say before we've got some wonderful questions in the chat? Would you like to say something about how the digital space opens up some kind of planetarity in your practice or what that means to you, planetarity? Yeah, sure, just briefly. I mean, on a very practical kind of superficial level, it's been amazing to be able to have people who are not in Cape Town in my classrooms, to bring in my network from Johannesburg even to interface with a group of students who are here in the West in Cape is really, is lovely. Yeah, it's really, it's lovely. So on that level, you know, there's that. And then I can't, it bumps up against notions of equality and inequality so forcefully as well. I mean, you know, we started, we were talking about the vaccine rollout in some parts of the world and all you have to do is take a scan of how, you know, how the rollouts are happening when and how and amongst what kinds of populations to, you know, it feels, it's so weird to, well, it's not weird. It's disarming over again, you know, to kind of be reminded that imperialism is alive and well in many ways and our vaccine rollout conversation has started, but my God, who even knows when at some point it was definitely happening this year for, you know, my particular demographic and now it's definitely not happening this year because it's late already. You know, questions of access and which students have data and need to be on campus and who can stay at home and be fed and watered by their parents and on their parents, you know, fast Wi-Fi, all of this, you know, all of this stuff is kind of bumping up against a real opening up and a real, yeah, I guess there are questions of access that come to mind when I think of planetarity and they are at once liberating and also just really reminding of particular kinds of inequalities and we're back in a space of, you know, asking ourselves as we have for a long time, those of us who teach in this part of the world, how to bridge the access gaps and this feels like a huge one. And if we are going to be teaching and learning and working in this way for the foreseeable future, then there's real work for us to do to figure out how to make it work. So yeah, that's what's kind of front of mind at the moment, but I'm very happy to open it up now, yeah. Well, you're bringing up the kind of shadow which is globalization, isn't it? So you've got planetarity and globalization as being kind of the terms that are being kind of in a sense, you're saying confronting each other, like when is it, what is the good side of it and then what is the, you're bringing up the shadow of it? That's very poignant, yeah. Let me just, because it's such a small gathering, I think it would be really great if people just unmuted and spoke out some of these really good comments here. I mean, I'm just scrolling down and I think Jehan, you came first in thinking about voicing. Do you wanna just speak that out? It just got me excited about the idea of I just remember always not paying enough heed to movement trainers who talked about working with the Indian body versus another body. And I just thought, no, but the body is, we all have bodies. But the same way a voice has such unique identities and everything I'm gonna talk about, I just suddenly found myself, well, why, that there's a complete analogous conversation to be had about the body as a tool of communication, as a tool of social interaction. And so it just made me think about the fact that there are unique identifiers in the way we move, the way we hold ourselves, the way we communicate with our body. And therefore also how an actor and training has to put on, like I was trained for a moment right now where an Indian actor who's going into a film called me and said, I need somebody who, do you know anybody in your global network who could teach me about an American accent? And the actor person I thought about was the voice teacher over here who was a basket trained voice teacher who was Indian. And I'm like, she can do this for you. And it's a bit of a segue, but I mean, I kept thinking about that more commodified idea of this is all universal, this is all universal access. And I'm just checking myself because I find that this is extremely globalization-based thinking versus the opposite, the antithetical. And I'm just finding myself listening to this going, gosh, even the vaccine thing, I was thinking about how long it's gonna take India to do this and that's the last comment I made, but there's many more comments and we should listen to them and have that conversation. But why am I thinking about the rate of the US versus India's vaccination? If I was really thinking about us as a single being, and I'm not trying to do this in a kumbaya kind of way, but just as a way to open up the frameworks in my head, then I should be thinking about, well, how long will it take us to get to 7.3 billion vaccines? Which is actually 14.6 billion shots if you're doing a two-dose regime. And if I'm not thinking like that, then maybe by thinking like that, however impossible that thought is, how does that translate back to whatever my immediate moment or thought or impulses? And so that's what you've got me thinking about. So thank you for that. Mark is also speaking to that in terms of what you were first saying, Jehan, about the voice and about the particularity of the voice. Mark, do you wanna say anything about, I know in the British context, accents and voice are so absolutely crucial? Yeah, sort of. I think that's changing, but for a long time there was an assumption that there was a received pronunciation, a sort of a particular way of speaking. It was actually a very middle, upper middle class way of speaking English. But I think I suppose part of what I put in here, I'll put it like a statement, but it's more of a question. And it's the ways in which accents sort of, when people speak, their accent is there straight away. It's in the relationship that you have with your own voice and with the voices of other people and with what you're hearing from other people. And it's a very subtle and insidious thing. You sort of notice it, but don't notice it. And the extent to which you notice it and or don't notice it very much relates to your own social context and cultural context, I think it reveals, if you are alert to it, it reveals things about you and about how you're situating yourself. I think also it sort of positions you straight away. You kind of immediately, even on a subconscious level, I think begin to understand where you're sitting in relation to other people because either they have the same accent as you or they don't. And there are all sorts of political, cultural, colonial forces that come into play just as soon as people say a few words. And that's an incredibly powerful thing. And yet, you know, often we don't pay attention to that in terms of how that relates to making theater and to training for theater, I think, I think. The challenge then is in what ways do you let students bring their own voices into the training situation? And I think on one level, yes, that's absolutely appropriate, but you can't do it uncritically because otherwise you're not empowering students to understand what happens in terms of their use of their own voices, their own bodies and movements, all of that. You're not empowering them to be aware of what happens dynamically in terms of how those social and cultural forces start coming into play. And I think it would be naive in some respects not to acknowledge that and not to help students through that journey. I hope that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. We have some voice teachers. I mean, I know Simon, we've a voice teacher in the room. I'm sure that other people in the room are also practicing specifically. I mean, I know that you're talking about something more bigger than just voicing, but it departs from that embodied reality of speaking. Ganey, just wondering if any of those teachers are people who teach voice? Yeah, please. So I was gonna say that what Mark points me to is the implicit relationship between the voice and the body. Right, is that voices are always embodied and always bring with them whether that context is marked sonically in how the texture of usually English in this case right as being spoken or not, is that yeah, the voice becomes another register for the kind of history that students are bringing into the room with them, right? Whether we like to or not. So even this idea of neutral actor and neutral voice, I think I pushed back a little against as a practitioner in some of you trained young students for exactly that reason. I mean, our foundation course was recalculated for specifically this reason. The first thing our first year is doing their life now instead of having Shakespeare thrown at them or a text that they interpret is just talking and engaging with their own life stories and each other's life stories because we've come to a realization in some ways that we can certainly yield more interesting results. I guess more, I don't like the word ethically kind of grounded practice from the students if they are aware of the fact that they enter into that room as one voice amongst many, as one body amongst many that bring all with their own histories, right? And that in some ways one needs to acknowledge that and recognize how it can be mobilized to engage in the practice of performing with more care, with the sensitivity to the other lives you are taking on when you appropriate a voice for your own purposes in performance. I wanted to say, Israel, I'm sorry, I didn't pick up on your comment. I couldn't find you in the room, so I passed over it. Did you want to read out or speak out what you were interested in saying? I found you now. If you're there, Israel, hey. Okay, we'll let him pop in if he's back. So I'm just really curious about the, we also have two mimes in the room and this is an interesting sort of juxtaposition between the focus on voice. And I'm wondering if in fact this movement onto the online and so forth prioritizes speaking and words and what happens to the body? I think we talk a lot about the body but I'm really quite curious about whether or not, I mean, it's almost like, I sort of feel sometimes that we're talking about it because we know it's disappearing and sort of we want to make something of it because I really do wonder what's happening as we move more and more into this mediated space, what actually happens with the body language, the specificity of how we move as well as how we speak. Just wondering if we have some thoughts about that in the room, many, many people working in movement and in physical praxis. Please unmute yourself, it's really, you don't have to put it into the chat first. It's a free-for-all. Then I'll just jump in for a second. Hello everyone and I'm sorry I'm late, I was teaching. The voice is, or the word I should say seems to be taking everything over and I've been pushing against it quite honestly. I have my students right now telling true stories and false stories and they have been pushing more and more towards non-verbal storytelling on Zoom and the stuff I'm getting is blowing my mind. There yesterday this young woman had a jar, a very short jar of water and she had a blue blanket and she moved the blue blanket. So the jar of water was in the forefront and the blue blanket just came in and out. And she was pushing it with her feet. So you couldn't even see, she was pulling it with her hands when it needed to go backwards and pushing it with her feet when it was going forward. So you didn't see the motor, if you will, of anything. It was a hidden motor and she was making sounds and we were at the beach and the entire student body who was watching this thing were transported in a place and time and then she yelled and from above, I don't know how she did this, but she dropped some red into the jar. The all of a sudden there was blood in the water and she was screaming, mom, mom! And it was, I was blown away by how resourceful our students are when we give them the opportunity to not lean on the word. And so I just wanna put that out there because they're blowing me away, they're blowing me away. I could share, this young woman also did a film that I could share with you, it's a minute long film, but it's mind-boggling what she did with her other story. She's, I don't know, can I hijack everything and show you a one minute long film? Let me find it, hang on one second. It's right. It's some popcorn. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So here, okay, I'm going to share my screen if I can. Desk top. And now I'm going to go here, and plug this in, there it is, and I go duck and boom, okay. And this was her other story. So then it was up to us to see which of the two stories were true or false. And I just thought, I don't know, she blew us away. And so I guess my point is that the voice, what's more important than how the voice sounds is that we give our students their voice, whatever that voice is, because they teach me more than I can possibly teach them when they use their voice. And I'm sure it's the case with the rest of the people. This is marvelous. I mean, I think what, I mean, that's such a brilliant, brilliant piece of student work. I think you've raised some interesting, to my mind, controversy, because we have been, and I'm very curious also, Wenya and Genny, what you think about this. In the last, in the last Unreleased Feature series, we were at times slightly preoccupied with the metaphorization of these terms. So, for instance, voice, Daniel, you talk about voice, and obviously what we're getting is mostly, we're getting images, right? So it's, we're sort of metaphorically speaking of voice. And then the body is, so again, there's a kind of metaphorization of the body, which I think has, it seems to have a lot to do with the movement towards digital. And so essentially, we're talking about film. This is a kind of, you know, film art that we're practicing now due to circumstance and also the pandemic, but also due to the sort of prevalent trends in the culture. So I'm just curious about whether we feel any sort of, also something more perhaps, I would say conservative in the true sense of the word. Are we also resisting at all? Or is there any resistance that we'd like to, you know, create around the metaphorization of some of the things that as theater practitioners, we have been doing in the past? Just curious about that. In particular, the two of you, but also just in the room, if anybody wants to speak to that. Is that a conversation stopper? No, I'm going to, I don't, I feel bad jumping in again. But what's interesting is that I think puppetry also becomes, because, because you talk about, you talk about the body. So we have another exercise I do when we're in the studio, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, we when we're in the studio, I ask them to do a bum recursos play, but we don't have puppets. And so they, I give them a length of rope, and they must not anthropomorphize the rope. I don't want a little rope, and I'm going to talk to you kind of thing. I want the rope. to become. Then and there are three of them and they're manipulating it very much like a pedestrian boomeraku, but it's not at all pedestrian because the rope is not. It's not a recognizable character it becomes a. It becomes a metaphorical character and and and depending on the sound that they give it or the or the shape that they give it, it becomes more about the dynamics of rope than, and yet they tell stories with it. And so I, I, I think that I think that my eyes are being opened by this digitalization, because I can't do any of the exercises. I've been teaching for 35 years, and I've had to change my whole vocabulary in speaking to my students, which is very frustrating, because I used to be the expert in the room, and now I am the beginner in the room. Talking to a bunch of kids who know this medium, so much better than I do, it's it is, it is humiliating how little I know about the computer and its capabilities, and they do stuff at this young woman who did that film within the shower. I, I call me in three weeks and I might, you know, have figured out how to do something like that but I don't. It's so it's it's a, the whole paradigm of teaching is upside down because of this, because I'm not the expert in the room. I'm just another eye who's able to add a perspective. And what would you like to say? Yeah, please. I just, I just coming back to this because I'm also looking, I mean, from what I try to keep up with you in terms of the idea of metaphorization of, of this and back to Moenya, and even from Daniel's example about how these kids are so bright and they're coming up with everything and I'm just thinking about what are, you know, we came in as the experts, we now have started to train differently, thinking well what can we do with what we know in this medium. And even that I feel somewhere is the resistance to change and resistance to transfer, because we're still trying to somewhere I'm speaking personally but I do hear this in a lot of other people's conversations we're still trying to we're trying to find our relevance in the space. You know, and that's part of that's the truth. I mean, like, like what do I have to offer. And there's our relevance in the space is still a place where, and I wonder whether that's a good thing or sometimes it actually limits us from seeing what really is possible coming out of these students and then, then I'm just thinking about, about, well, what are the things that we can, what are the things that theater training does and can do it, you know, when I think you said it earlier, you about you use this phrase which I didn't quite exactly catch. And then I just put a note into myself. God, something complexity and leveraging diversity. And I just wanted to get a bit more, first of all, I wanted to ask you what complexity and then leveraging diversity but but do you think there's some universal things that these kids have innate in them that we all had as human beings as young, young people wanting to make a change in the world that we can really, like, is that the anchor point from where we can, we can come up with a new purpose for ourselves as teachers. And, and what their elaborate thoughts on that. Am I, am I making sense, my question. Okay. Yeah, and just say that last but again. Sorry. So, yeah, the relevance age to 30 years. The relevance, our relevance in terms of how, how do we tap into what is innately inherent in, in us trying to be good human beings, etc. And, and where do we find like to find a new local stand by in the room as teachers, holding space in which these guys can be the best versions of themselves because they're already out gunning us and out doing us. We're already catching up with them. But should we be catching up with them in trying to with our old expertise or do we have to just completely realize that there's something else that we can do to enhance what they're already bringing into the room. I'm not sure if this is a response to your question but I'll, I'll riff off what you're, what you're saying and it's making me think about these must fall protests here in South Africa that you know kind of ran for a few years in a row. And I'm particularly thinking about that in relation to this idea of relevance because if, if there was ever a point where particular kinds of relevance was being challenged head on in a university setting. It was around fees must fall and where the students across the country were protesting for free decolonized quality education. And were the demands that the students were calling for and I think different universities and different departments at particular universities handle that time in very different ways. I don't know if you were at UCT and you want to speak to what the UCT scene was like at the time. It was my first year here. Within weeks of arrival. Within weeks of arrival. It was a complicated time and and and I think you're right is similarly to now actually, and the kind of covert moment was one of those moments where he had to really think carefully and deliberately about what the underpinnings of our teaching practice but also the things we were teaching. And, and those moments definitely show up, I think what what was talking Daniel was talking about is is in many ways we are the experts. We have certain areas of expertise. But we aren't the nodules that I think our position, our professional position often incorrectly kind of, you know, places upon us and students themselves. Yeah, there are those similarities that I'm saying as well between now and then that moment. But this is constant recognition that you kind of have to be emphasize your your assumed position of authority in order to be able to listen in here and and recognize where your limitations are and where the limitations of the practice as well. So just to jump in. Hello everyone. The sound you're hearing I was cooking and then I decided to join. So lots happening at the same time. And I thought I'd go back and have a look at the word pedagogue, you know we all know, or it's this word of a used to be the slave that took the student to school it wasn't the teacher. The slave that took the student to school, maybe imparting a bit of knowledge on the way to sort of answering John is questioned, Jay hands questions, sorry. I think there's an established one, I'm not going to, I think we shouldn't bash ourselves about they have more knowledge they're more you, you know, it's not about it's not a competition it's not. I think the gig might be is to take the student to the school to take the student to the river to take the student to the place where they learn, they do the learning. I think our job, the way I see it is establishing the rule, showing them the rules not even establishing the rules showing the rules and then you go here, here are some rules. You know them before you break them. Here's my experience of 30 years to show you the rules or 10 years or 20 years. Here are the rules and then, of course, you were you bring your life experience you bring your interest you bring your questions you bring your interrogation, you bring your journey, and you break the rules the way only you can break them. But there's an element of, I wouldn't bash. I don't think we should be all here bashing ourselves that. I think they're still at the role of the pedagogue but the role of the pedagogue is not to do the learning or the, or in fact the teaching. I think, I think it's here is, here's the way to the school and then the kids, the students for the other teachers the other people we work with. I think what I'm saying is that there's not intending to bash myself over the head with that, but I think that there's a tension still between the struggle to find the new relevant by, you know, we've been teaching in the space for all these years and now we're suddenly teaching in this space and how do we make ourselves relevant and that tension on that end. And then, then to do exactly what you're saying on this end but also I'm, I doubt myself sometimes about what am I listening for with the new students with the students coming in right now every batch and this last digital medium batch that we've had because this medium tends to heighten the word and the thought and the intellect. They are more woke than I've ever seen and dealt with before to use a different kind of terminology of very loosely but catching up or keeping up with them or wondering if I'm just missing the point when I'm in a room with them. It's very it's a very prevalent sort of fear and thought and so I think my question was really how do I listen for how do I listen to enhance or hold the space for them to do their learning, you know, do I am I even like am I walking in their room holding and with the earmuffs on is the fear. I think you show them more in your candor about how you're listening, then you might think that the very fact that you're asking yourself this question. You, I would ask that question out loud with them in the room, because it the metaphor I've always used as a teacher is that I'm the person in the room with the flashlight. I'm not the one who knows anything that you need to know because what I know works for me, and it probably won't work for you, but I have a flashlight. The reason you gave me the flashlight is because I've been doing this for a long time. And today, the flashlight, we're going to look at this, this, this, the frame right here, where, where it goes down and across and then we call this a perpendicular. And, and so, you know today we're looking at perpendicular and now you tell me what you see there, and the conversation, but by virtue of the fact that you're asking. The question is such a different paradigm than I went to school and I did not go to school where people ask questions. I went to school where people told answers, and that I was to learn those answers and then I would be doing the right thing in school. And, and I think that that what we are finding and with my more woke colleagues of whom I consider you guys particularly Amy because I know her so well. And Norman, because I know him. I know people who are showing students that we don't know, and that in fact, it's not about knowing it's about preparing yourself for the investigation. And that we're not, we're not imparting knowledge. The way it used to be, we are, we are equipping ourselves with with the Jerry rigging elements of a MacGyver to go in and discover what we're supposed to go looking at. I think it's very interesting because we started talking about sort of, you know, what are the, what are the topics in a sense of, and then the now we're sort of wondering what it is to teach at all. But I just, I just wonder if implicit in gaining and when you're your, your, your interest, it seems that that this mode of asking a question that might be implicitly the methodology that you use I'm just wondering, because if you're using it as a as a way to find identity and, and transcendence a way to apply, I mean, these seem to be implicitly investigations rather than information being delivered by teachers to, to, to, you know, silent students and I think we were probably at this point talking about method to this sort of between topic and method is that is that sort of what's going on with like 100%. I absolutely agree. I think that is the trick is to, or certainly that's that's my own investment, my interest is in is not necessarily in coming in and offering my expertise in order to do the answers, but to frame and model ways of engaging in conversation and recognizing that that conversation is genitive, it yields things. There may be things that aren't necessarily useful to me in my professional position, but the act of conversing and listening to and with each other. I think is is the beginning point for recognizing that we all have capacity to make knowledge in a particular way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We just, sorry, we just have a couple of minutes and Israel, you've raised your hand please speak out your question you had or your comment you had earlier posted in the chat. Sorry, my video itself because of the bandwidth. I hope you can hear me. Yeah, my thoughts really it's probably starting from where Daniel mentioned about about being present in the class or in the rehearsal as it where where is the position of the teacher at that point. You know, it's in front of them behind them, because that again sort of changes the narrative or the conversation or the class dynamics because if you're going to be giving answers or giving questions, the position of the teacher is actually sort of like if it's an around table or a long table. So how does that fit in. That's that's one for instance, you know, just about voicing earlier on my concern really is about how we, we see voicing from the Western perspective, not thinking probably like J hand made body is there an African body and Nigerian body as it were. He wrote to me sort of try to rearrange that in some of his plays so you take a word like EH for instance, and you could make a conversation out of that. It depends on how you, you put your stress button but but but the audience can understand what he's saying what the actors are saying on stage so it's just one word EH and then they just play with it and and begin to get some dialogue some out of out of the chairs. Marvellous. Thank you. Thank you. That's really wonderful example and demonstration. And I would love to keep on riffing. I am tasked with creating a hard stop. And so I shall do that and then invite everybody to just stick around because nobody disappears it just we just, it turns into kind of, you know, water cooler type situation so thank you so much for coming to this first session of our second season and really looking forward to next Thursday's session with me. We will be moving to you and you will be. No, sorry, is that correct. Apologies. My heart almost jumped up. I'm not ready. I'm not ready. I'm not ready. I didn't have my notes. So when we will be jumping to please, Jim, can I just have one more minute because I want her to please introduce. Anya, please tell us your, your, your, your, who will be your interlocutor and what will be the topic. Sure, quick, briefly. I will be in, will be in conversation with a woman named Ndoni Kanyle, who is actually a close friend and colleague of mine who also studied at UCT and she is a poet and a writer and has moved in really interesting ways into coaching and facilitation work. And so we are, yeah, we'll be speaking to her about her, her career journey and the kinds of choices that she has made along the way. Wonderful. And what time Cape Town will it be? 10am Cape Town. Work it out for yourselves. 10am Cape Town. That's all that's what I know. The DSM team will, the DSM team will help you all figure it out. But we mean it when we want to say coming to a time zone near you we mean it. It'll be morning in London and Europe and it will be. So we have the three time zones just very quickly. And the three time bands are when America sleeps, when Australia sleeps, when India sleeps. And as you can say when India sleeps and we're all here. So these are the, these are the three time, the general time bands. As Amy said, it's a movable feast. If you love it, you'll just keep up and catch up and come find it. It's like that traveling surface that pops up in the middle of the forest sometimes and people who hunt after the current. Okay. But if you missed the talk, they're all on HowlRound. Right now, just, I think we can say thank you to Amy for helming the first one and showing our new curators and how it all works by running them through it. Thank you all for coming here and being part of the season two premiere. It really means it and so good to see so many faces back in and new people from Edna Manley College. I want to know where Elizabeth is as well. So I can't wait to have all of you back. And we will broaden our scope and we will, we will broaden our group of people who show up. So I really, in terms of interlocutors in America's and all of that, as we find our feet in this new format, but just keep coming. And literally the next day, the talk is there live for recording in case you miss it with some highlights in there and of course four or five. A couple of weeks later, the full reported piece comes up and everything can be found on the website. And it's really great that you're all here. At this point we formally end the recording. So.