 Welcome to Prairie Loop 2018. This is the toast. This is where we celebrate the beginning of Prairie Loop. I hope all of you know that Prairie Loop isn't just today, it's today, tomorrow, and with a great victory, Prairie Loop is now on Saturday. So, Showcancer is going to be here tomorrow. Beautiful. How about Saturday? Wonderful. Take a look at the books, take a look at the tablets outside, and if you want, grab any of us. You can grab me and say, what should I be seeing? Because there's a lot. But I could think of no better way to start Prairie Loop than to turn to one of my most favorite artists and cherished collaborators, Captain Hamilton and her amazing company, Sister Sylvester, who is going to lead us through a performative toast to Prairie Loop, which gestures toward her next project. And I'm going to get out of your way with that, Captain Hamilton. Thank you. I'm going to give you some cocktails that you will shortly be drinking. This is Jude and Mike setting up some drums and pots and pans, which they will shortly be playing. And this is Correct Forensics. So we wanted to initiate, we thought we could initiate a new genre of theater here tonight. We're not quite sure about the main yet. We're going with either genetically modified theater or transgenic theater. Tonight's performance is going to take place in your small intestine, and it'll be a trio between you, a dead German soldier. This is actually Kurt Gable, but it was the best picture I could find. And a phosphorescing jellyfish. So that'll be the performance. We get to that. Andrew asked me to give you a little bit of context, kind of studio visit style, and just mention a couple of the other pieces we've done as a company to ground you in what this all is about. So very, very briefly, one piece I want to mention is called The Mades, The Mades. And this was a piece that we did at Abrans Art Center, and we had Jean-Germain's The Mades, reinterpreted by housekeepers, actually working housekeepers in New York City. And I bring this up because it's something we've done with other pieces as well, where we bring classic theater texts into collision with the real life that they represent. And that's definitely something that we're doing in Correct Forensics. Another piece we did recently, with Andrew, is called The Fall. It's a lecture performance, and I bring it up for two reasons. Well, it's about a film that caused a revolution. And I bring it up for two reasons. One, as you can see here, it has a chicken in it. We've used non-human actors in quite a lot of our pieces. We've had chickens, dogs, fish, tortoises. And now in this piece we have bacteria. And the second reason I bring this piece up is that we work a lot with research. So we do very intensive research-based pieces. This one was a particularly kind of journalistic piece. I spent a year and a half interviewing people, following leads, to try and track down this story of a film that had caused a revolution. Other work has been more archive-based, and this particular piece is science-based. We're looking for ways to share research as we go along, and what you're going to see tonight is one of those. It's our attempt to share some of the research of this piece with you before we're actually ready to perform this piece. So, Correct Forensics. This piece began, or the idea for this piece began, exactly one year ago. I was in Berlin for the first time. You can see me here very excited to be sitting next to a statue of Brett. And topping my list was to visit the Berliner Ensemble. So I go to the Berliner Ensemble, and it's about 11am, and the whole place is shut. The doors are locked. There's flyers like this one, which say a duet farewell, it's all over, it's the end. And I was quite confused, and I did a quick Google on my phone, and I found out that the previous night had been a closing night party for this iteration of the Berliner Ensemble. There had been numerous conflicts over the Brett estate, and whether they should continue to do historically accurate re-enactments of Brett plays, or whether they should innovate. And that had come to a head, and the previous night the theater closed its doors, and everyone was loading everything out, and someone new was going to take over. So I decided I would creep around and see what I could see. And what I found was, around the back of the theater, there was a group of technicians. It was 11am, and they were drinking beer, and they just finished their final shift in the theater. They were all losing their jobs. They finished loading everything out from the party, and they were having one final beer together to say goodbye. They were literally lurking around in the corner, and they asked what I was doing. And I said, you know, I just got to Berlin, and I just wanted to see this theater. And one of the technicians said, well, it's your lucky day, because I've got the keys. And so he opened the theater up, and he took me on this tour from the basement of the theater underneath that revolving stage, where the revolving stage still goes around using old Russian tank wheels. Because they built that theater out of the rubble at the end of the Second World War, so there's still Russian tank wheels that make that stage go round. He took me all the way up to the top, to Brett's office, to backstage. The genuine knots of flags, the craziness that is that theater. And, oh, and then he also let me pull my The Courage's card. Wow. I got incredibly excited about it. Can we do the next slide? Yeah, that's it. That's me pulling the card. These are the three technicians at the back. And one of them started to get a little bit tearful. He started to get a little bit sad. He said, you know, no one cares about this anymore. This stuff is all, you know, no one cares about the history. And he picked up a hat, and he said, for example, this hat. This hat was used in Mother Courage, since the first production of Mother Courage at the Berlin Ensemble. And this hat, Brett said it could never be washed, because he wanted it to stink like the war at the end of that play. And no one cares anymore. And then he looks at me, and he goes, you obviously care. You take it. Put it under your jacket. Take it. So I took the hat, I put it on my jacket, and I went. And this is this hat revolved around the table in front of you right now. So who knows Mother Courage? Yeah. A few people? Okay, so Mother Courage is a really beautiful play. It's about, it's set during the bloody war, and Mother Courage is, she has a cart that she pulls, and she's selling wares. She's profiting off the war, but over the course of the play each of her children are killed in different circumstances by the war. And the actor, who would have won this hat, played soldier number two. Now soldier number two, I can read you the entirety of soldier number two's part. He says, colonel's frothing at the mouth, sir. We're all up for court martial. And then he has one action, which is to shoot to the trim. And that's it. That's the entirety of the part. And so I was wondering what to do with this hat. You know, I have this hat. It's not been washed since 1948. It's still happened to people who have interacted with it. What can I do? And so I thought maybe I can sample the DNA from that and maybe I can find out some things about these people who wore the hat. The problem with that was that I had not been in a science lab since I was 16 years old. So I went to a wonderful space called Gen Space, which is a biohacker community lab down in Sunset Park. And I took a couple of classes and partnered with a scientist and we began to do DNA extraction on the hat. And what I want to show you now here is a very basic DNA extraction. Okay? So, everybody's scientific in the house. Okay, a few. So if I make a mistake. So I'm going to extract DNA, not from humans right now, but from strawberries. Why are we going to extract DNA from strawberries? Well, where humans have two strands of DNA, strawberries have eight, they're octoploids. So there's an enormous amount of DNA in these things. And so it's possible for us to do it actually here, not in a lab, and for you to be able to see the DNA with the naked eye. As a side note, that's one of my favorite things about microbiology is you can't actually see anything you're working with. You can just see it by its effects. But here we're actually going to have enough of it clumped together that we will be able to see it. So we take these strawberries and freeze them. And we freeze them because the ice acts as little daggers and it cuts through the cell walls so we break open the cells. Then we're going to add pineapple juice. And we add pineapple juice because it contains an enzyme named bromelain which splits the chromosomes and allows the DNA to flow free. So this mixture up, we freeze that DNA and then we take a coffee filter and we strain the mixture. And now DNA has a negative charge and the water has a positive charge. And so the DNA will actually follow the water through this filter and collect down here. This takes a little while so we have one minute earlier. This is the strained strawberry and pineapple. And what we're going to do now is we're going to take some alcohol. It has to be more than 70% proof. This is 121% rum so it should do the job. And we pour it. Very gently to this. And then you can see... Can you see? I'll move on to one we made earlier. In this one you can see that the alcohol is sitting there on top of the filter. And now it's drawing up the DNA into the alcohol and the DNA is clumping together because of its weak polarity. And you can see these stringy bits floating around in the alcohol here. You'll be able to come up and look at this later as well. But that's actually strawberry DNA floating around in this beaker right now. So here we've extracted DNA from strawberries. So then you might ask, what can we do with this DNA? We did a similar procedure on the hat. And we did actually find DNA. We've got two hits. We've got one from the inside of the hat there and one from just underneath the lining of the hat. So the first thing you can do with this is we could actually take this DNA that we have in here and we could send it to the lab to be sequenced. And we would get back from the lab an actual sequence of this DNA. So that's all we did with the cart with these two pieces of DNA here. We sent them to the lab and we got back some mitochondrial DNA results. So we chose mitochondrial DNA because it's one of the easiest to extract. It tells us where it's matrilineal, which I love for mother courage because in this scene Katrina's killed and so that is the image of mother courage as matrilineal line. This piece of code that she's had in her body or her female ancestors had in that body for 50,000 more years is coming to an end in this very scene. And so mitochondrial DNA we thought we were looking at we found one is half the group H and the other is half the group K. And so I've nicknamed them Carl and Herman. And so what else can we do? Well this is just the beginning of our research. We can quite easily find out things like gender. I'm assuming that they're both men because it's from the inside of the hat and the actor playing this part would have been a man. My hypothesis is that on the surface of the hat we might find other DNA from other people in the theatre. Brett, Brett's made up with this on the side one of these might be Brett. My hypothesis is Brett might be on the outside of the hat if he was handling it. So we can find out gender, we can find out really wild stuff like did Herman have the tendency towards insomnia or maybe Carl was genetically predisposed to have a monobrow. So there's some amazing things we can find out and I'm interested in this as well because of course right now we're dealing with a lot to do with the use of DNA in forensics and crime solving and it's pretty fascinating once you get into it to know that these things are so highly speculative like the fact that Lisa using the DNA people don't understand it well enough and they think that okay great DNA is going to solve the crime when you get into it actually these things are just hypothesis seeds and people are being convicted on the basis of pure hypothesis. So we can do all of that. Something else which is kind of amazing that we can do with this is that we could take this line that soldier number two says we could translate that into the 80s season G's of genetic code and we could actually make a string of DNA that corresponds to this line and then we could figure out whether that particular string of DNA might secrete like code for colored protein or code for another action and put it inside a bacteria so that that bacteria is actually speaking the line of soldier number two. We can translate in the other direction as well and we have when I first got Herman's results I sent him to two really dear friends over here Mike and Jude who were percussionists and I was thinking about Katrina's drum in that scene and I thought wouldn't it be kind of amazing to turn Herman's DNA into a percussion piece and they've done that and they will play it for you momentarily. One other thing that we've done is create transgenic theater here on this little dish. Well, so first of all here's Herman and Carl's actual DNA in this bottle. This is about to go into your cocktails. And this is Herman and Carl on a rotating Berliner ensemble stage and we have inserted their DNA into a plasmid and we also inserted the DNA from the jellyfish which secretes a fluorescent protein. So this is now a transgenic bacteria jellyfish German. And of course this becomes its own theater because we have Carl and Herman here and for the moment they're going to get along really well. They're going to grow on this dish and over time as resources become scarce much like in the Thirty Year War that Mother Pirate was based on these two will begin to compete for resources. And so we may leave this here over the course of time and you'll can check in and see how the drama between Carl and Herman is playing out for the next couple of days. So the final thing that we can do with this DNA and that we're going to do right now is turn it into a cocktail. So we're going to take all of our science I'll leave that on there so you can see the DNA floating. I'll take this one. We're going to take all of our science over to Jacqueline here and now over here the wonderful people at Onewood Distillery which is a local distillery have made us specific cocktails for Herman and for Carl based on potential characteristics of these two people. And so we're going to make you right now a Herman. Yeah? So Herman, you take a shake with us. We pour in all of our science. We add a little acryl and what else? Check them out. Go out of your spirit. Go out of your spirit and acryl and then turn this to Jacqueline and she shakes it up. And while you're doing that I'm going to take... So here's Herman. This is now a transgenic cocktail. There's a strawberry DNA fix as well. We've also got a Carl. A Carl involves... That was Carl. The Herman involves gin, absinthe, soda, lime zest and some H2A1 Herman DNA and so the Carl all these cherries are preinfused with Carl's DNA and all of these sugar cubes here are infused with Herman's DNA. So as you come and get your cocktails and we drop these in, as I said this performance is going to take place in your small intestine. So over the course of the evening you will be doing a duet with Carl or Herman. So in just a second I'm going to invite you to come up and get some drinks. Once everyone has a drink we're going to do a toast to this fabulous festival and then Jude and Mike will play you Herman and after that I invite you to stay. There's plenty to drink. Stay, chat, come and look at the science. Ask us any questions. Enjoy yourself until the next performance. So I'll hand it. One last thing I wanted to say was that I think this idea that the fact that this DNA is going to go into your small intestine it's going to be broken down and those amino acids are going to be reused by your body to build your own proteins. So you are very literally taking in Carl and taking in Herman. And I think in terms of theatre and performance and these two actors I think it's a very unique gesture. So on that note I'm going to pass it to Andrew. Do we want to have everyone get their drinks? Oh yes of course. Everyone come and get your drinks and then we're going to do a toast. How are you? I'm good, how are you? Andrew, right? I'm good. I'm good. The person who got the drinks is also I mean it. This is so awesome. I'm so happy you're doing this. I'm so proud of you. I'm so proud of you. I'm so proud of you. There's so much puppeteer that we can get. It sounds like they don't have to have the one you want. It takes 24 hours. It's only a few hours. So we don't have to like, like we're excited. We bring the other ones. Oh good. No, of course. Thank you. That's your match. Oh my god. It was supposed to be an axis. It was the one guy that voted for Gabba was it? The Ark, the Ark, you weren't going to say? The Ark, the Ark, you weren't going to say? Say it went bold. Yeah. I'm going to grab that cup. Oh, I thought we were going to have a drink. Yeah. I'm going to grab that cup. I'm going to grab that cup. I'm going to grab that cup. What is it? He ate something. It was amazing. My mind is in focus. Well, I'm glad. Is that your back pain? I think it's going to be heavy. Yeah, it's going to fall backwards. Drink of the metal. So, you guys are shooting, are you filming? Someone's gotay. passenger You're worried about the DNA? Raise your hands if you don't have a drink in hand. We have one, two, three. So first I'll say right down here there are chocolates, which are provided by obsessive-impulsive-chocolate disorder, which is actually owned by chocolatier Sebastian Brecht, who is a virtual Brecht's grandson, and also a wonderful generous person to have brought his beautiful chocolates. They have hazelnut in them, so if you have an allergy, please be aware of that. Yeah, Crossroads of the Lama, so part of our family. So thank you so much for that. Thank you so much, I appreciate it. And with that, do you want to consider it? Let's raise a glass to the 2018 Brecht group. Thank you all so much for coming to the apartment. Thank you, Sister Sylvester.