 Welcome everybody back here to the Martin East Eagle Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY in Manhattan in Midtown. It's again a beautiful day. We having a fantastic week when it comes to weather is over 20 degrees here. People are out and and the city is full and with people. We had sad news here in the New York theater world the great under the radar festival that's happening in January that brought people together globally internationally. It looks like that's taking a time out for financial reasons if I understand right. A great hit in the stomach I think for New York theater experimental theater so much happens in festivals. And we hope this will be just temporarily and maybe perhaps you know one day there will be a summer festival possible or think about we are trying to work on that but it's been a great contribution the festival did and as someone said I think Bob Wilson and as big play you know a tree is best measured when it's down. Sometimes one only knows the greatness of something when it's no longer there or has been has been cut. With us today we have a special guest in our exploration of international global work for this theater for performances of new forms for the new times we live in this mantra that we always had brach said that new times do need new forms of theater and we need innovations we need to look with different fresh eyes especially after the time of corona. The time of COVID and with us today we have Andy field, a great worker from the UK and carry that switch, a good friend of the center called and wrote that Frank you have to talk to Andy field. And we always often take series with our friends and collaborators say so we reached out to Andy so Andy here you are with us. How are you and where are you. Here I am. Yeah. Thank you very much for having me. I am currently in London, the beautiful city of London. It is, much like in New York it's been about with 530 now but it's been a beautiful day here the sun has been shining. People have been out on the park. For people who know London, I am in the east end of London just by the corner of a beautiful Park called Victoria Park in my in my small apartment by live. And yeah, all is good here really looking forward to talking with you. Great, it's about 530 in the afternoon I think. So let me tell you a little bit about Andy and he feel is an artist writer and curator and he's based as he said in London. And his performances went around the world and he especially has this idea to create encounters between strangers. It is that he's the co director of the award-winning forest fringe festival we're going to talk about this too, and a regular contributor to publications including the great guardian newspaper encounterism, as he calls it is an interesting word very beautiful word actually is a playful analytic and poetic exploration of the delight and transformative power of real life encounter. So Andy, tell us a little bit. What does it mean? What does it really mean? Encounterism. Yes, so I suppose my interest in human encounters extends back many, many, many years into my work as an artist. And this book in some ways is a combination of the work I've been doing over the last 10 years in making art, art making and theater making. And in some ways it's a complete departure. So the word encounterism, what I wanted to do was to invite people to pay attention to these kind of very ordinary everyday human encounters with the kind of concentration that I suppose we normally reserve for subjects that have an organism on the end of them, you know. And so I think it's sort of just a little playful way of inviting people to think about the encounter as a form, as a maybe as an artistic form as a social form, as a kind of phenomenon that exists within our lives, and that perhaps is often too often overlooked. And that's really what the book does is it tries to kind of really drill down into these sort of everyday human events. Show us the cover, maybe hold it up, you know, it just came out, right? So in fact, what I can do, I mean, I don't know if this is of interest to anybody other than people who work in publishing, but this is the US and this is the British, the UK. So in the US, this is the one that people will be looking out for. You published it for you in the US, what's it called? Norton. Norton, right. I was going to read sort of to follow up your question. So just at the very front, I've put this quote from George Perrec, which is how should we take account of question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day. The banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infraordinary, the background noise, the habitual to question the habitual, but that's just it. We're habituated to it. So that that that I thought that was a nice way of starting the book, because that's my, that's what I'm attempting to do in this book encounterism and, and through this kind of focus on the, the everyday encounter is to to drill down into the the everyday habitual and render it in a in primary colors to hold it up to the light and offer people the opportunity to examine it. So give us an example. Let's say I go into a barber shop. That's an encounter. I have the or is that you create a barber shop and then someone walks in by these and tell us a little bit. What's your idea what what's the difference. What how do you highlight it and how is it. That's a good question. So I look, I so when I say that the book is kind of both a kind of combination of the work I've done and a departure from it. What I mean is, I suppose that so my work as an artist over the last 10, 15 years has taken lots and lots of different forms. And for a long time, I, I kind of wondered what, what the hell I was doing with my life, like, I would sort of doing these very what felt like very disparate things. For a while, I was making kind of street games, and of these these kind of games for adults to play out on the streets of their cities. What game do I created a game called checkpoint that was probably the one that was most popular and that people ended up making versions of that all over the world and the aim of that game was that I would build a living room installation on one in one area. And then all the players of the game would have to smuggle that deconstruct that living room and smuggle it piece by piece, past a team of border guards like paid performers. And reconstruct it on the other, other side of this, the area where the game is being played. So for example, if the game was being played in a, in a city square, it might be that the installation is hidden on one side street. And you have to deconstruct it and smuggle it piece by piece across the square and reconstruct it on another side street on the other side. And the game. So the way to play the game was to appear as if you weren't playing the game was to look like just an ordinary citizen using this public square to not draw attention, not to, to, in order to not draw attention of the, the border guards who couldn't stop everybody because that would be rude and. And so they were on the lookout for people who looked like that they were participating in this game and the players were trying to do their best to conceal themselves within the kind of everyday fabric of that, that public places life. Around this time I was very interested in the idea of ordinary people playing ordinary people. So, you know, doing these ordinary actions but with a kind of reflexiveness with a kind of. That maybe made you question the kind of the everyday and question the way in which you kind of normally move through those spaces and thinkingly. So that was a, that was a sort of fun game for people to play and there were lots of very, very creative ways in which people attempted to kind of play this game and, you know, some of the things that people were trying to smuggle were very small and easy like, you know, there might be like a dinner plate or something or there might be like a cup on the sideboard, but then you know, sometimes they were really bigger things like a whole TV or a whole chair sofa or carpet that people have then got to figure out a way to try and move without drawing attention to themselves and drawing attention to their participation in the game. So is this these kind of so I started off making these kind of. And people bought a ticket to participate in it or how did how did that work. Often, often this was part of, so this was around about the time in the mid 2000s when this kind of sort of urban playfulness was very popular. And there was lots of, I think that there was in New York there was a group called improv everywhere who did these kind of like some these events that were somewhere between a kind of sort of 60s happening and a kind of prank show and there were flash mobs became very popular at this time and if you remember kind of flash mobs where lots of people would kind of a light on a public square and all like freeze or do like a big pillow fight or something so there was something in the air at that time around this idea of reconnecting us with a playfulness in in in relation to the way that we use public space that maybe public space have become too to pedestrian to to to limited in in how we used it but so a lot of that work. I was doing with a company in the UK called hide and seek, which was won by a wonderful man called Alex Fleetwood and and a brilliant game designer called Holly Gromatzio, and they run this wonderful project called hide and seek and they would kind of, you know, commission people like me to make these kind of street games, and then people would just turn up and get to play them for free, basically. And then quite often, the rules of these games would be kind of shared online and that's often how you ended up finding out that some group of students in California had kind of like read about this game online and they decided to do their own version of it on the other side of the world so it was very kind of very friendly creative commonsie, you know, the sharing of games and rule sets, all over the place and often, you know, yeah, usually free. Why is that more interesting to you then let's say to direct a play by Harold Pinter, Carol Churchill. Yeah, that's a good question. So, on one level, I think, for me at the time I was very young at the time so I'm 39 now so I'm talking about you know when I was in my early to mid 20s, when I was starting to do this, and partly it was because no one was inviting me to come and direct a play in their theater. So I think about, you know, in part it's the kind of expediency of, you know, where are you being invited to do things and I, you know, it was much easier to, to gain invitations to make things happen on sidewalks and in cafes and in, you know, public spaces, then it was to, you know, all of the kind of infrastructure and the resources and support that were required to make a theater show happen. But for, I mean, in relation to that, there's a company that I've worked with a lot in the UK called Action Hero, truly, truly wonderful company who is still going today. And the first very successful show was a show called A Western, where they recreated a cowboy western movie in a, in a cafe. And the reason, you know, and this, the reason that they decided to do it in a cafe in a theater cafe was because no one was inviting them to use the, the actual theater auditorium. And so they thought if they make a show for the cafe, every theater has a cafe, maybe everyone will want to program. And then they had the opportunity to kind of that, that resourcefulness became part of the, part of the grammar of their work, part of the way that they, they made things and they actually toured that show all over the world I think they may have even put it to sort of under the radar but it's certainly been been in the US before that show. And that came about through this moment of resourcefulness so for me partly it was that partly it was, it was a certain resourcefulness wanting to make art wanting to make performance but but not necessarily having the the means or the access. But also, I think that I had grown increasingly drawn to the idea of work that was participatory work that was interactive. I was very excited by things that invited the audience to have a greater degree of physical agency in the work. The thing that really excited me about these games was the degree of not just kind of freedom to move around that you do in say site specific immersive work, but was the freedom to be co creators of the experience through, you know, by providing this this rule set, rather than a script or anything else, you are simply kind of creating the space for the audience members themselves to be creative to do to be really co creators of that, of that experience. And that, at the time was was very exciting to me I was also studying for a PhD and a lot of my PhD was looking at the work of people like Alan Capral. And thinking about, you know, happenings and event scores George Brecht and people like that. And, you know, I was very drawn to the idea of creating these kind of simple structures these simple spaces these simple environments and habitats where where people are invited to to be creative and to renegotiate their relationship to each other and the world around them. Great. Yeah, it's a great addition, as you said, you know, coming out of New York's avant garde in the early half of the second half of the 20th century the car park event. And so, so many others, the cage ideas and governments, you know, performing in everyday connections and others. And it's an important I think contribution that they made us aware of what in visual arts has been a common new approach, you know, to work in theater or performance you know it's still in some way often to this Italian idea the Italian theater that comes from the 17th century. Do you find it more interesting is it more alive for you than a production production. Just to come back very briefly. My one of the things with my PhD was about precisely that was about saying that this so much of that work that work coming out of New York in the 60s and 70s had been kind of its legacy its cultural memory was stored in galleries and so it was this very visually visually orientated form of memory largely taken the form of photographs and videos and things like that. And my PhD one of the things I was trying to do in that was to say, Is there a different form of cultural memory that we can have of this work that re-centres the performance performance itself and re-centres the liveness of this encounter between audience and performer anyway that's a that's a that's a that's a tangent. Do I think I mean, so for me, there is there have always been very excited about the moment where a theater show turns into an event. I suppose, and I am when I used to teach at Royal Holloway in London I created a course that was called unrepeatable performances. And I would always start by saying to the students, you know, do you remember a time in the theater when something went wrong. And I realized invariably everyone remembers a time that something went wrong. And, and they remember it with this incredible clarity and I am one of my formative theater memories when I was first a student and I was first learning to love theater was seeing a production by out of out of joint. The Max Stafford parks did company and they did a production of Macbeth, and it was in these sort of subterranean rooms underneath Edinburgh, where I was studying. And this was an increase was an incredible production of Macbeth it was this kind of voodoo themed Macbeth I think kind of this. Yeah, it was brilliant. But towards the end of the performance, all the lights in the theater went out they were that the performance was taking place in these kind of subterranean spaces beneath the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, and all the lights went out, and like a power cut. Immediately the actors ran around the production team got torches and sort of trying to like things with torches suddenly someone found all these candles from nearby. And they stuck candles out and it all got lit illuminated by candles, the actors carried on, they made like a few sort of side references to it that made everybody laugh and struggled on through until a stage manager came in and said, we have to stop because it's not safe because the fire exit science have also gone out so we have to finish and the actors broke character and they looked kind of disappointed because they struggled on valiantly and we all kind of gave them the big clap and then as we were clapping all the lights came back on again suddenly and everyone looked around that they didn't know what to do the actors didn't know what to do the director didn't know what to do. So they went and had a quick conference out in the hallway, then they came back and said okay we're going to rewind one scene and we're going to carry on from there. And that that that final section of the show was, there was some some quality that it had some quality that of intimacy of the bond that we now shared having seen these these performers, breaking in and out of character, having all navigated this sort of messiness of this journey together, and then returning to the drama to the theater to the make believe it was absolutely charged it was like no other and maybe it was also partly the space that we were in but it was like nothing else I'd ever experienced in a theater. It was phenomenal. And at the end, they had this incredible drumming sort of sequence at the end and it was, the whole space was vibrating. And I remember the biggest round of applause at the end and the actors also look absolutely delighted. And it was that thing and Tim Hatch was wonderful Tim Hatch was from forced entertainment has talked about this. That moment when the theater turns into an event, and nobody's quite sure where it's going. And that is, is there's something thrilling about that there's something truly exciting and potentially dangerous and uncertain and transformative about that and it feels really where the boundaries between the real and the make believe begin to kind of bleed into each other, and the theater's transformative power seems to have the potential to kind of wreak havoc in the real world. And that was what excited me. I suppose that's what excited me and that's what still excites me and I think for for a while, I kind of drifted further and further into saying where we're into this idea of blurring the real and the everyday and art and life as some as I look at pal said. And. And yeah so you know for a while that was that was that was that was the thing that truly excited me and you know I've made a journey back as a as a viewer as a watcher. I've made the journey back and now you know I'll go and see a traditional theater show and sit there quite quite happily want to sit in the audience and have absolutely no involvement. And love it I recently saw the Oklahoma that came over from the US to the UK. It was wonderful it was wonderful and and you know I think maybe now I have a slightly more nuanced sense of theaters power and the power of the power of being and how active you can be as a spectator. I think, when I was younger I would maybe be quite dismissive of what it meant to sit in the dark in silence and do nothing and I think maybe that was a certain. Maybe childishness, you know, or the the impetuousness of the kind of fresh convert. But now I think you know there are lots of different forms that kind of agency and activity and active listening can take. But yeah I think that's where I that's where I was drawn to that kind of work. Yeah, we just talked to you to your bar bar the great bar bar last week and he did say it's all about multiplicity, you know have things next to each other it's never about this or that right or wrong. He says your things exists next to each other and in like in a museum where you see artwork from different centuries, you know next to each other and it works, you know and there's a lot of admiration inspiration it's all movement. So in a way you mix your experience as a city watcher as a city tweler as a performer. And to create some kind of a hyper real sense of the reality we live in I mean they have big theories it's all a simulation, you know and anyway, so you're trying to look at the matrix and play with it. So you like these kind of creative connections and you wrote in walking hand in hand with strangers knocking on doors staging encounters in parked cars so tell us a little bit. Yeah, so, um, as I said, I've always had a sort of fascination with the idea of offering, offering ordinary people the opportunity to pretend to be ordinary people to create that that sort of that freeze on of creativity within our everyday lives that enables us to to kind of pay attention to play closer attention to to the everyday. You mentioned John Cage earlier on, and he's been a big source of inspiration I suppose, and that that, you know that that thing that he's doing in the silent piece in 433, which is not about silence at all really but is about listening, and is about listening to the world with the concentration we normally give to music. And I've always liked the idea to say for the audience members who don't know it's like maybe a concert piece right and the orchestra is fully and doesn't perform tell you. Yeah, so 433 is is is is I think one of the maybe the most important. Maybe the most important artwork of the 20th century, I'm going to be really bold and I'm going to say that. I don't know if that's true but why not say it. Maybe the most important for me at least and 433 is a piece in three parts, where it's a it's a it's a musical composition in which there is no plane. So, at the beginning of make sure I get this right it's four minutes and 33 seconds of silence or that's what it's described as. The concert pianist at the beginning of each movement just closes the lid of the piano and waits for the correct length of time, and then at the end of that section, it stops and then it begins again. People call it the silent piece. But as I said, I don't think that cage never intended it to be experienced in kind of solemn silence. And he, yeah, I think that there's someone once asked him, for example, about listening to four minutes, 433 on a record player like what does it mean to listen. Can you have a recording of it of silence and he said, well, yes, as long as you recognize that all the sounds between the speaker of the record, the speaker of the record player and your own ear, and now also part of the composition. And so, you know, it was as part of his, his, you know, his movement into sort of chance and uncertainty and sort of composing with the composing with the ears of the audience, I suppose is what what he's doing there, and or inviting you to like listen to the kind of concentration. I would say listen, but also create encounters or tell us a little bit what do you know does it work with the dog walker chats or two videos or what all that tell us a little bit what you do. So, so, so it's probably worth this point separating out the book from my making. Yeah, to come back to what I was saying right at the beginning. So the book is a combination in some ways in that like all the work I've been doing has been thinking about encounters thinking about everyday experiences. And this, but always, or usually in the realm of art in the realm of theater, and I can I'll talk about one example of that in just a second when you mentioned encounters in park cars. But the book itself this book is actually in some ways the complete opposite of that. So rather than being about constructed events constructed performances that the mimic everyday life or the borrow from everyday life. The book is using this kind of lens that I hope that I've owned over the last little while to look at. To look at ordinary life basically. So the things that I'm describing in the book are not created events they're not art pieces, they are just normal everyday encounters so whether it be going to get one's haircut or going for a walk in the park or going to the movies or going clubbing in a in a in a nightclub. What I'm doing is trying to pay attention to and write about and this sort of deconstruct those events with the kind of care and with the kind of care that I would normally use it when I'm writing about or thinking about and thinking about life performance theater so there's a chapter for example about the first chapter in the book is about getting getting your hair cut going to get a haircut and in it, I describe myself going to get a haircut like an actual haircut that I got from my wonderful hairdresser and through writing about that haircut I'm also trying to sort of disentangle the the history of of hairdressing and haircutting and the role that this encounter has played in our society in our lives the role it continues to play today in different communities the role of African American barber shops, the role of you know that the myths that we connect with hair cutting from Samsung and Delilah to the epic Gilgamesh. So, sort of trying to, as I said, take something very ordinary, very banal, a haircut, and think about it in this kind of expanded way and think about everything that it means to us and might mean to us in the hope that the next time that the reader goes for a haircut, they might sort of pay a little bit closer attention to what's happening and might appreciate it or value it in a way that they haven't before that you know, in a way that maybe we've sometimes taken some of these encounters for granted. So that's that's the, that's the, that's the aim of the book. Maybe read us a bit read us a bit as now you have some things prepared. Yeah, I can read you a bit from that that chapter, actually so this is the chapter about. This is the chapter about getting your hair cut so it says the first time a hairdresser washed my hair I thought she might be playing some kind of trick on me. I was 20 years old in a proper hairdresser's rather than a barber shop for possibly the first time. The hairdresser left me at the back of the room with a hot towel over my face and all I could think was that everyone else in the salon customers and staff alike was looking over and laughing. Such care, some people might dismissively call it pampering was uncomfortable to me because I was so unused with. I was used to having my haircut in a room where the boxer Rocky Marciano picture of him was always there to reassure me that nothing on manly was about to take place. Now I think nothing of the fact that my hairdresser Susanna finish is watching my hair by massaging my head the tips of her fingers moving in small circles across my skull. How I love this part now this pampering this little anachronism this gentle vestige of a time when the person who cut your hair might also treat the rest of your ailments lance your boils bleed you if you needed it. Throughout history and across cultures hair cutting has been a service that people at all levels of society could access, which meant that for many people, the care you received there was often the only kind of care available to you outside of your immediate family. The link between hairdressers and surgery goes back nearly 1000 years in 1215 the Roman Catholic Church decreed that it was inappropriate for monks to perform any kind of surgery. And so across Europe, their knowledge and their tools were transferred to local barbers who were considered the most suitable people for this new role, given their familiarity with razor blades and scissors. For the following 500 years in Europe at least most of the medical treatments available to ordinary people were performed by barbers. At a time when learned medical professionals were limited to courts and universities, they provided the closest thing that most ordinary people could get to a regular medical care. In China to traditional street barbers performed essential medical procedures traveling from town to town ringing a bell to announce their arrival. There's a longer section but it's more interesting to talk with you, but you get a sense of the kind of project of the book which is to kind of to take these real human encounters and to analyze them with the kind of sort of careful focus that perhaps in the past I have analyzed theater shows and art performances. So you're asking us to say you know you look your your lens if you sit in the dark rooms of theater and you see that the theater on stage the movements the light the objects to use that skill that set what you have or be being trained to really be in a Zen like in the moment and to experience an encounter. That reflects the theater of life in a way this the, the, the, the stage you know of life of life's a stage. Yeah, that's a really nice way of putting it yeah yeah I think you we bear the great New York baseball player said you know you can observe a lot by watching you know he said and. So, do you think is it kind of a socially engaged art is it a political action what you ask us to do. That's that's an interesting question. And I guess I think that there is certainly a political dimension to the quality of compassion, which is what the books, I suppose, primary theme is that perhaps these encounters that we have that often take place across. These, these live in person encounters that often take place are often are the opportunities that we have to encounter difference, people different to ourselves and experiences other to us and our, our experience of life that that. We're having those kind of encounters that encountering difference in that sense, and through that encounter. Hopefully, generating greater compassion and empathy for people different to ourselves and for people in general, I suppose that is that is to an extent it's a political project, and it is a socially engaged project. But, but it, I, if it is, it's a very. It's a, it's a, it's an open one, I suppose, I, I write this book. I suppose, as I said I write this book as someone who has spent 15 years as a performance maker and as an artist, not as someone who spent 15 years as a social anthropologist or as a kind of, you know, activist for the importance of urban space and there are all these you know wonderful people who do profoundly important things in this in the sphere of, you know, social change and the book is not that that it is hopefully a, you know, a small contribution to the kind of a small contribution and invitation for us to think about our we as individuals position ourselves in relation to the world around us and to the people around us, especially those of us who live in in cities. And in those kind of crucibles where, you know, as Stuart Hall said, you know, cities can dense difference. They are these crucibles of difference in which people are very different economic status very different backgrounds cultural backgrounds are all in, in these very kind of dense and condensed ways, and it creates a lot of friction, it creates a lot of problems. And, but it also creates a lot of opportunity. I hope it creates opportunity for compassion, empathy for understanding for, for, for, for connection, and the book is in its own small way, and attempt to improve our, or enhance our ability to empathize and to connect through playing care over the way that we are encountering. Oh, interesting. And in a way how radical, you know, if you look at the history of theater it started with the gods, you know, we have the Greek gods and they were the kings Shakespeare's kings and it was, you know, military leaders of the good and chiller place and then perhaps it became the merchant class that in the Moliere Moliere place slowly the servants came up and someone someone and someone said, now it's teenagers on the stages. Remini protocol the great German company who said we're going to show the work of the experts of everyday life so they ask people to participate you know she she pop on does that to they bring them on stage. And, and you in a way create a new form after what street theater did the bread and puppet theater that said we don't need a big stage behind us. The street is our scenery, you know we don't need to stage lights we have sunlight. And we perform there. And, but you say, an ordinary interaction in itself when observed right on the right mind can do a work that perhaps a theater play doesn't want to be hope a theater play. It does Timothy Gall of course in museums and also does that when he has talks he says the talk is more important than what you see at the wall the interaction. So it's a radical idea that you say, what if I quote you if I understood right that every day people ordinary people perform themselves an ordinary everyday things without performing perhaps even without being aware of it. But if you observe it if you are in that moment if you are a whist that it can be as enriching as a significant and why I like it is, you know it's a great Tonya Bruguera said why do we go to the castles of Versailles where the slaves lived who were killers who were colonialists you know was done on the blood of slaves in the Caribbean and we observe it you know she said why don't we go into the houses we live in a democracy. What people's lives people's ideas are as important next to it, at least. And I think yours is a contribution. So, give us another example where you said this was a moment when I realized that what did what did you know what is there a moment but he said that now I think this is. I'm going to write a book about it. What was. Just to come back again. It's interesting you say we began with the gods. I wish I could remember who is I think it was a speech by Jeremy Miller. But anyway, there's a wonderful cabaret artist called Dickie bow in the UK who has a show on if anyone is in the UK moment to show at the Hampstead Theatre and will remember me just truly wonderful show he's a lip-syncher he's the maybe the most miraculous lip-syncher that you've ever seen and makes these wonderful shows. He made it he made a video once that was a lip-syncing of a speech and I think it was by Jeremy Miller but that could be completely wrong, where he talks about ancient Greece, and says that you know the theater was the accompaniment to the, the, the forum where the, you know, the ancient Greeks would gather to, you know, to discuss democracy but obviously famously the only people that really participated in Athenian democracy were the, were the, were the men, the, the soldiers here coming back. But in the theater, those people went to listen and the people that they were often listening to were women and slaves they may not have been played by those people but the voices that were summoned through the theater were both the voices of Dionysus but they were also the voices of, they were voices of women, they were voices of slaves, they were voices of servants who are and that actually from the very beginning perhaps theater has also played this role of inviting people to listen to the ordinary, listen to the everyday as part of the necessary and inherent work of democracy. But anyway that was just a thought that popped into my head. But yeah, another, another instance of when I, I thought about this, I mean I was also thinking as you were talking there and listing off all those people who have, yes, absolutely been enormous influences in my life, Rimini protocol, 100%. In fact I mentioned Rimini in this book. There's a section talking about telephone calls, and I mentioned the Calcutta in a box and talk about that piece there. And as you, as you were talking I was just thinking about a really important thing I think for me was, there was again the work of forced entertainment has been really important. The piece that they made, which maybe was the most important piece of art in my life that I never got to see. There were local nights in the city, which they made in 1997, which I was, I was, and now I was 13 years old in 1997, and I was not living in Sheffield so I didn't get to see this particular piece. But it's kind of haunted. It, it, I think everything that I've done since I read about it the first time has been in some ways, a kind of attempt to recreate the idea of that piece that I had in my head. Tell about the idea, tell about the piece. So the piece nights in the city is a was a coach tour through the streets of Sheffield. So you literally you got on a bus you got on a coach, and they drove you through the streets of Sheffield with a tour guide. The tour guide seemed to be kind of drunk, and a bit lost. And they're kind of describing what you see in front of you but they're also describing something else. And it's this sort of beautiful idea that there's in them in this in the forced entertainment book certain fragments this one in this book, there's a, they, they, Tim writes about this show nights in the city, and he said something that's always really stuck with me, which is like, sometimes, I'll just leave it there. Sometimes, all you need to do is point out of the window or gesture out of the window and invite people to look. That in itself is is enough that that is the, that is the performance that invitation to look is enough. And I think that's been that just that one sentence has held such value for me in my life in fact a piece that maybe the piece of work that I've done the most often is a show called look out which my partner Becky and I make and have done now versions of maybe 20 or 30 times in different parts of the world. And that piece is just, we collaborate with a group of local children nine or 10 year old children, and the performance is just happens, it's called look out. The performance just happens somewhere high up on a rooftop or a hill or some building overlooking the city. And it's a one to one performance between one adult audience member or one child performer. And together they look they simply look out at the city together and listen to these recordings that the children have made describing how they think that view will look differently in the future. And then they have a conversation together. And that's all there is to it really it's a conversation informed by this view and informed by this idea of the future. And yeah, that I think all of that that the seed of that idea that seed of that performance and the seed of so much of what this book tries to do and what I try and do my work is that that one line from Tim, about the importance of not telling people what to think, or, you know, telling them what they're looking at, but simply inviting people to look and inviting people to play, pay a close attention that perhaps they wouldn't otherwise. Yeah, that's quite quite something the complexity of a simplicity that Zen like a call for being in the moment attentive and what you say, compassion and care and it is starting to think you know that theater companies with members come on airplanes and tickets and what days lights will set up and to create that encounter but you say well if you pay attention enough it could happen on your coffee shop. It could be in this subway could be in a car a conversation. Ultimately as Peter Brooks said you know what is theater ultimately, you know one person shows something for someone else in a room. That's it. That's the minimum of it and everything else. You know is a larger version of that encounter and that really what it is its movement and encounter that actually what life defines and. And so you know it's a big thing to think about especially for us also think about how does in that new times we live in how does the work performance work how do we experience a city. How do we celebrate it how do we connect to the people live in it. So there is something of real significance in your work in your discoveries. Just for me to know that forest fringe idea. Is that connected already to to this encounter is there something in it tell us a bit, the vessel became well known but I don't know. So, and again I think that comes all the way back to the roots of forest fringe go all the way back to what I was saying earlier on about that, that that desire to find you know that kind of youthful desire to find sort of opportunities for yourself and your, your friends when, when it's so hard to do so you know when, when the, when the funding is tight and when there are not many spaces open to you. Forest fringe was actually started by my wonderful friends Deborah Pearson in 2007. So, in, in, in to that Deborah and I know each other for many years, all the way back to college in Canada, we went to college in Canada together. So we, in around 2007, we were both kind of finishing up MAs in London, and struggling to find opportunities to present the kind of theater that we wanted to present at that time. And this opportunity arose. And Deborah used to, when we lived in Edinburgh, Deborah used to volunteer at this anarchist anarchist vegetarian cafe called the Forest Cafe, which was a legendary institution in Edinburgh, this kind of wonderful chaotic, truly radical and radical institution that used to run a cafe and used to do events. And it was, you know, you could do anything there if you wanted to do it and if you could, you know, if you could persuade enough people to kind of join you in doing it. And they had this cafe in the middle of Edinburgh, and they had this wonderful beautiful dusty old church hall above the cafe that they had access to as an event space. And every summer, the Edinburgh Festival would arrive in town, and I say arrive in town because it was by and large run by big companies from London, who had very little to do with the city of Edinburgh for the rest of the year. So the festival would arrive with, you know, this huge scale and very, very kind of commercial festival and they didn't really know what to do with this festival suddenly appearing around them every August. So they invited Deborah, because they knew she was a theatre maker. They invited her to come and run a program of events in the, in this event space during the fringe, as a kind of what we ended up often being called like the fringe of the fringe so it was sort of, we weren't an official part of the Edinburgh fringe, but you know, we were doing events, they were completely free anyone could come along. And in that first year in 2007 Deborah invited some range of her friends and other people from the cafe itself come and do do events in this space to try something out the new. They could do it completely for free which was very rare in Edinburgh, and they could do it for just one one night if they wanted to one one, one off event. And I came up and did did did something to the little performance, actually, again, to see it all comes back, the event that I did was an event called exposures, which was a little kind of photo treasure hunt around the city, which was again deeply deeply influenced by that same performance in the city by forced entertainment. So when forced entertainment went to Rotterdam with that show they created this series of questions to ask people as a way of learning about the city. And that became the, the, the inspiration for this show that I made at the forest fringe in the first ever year. It was a success, it went really well that the forest fringe in that first year in 2007. There was, and Deborah and I could really sense that there was real potential in this there was a need for a venue that was at the Edinburgh festival was operating completely as a commercial imperative of the most of the rest of that festival that was doing something experimenting with new forms that was, you know, and much more kind of DIY and, and so forth. So in the following year 2008 and the Forest Cafe invited Deborah to come back and do the program again, and she invited me to come and be a co director with her. And I was working at a popular theater in London at the time called Bassi Art Center and so we got, I managed to persuade them to give us a small amount of funding that helped us pay for some accommodation and a printed program and from that moment on it just grew and grew more than Deborah and I could ever have imagined so over the course of we ran that venue in Edinburgh for 10 years. After a few years another friend of ours era brand, a German artist with era brand, she, she joined us, and she became a third co director, we moved venue for to a larger venue. So we were all on the edge of leaf. And yeah, it over time, what kind of consolidated around these kind of scrappy, not for profit free experimental space was a community I think more than anything else, a community of young enthusiastic performance makers in the UK, who were trying to make more. Yeah. A different kind of performance work. And that was people like action hero who I, who are a company I mentioned earlier on, an artist called Taniel hurry, who is now running the Center for Civil Rights at Bard College in in upstate New York is an incredible artist who's gone on to have enormous success all over the world. She started off. She was a just a recently graduated MA student. She was in a seagull talk here actually she was here. Yeah, we always was getting on the Western. Yeah. Yeah, so she, she, she, she just finished her MA in London. She emailed Deborah and I at the blue and was like, can I come and do something at your venue. And we said, yes, of course you can. Yeah, we love to have you. You sound great. And so she came up about two days before she was due to do a show she said actually I want to do something completely different. I want to use a room downstairs in the basement. And I want to do this show that is about the breakup of my relationship of where I get the audience to be the counselor in a relationship counseling session. It was, it was fantastic. And it was something that that was the kind of spirit of forest fringe at the time was like you, we are trying to provide this space we're trying to host this space for artists to use in whatever way suits them and for them to be able to have the opportunity to take risks in an environment like Edinburgh where there's lots of potential, there's lots of economic economically it's very expensive but there's also lots of potential rewards in terms of the number of programmers that are there the number of journalists and the number of artists you might be able to connect with. So our philosophy was always if we can try and eliminate the financial risk to the greatest extent possible by providing people with accommodation, providing people with the space for free, providing people with allowing people to do very limited runs one or two performances rather than a whole month by eliminating that financial risk, we can encourage people to take much greater artistic risks. And that that was the, that was the spirit of that that place and it was, it was a, it was really exciting thing to do and I think that a lot of I met Tim etchels and the wonderful people forced entertainment through that they were big supporters from early on. Tim did a number of projects with us, forced entertainment in the end came up and did quizula with us as well. In one of the final years. So, it, it was very formative for Deborah and I, I think, running that venue, and we made so many friends but we also learned so much from our peers through observing them, supporting them to kind of take risks and present present work in a different way. And it is one more reason also to look closely at your book and of your suggestions, you know, it comes out of a long experience with the answers very serious artists, and to say you know this is perhaps something we should focus on we should think about what comes to my mind David Levine a great New York artist or theater artist he once created a painting of Monet in the central park. You kind of put the people and costumes as an opinion, but didn't tell anyone. So people would just pass by, you know, and, and see, and, and, and, and see that and I think for you to highlight as I think I once a book from architects, they said you know, I'm normally their city guides but to go what museum and what buildings and they would say go to the 86th Street to the playground and see where the nannies who are hired from Latin America take care of kids, you know, from people who live there, watch that go to the Grand Central train station when the last trains leave every evening one or two people will miss their train and have a tantrum and throw their briefcases on the floor because it means they have to spend a night in the hotel or pay $250 for a taxi, you know, and, and many things go to a game and what look at the people how they come to a game at their faces, what they addressed, you know the hope that the atmosphere and I think it's a, it's a great, great way to include something in thinking that doesn't come to mind right away when it comes to performance festival ideas. And still, I don't want to let you go away with it without telling us the staged encounters in parked cars and what was. Yeah, yeah. So that was one of the. That was one of the early shows that I made after. So as I said I sort of began by making these games and street games that were really just sets of instructions rule sets and such like. I got a couple of invitations basically went in my youngest younger years, all of the most important and interesting opportunities that were given to me were from this one. Sadly, now lost theater in Glasgow called the arches from a. It was to be run by Jackie Wiley who now runs the National Theatre Scotland and by a programmer called LJ dogs who now runs a really fantastic theater festival in Glasgow called take me somewhere. And they were just so so important to both Deborah and myself in terms of the trust they gave us and the opportunities they gave us and very early on in my career, I think, like 2000. 2008 2009 something like that. And they LJ and Jackie word that their venue was going to be closed for a while for some renovations, and they had some funding to do an offsite season. And they said to me, we would love you to make something for this offsite season, you can do anything you want. It just has to not be in a theater. And I was initially that was too much. It was, I quite liked to be in situations where you are able to kind of respond to a sort of set of limitations or the, you know, the particular kind of textures and dimensions of a space. And so this was sort of almost overwhelming. So I thought, well, what, what, how could I, how could I build myself a space and a set of limitations in a space. And so I thought why it would be great to try and make a show that happens in a parked car. And so I made this piece. I've always loved like for my sins. I've always loved cars since I was a little kid. Which I know is a bad thing to confess to because they're so awful in so many ways and done such damage to the world, but I just always loved them I loved the, I love driving, I love being driven around when I was very little my mom would just drive me around to get me to sleep. I love the excitement of cars and of racing. I love the association that cars have with the Americana and the, you know, this particular version of the American dream American graffiti and, you know, cannonball run and all these kind of, you know, this kind of associations. And so I always loved cars, but I was always fascinated by the extent to which the mythology of the cars lived in my head through motor races and Steve McQueen and, and, you know, whatever else was such a far removed from the banal, quite depressing often quite frustrating experience of actually driving around, and that these two things seem to kind of operate almost other completely dislocated from one another. And the myth, the symbolism of the car and the actual lived experience. I thought it would be great to make a show in a car that is employing this kind of register of mythos and romance, but within this very, very banal setting. The way I sort of decided to do this was through audio so the concept of the piece the piece was called motor vehicle sundown as a sort of direct allusion to the George Brecht piece motor vehicle sundown. And the idea was that you, the idea was that this car was a living museum to the automobile at a time in the far future when cars no longer exist. And as an as a visitor to this museum, you sit inside the car and you put on a set of headphones, and the voice on their headphones describes to you what it must have been like to drive a car. And the descriptions that you hear are these kind of lush romantic sort of string backed rhapsodies on the journey down the open road or the romance at the drive in movie theater or whatever. And that this experience of what you're being told driving is like in your head is so far removed from sitting in this very boring very ordinary English little English car at the top of a multi story car park in Glasgow or wherever else we did it. That this was kind of forcing you to kind of reflect on the relationship between the myth, the romance, the, the notion of the car, and the actual physical object and it's, and it's, it's placing in the world. So that was kind of one element of it and then the other thing was about it using the kind of constraints of the car. And it became this little dance that so the audience came in pairs, and it became this little dance that took place in in the car so you would begin together on the backseat of the car. And then you'd move together to the front seat of the car, and then by the end of the piece one of you is in the front one of you is in the back and so over the course of the piece. So you, the two audience members drift further and further apart, and they begin to experience the piece in very different ways and what they're hearing in their headphones diverges further and further from each other. So this, it was a kind of a little piece of choreography, a little piece of experimental performance, a little experience that you had that was again, I suppose coming, coming back to the book again was about asking you through these kind of through this little choreography through these words that you're listening to in your head through these kind of illusions to their history and romance and, and the myth of the automobile is asking you to pay attention to the act of driving and the act of being in a car in a way that you might not normally. And we actually did that that's, we did this piece we did it in New York, this piece at the Abron's Art Center, and the lovely Jay Wegman was still there. We set the car up on a street just around the corner from a bronze and an audience members got to come and do that and when we were when Jay hosted forest fringe as doing what we used to call like a micro festival so we did a little mini version of forest fringe over at the Abron's Art Center Abron's and that car piece was was part of that was part of it. Yeah. I heard of it. Well, this is fantastic in the way all of this, even if you say, you know, it's a different reaction to your normal work the book and your work. It seems connected. And so highlighting, you know, a new aspect, you know that perhaps should be paid a much more, much more attention to we are coming you know close to the end, maybe you read us. There is a small finishing piece what I'd like to share and as a reflection and and also for the audiences, as always with seagull talk ultimately it's about you are listeners who are there you know how can you listen how can you be in that moment and have an encounterism on your own and to to feel alive to be connected to life to your city and it's a it's a call to all of us and you can also do it without paying the $200 and I'll ask for to see I think there's Steppenwolf production. I go on those student tickets and so there is something there for us in that big world we live in and perhaps closer in a way to democratic ideas and also perhaps as you hint to spiritual ideas of what art and theater is about. Yeah, well interestingly this this this is the chapter that probably comes closest to us sort of trying to explore it as sort of the spiritual aspect. This I'm going to read one short it's about three three or four pages from a section about. And about nightclubbing so in this chapter I break the experience of going clubbing down into a series of movements. The first movement is the journey to the edge of town where the club might be or, or a journey towards an edge, but it might not be the edge of town but it might be a sense of being far away from your lived reality. The second movement is about the queue queuing a later movement is about the joy of the smoking area as this kind of liminal space and the final movement is going home, but this this this section is specifically about about dancing and about music. So it says it's called movement three a succession of repetitive beats. Dancing together might be the oldest way we have of not feeling afraid, a way of keeping it baby and no ability of the world and all the dangers it may or may not contain. At the height of the wet season in Gombe National Park in Tanzania when when when raindrops waterfall from the sky, splattering across low hanging leaves and the forest floor chimpanzees have been observed to strut and sway along to the sound striding across the ground in big loop which in figure eights match in their own furious energy to that of the weather primatologists who study chimpanzees believer our own human dancing might have evolved from this kind of behavior. You covert Tory from Kyoto University for example speculates the animals like chance began making rhythmic patterns of sound as a coping mechanism when faced with loud and overwhelming stimuli in the world around them. There is something wonderful about the idea that music and dance may have originated as a way of coping with the often overwhelming experience of simply being in the world. A means of reflecting and refashioning all the noise and the chaos the riot of a thunderstorm the fury of a stampede, the sudden shock of a rockfall, a way to bundle it all up in sound and dance it into oblivion, dance it into oblivion, dancing until we aren't afraid anymore. And we have been dancing for so long now we have danced through ice ages and migrations through droughts and floods and famines. Through revolutions colonizations we dance through the black death and smallpox and coral cholera. We danced into the machine age, when the way we lived was transformed forever by the power of capital. As philosophers Simone by observe the oscillations and variations of our natural rhythms were supplanted by the clockwork repetition of industrial time. Now, in our vast modern cities it is rarely the sound of rainstorms or stampede that overwhelms us, but rather the sound of so many other people driving cars talking on their phones, shouting arguing fighting working, living right up against one another. More than anything the thing that we learn to be afraid of is each other, and especially of those people identified as different to ourselves as other. This fear is reinforced in particular in big densely populated cities where people from different backgrounds and communities live in intimate proximity to one another. Such places are characterized as especially dangerous hotbeds of violent crime hostility and mutual suspicion. This was especially true in the late 1970s and 80s, when in places like Chicago Manchester and Detroit, the decline of industry and the hollowing out of the inner city helped foster a conception fueled by prejudice and neglect of urban life as perpetually blighted by criminality and violence. It is no coincidence that such cities were the first places where people, especially those marked as other, including people of color and queer people came together to create a new music and a new way of dancing together that reflected and refashioned this new reality. That took our paranoic urban isolation and its relentless machine rhythms and made a new kind of machine music to enable them to cope with cope with it. I just read one last. The 1986 Chicago House song Your Love begins with a simple three note arpeggio synth loop. Tiny pricks of sound descending out of the darkness like rain falling on a still pond. A few seconds later a drum machine erupts snare kick drum and a barely perceptible high hat combined to create a propulsive beat that you feel as a snap in your shoulders. It's characterized immediately by a sparse bass synth loop that carves itself a hole in your chest and takes up residence there. This song isn't so much moving forward as orbit in accumulating new textures new rhythms new feelings as it does so. Then, at about the one minute mark a single sustained string note unfurls like a fog bank, wrapping itself around the first three sounds, binding everything together. There are a number of versions of this song, each combining these four elements in a slightly different way, but everyone I've heard begins with that initial three note line looping and looping insistently unchangingly a rippling repetitive pulsing beat that cannot be denied. Because the thing you may not notice about your love as it soaks through your skin is that the initial three note synth line is in a completely different time signature to the rest of the song, meaning it is constantly changing the repetition in relation to the other elements of the track, twisting itself around those repetitive repetitive machine beats like an act of seduction. In this music repetition becomes a texture rather than a condition. It bends and dips and unfurls, it pauses and recommences, it moves in wondrous ways, and the dancers move along with it. This machine music transformed the deadening cadence of mechanical repetition into something vibrant, sensuous and alive. In the ruined cathedrals of our industrial age in buildings where once thousands of people have performed the same repetitive tasks hour after hour day after day in the production of profit for a tiny few people now gathered to dance in glorious defiant unproductivity. There's a bit more to that, but that's probably enough. Wow, the new machine music and that places, as you said, the work for technical reproduction for a profit of few are now democratically used in an artistic way creating a community. So listen, it's been great to listen to you and and I will keep thinking about all of it as an important contribution to the field from Andy Field. And, and really a congratulation on all the work you have done the reflection which one can hear so clearly, you know you have done have you have worked hard, you know to find solutions for a theater for performance for our time what is meaningful not 20 30 50 100 years ago but really now, or perhaps even as you hinted it in the future, you know what will will become of significance and importance to cope with what you call to be thrown into life so thank you all thanks for how around three are for supporting us. Join us on Thursday we have Gia man, the great granddaughter of Heinrich man and Thomas man who created a play about the astronaut or someone reflecting on the Czech revolution and go out to Boston the I saw the Gaga play we talked about before from the Arlequin players from Sasha at any so by wonderful interesting place in a bunker underground to it was professional actors and members from the community on this putin imagined on trial in an Alice in Wonderland or Alice in a Dunkerland production very interesting so thank you so much. I'm so glad we all connected and and yes everything everything is connected as you as you pointed out bye bye. Thank you so much. Thank you.