 everybody, those that have tuned in from all over the world. Thank you so much for being here with us today. This is the first of our episodes this year, but definitely not first in terms of our season. So really, really excited to be back with our series and our first panelist this year. For those of you who are joining us new-new this year, my name is Karishma Pagani. I am a producer, director, and an emerging scholar based out of Kenya, interested in understanding performing arts and the intersection between arts and politics in our region. Just to give you a little bit of history, we started off this series last year with the support of HowlRound, the Tebere Arts Foundation, and the Nairobi Musical Theater Initiative to really bring to light the stories that the women in the creative arts on the African continent carry and really to bring light to various creative practices, whether it's in acting, directing, performing, producing across the continent. So it is it is my great pleasure to reintroduce season two, episode seven of this series. And I'd again just like to thank everybody that's here on the phone call, our Kenyan Sign Language interpreter Lucy, and our American Sign Language interpreter Zina and Sharon, who you will see later on. Thank you so much for being here today and to HowlRound for really supporting the start and continuity of this series. Without further ado, I'd like to jump in and introduce our very very special guest today, Dr. Mshai Mongola. Welcome. Thank you very much, Karishma. It's such a pleasure to be here. It's such a such a pleasure to have you. For those of you that have just tuned in, just to share, Mshai and I met virtually a couple of weeks ago, though I have been a follower of her work ever since I was a student at university. So I haven't really met her in person as yet, but it feels as though we've known each other for years, given that we've been talking much more on various projects we've been collaborating on, and we will be working on soon. So it's it gives me great pleasure to to speak with you today and to be your question asker instead of having you be the question asker that is usual. So how are you feeling? How's it going? Not feeling fine, but you know, just before we came on, I had stage fright, which I thought was completely hilarious, because I usually I hold the space for podcasts, and I never feel nervous, because I think I'm the one asking the questions. So this time that I'm answering the questions, I just felt like I was about to go on stage for a role, which I thought was really, really funny. So now that we've started, I'm completely fine, which is what happens, and I'm going on stage anyway. So this is interesting. Just in just in that really, really brief thing that you just said, I already have so many things that I'd love to learn more about from you, including the podcast and the things that you're working on, but also it just really already speaks the magnitude of work that you're doing here in the region and on the continent for being a moderator and for bringing so many voices to platforms like this one as somebody who asks questions and moderates panels. So again, just to reiterate, it really is exciting to me that I'm the one asking you questions, and it's such a big honor. So thank you for sharing the space. And thank you. I want to say this right off charisma. I've so enjoyed getting to meet you. And as you said, it's true every time we seem to talk, it's like we have an agenda and then we go off into 10 different other directions. This will be a continuation of our, okay, Karishma, let's talk for 10 minutes, which end up being an hour kind of conversation. I love those. I love those. Thank you. So why don't you why don't you tell the world who you are? Tell us about your practice. Tell us how you got into the arts and why you're still a practicing artist today and scholar. Huge question. So I call myself when people ask me who am I and what do I do? I say I'm an oratorist and a performance scholar. And I feel that those two terms and have become to me they now encompass both my journey and what I see myself to be. So let me just start with how I got there then you'll get to where the terms are coming from. I think I know and it sounds like such a cliche when people say this, but I think I've just grown up not intentionally being an artist, but ever since I was a child that it has just called me. So I grew up very much, I guess, a typical middle class Kenyan family, which meant that part of my extended family were relatives, older relatives. In my case, a great aunt, my grandmother's sister, who just came to live with us and has been with us literally for over 50 years until she passed away last year, like literally living in our family home. And then my godmother. And the reason I cite those two is that they were the first storytellers in my life. My godmother auntie Fibi Kimongi was a nursery school teacher and she taught, you know, lower classes. And so she always had stories. So I loved her coming to visit us because she always could tell, you know, all the stories of the hares, you know, the traditional things you hear about, I got that from her. Baba Jay, my grandmother, great aunt, they call her Baba. The thing about her was it didn't matter. She had this gift of taking real life and telling you a story about it. So she never punished me for anything I did wrong. But what she would do is she would tell you a story. And then she made up the stories as she went along and she was so good at it. And then you realize that's about me, isn't it? Or that's about so and so, isn't it? But she didn't tell you that. And I realized that to this day because I love how do stories help us understand the world? She taught me that. And so yeah, so I began with that. My father loved literature, absolutely loved literature. And one of the things I remember when we were young, he would quote, especially Shakespeare. He Shakespeare was the playwright, was the writer who called to him. And he would never tell us where the quotations were from. And so I very, when I was very young, I started reading Shakespeare. I was a reader from a very early age. And I don't think I understood what I was reading, but we had the plays. And so I would read through them, looking for the words that my father had been quoting, just looking for the words and memorize those two lines and look for them. And it became a game, like he would say something. And if I knew what it was, I'd be so excited. It was like winning the greatest prize in the world. So much so that when I got news of my father's death, I was in Ghana. And I wasn't not quite expecting it. And when the news came, the first lines that came to my mind were from Shakespeare, cowards die many times for their death. The valiant only taste death at once. And it was so comforting to be held by that. And then, you know, I, I loved to recite poetry. And to this day, I think that thing of performing poetry as opposed to reading it to myself was something that I learned early. I learned it from a primary school teacher, Mrs. Sutton. And Mrs. Sutton, if the class did well when we were, this was standard seven, exam time, if we did very well in an assignment, she rewarded us with poetry. And I think now when I look back, it blew, it blows my mind because many young people see poetry as difficult, something that, you know, it's put in front of you to make, you know, English difficult. And because she gave us that this is your gift, you guys have done well. So I'm going to do the yarn of the Nancy Bell. And, and we just got caught up in that. She was English. So a lot of it was English poetry, but it set me on a path. That was primary school. And then I went to high school, what I call, you know, I loved high school. I was in a boarding school. And I know people say all sorts of things about boarding school. I loved being in boarding school. Partly was that my sister was already there. Partly was that it was a small school. So we were really a community. And partly was that the extracurricular life of the school was absolutely fantastic. And so I joined drama club and not just drama club, there was drama and there was dance. And for me, it was getting into doing traditional dance, but not in the traditional way of learning it the way it was, but taking traditional dance and turning it into a story that completely transformed my relationship with the stage. The other thing I'd like to say about that was in those days, because there were six years, we had a level, the older girls were the ones who wrote the plays, they directed the plays. They did all, you know, so when you joined the drama club in form one, actually didn't join in form one, they didn't let you join in form one. In form two, you were backstage. It didn't matter how great an artist you were, didn't matter that you were the best actor in the school, you were backstage if you were in the school drama club. And then you worked your way, you know, to beat pieces. And then finally in a level, you were the directors, you were the playwrights. And now when I go back to it, I realized it was such a great foundation for me because it taught me that it isn't, you know, the goal is not to be the best actor in the world. The goal is to work together with everybody else to make a piece that other people will appreciate. And so going to the different levels of the competition, winning wasn't just what it was about. It was about watching other pieces. It was about thinking about why we did so well. It was about in those days after your piece, the adjudicators would take you backstage and would suggest things to make your piece better, whether or not you are going on to the next stage. And so that taught me something that you can always, it doesn't matter how good you are, there's always something else to grow on. And up till today from directing a piece, you know, usually they say the director's work ends the night after your dress rehearsal. For me, I stay connected with the piece until the very, very, very last performance because that allows us to continue to grow as we do it. Yeah, and then I went on to university again. I was at Kenyatta University in Kenya and my sister had been there the year before me and she had all these friends, all these people she was mentoring. So on day one, those friends were there. I had just, you know, come in as a first year. I had friends in the university before I even started and they came and they looked for me and they pulled me into the drama club. And so I found another community at university. And this one was really mind blowing because in those days, Kenyatta University Creative and Performing Arts Center traveled the country. We would go and perform in schools and things like that. And so for me, it was also an opportunity to see how plays worked, not just in the university, but out in the most rural of settings. It also was an opportunity to meet real professional directors. So people like Mumbi Wa Maena, who is American, at that time she was in Kenya. Her husband, Professor Maena Wa Kenyatta was teaching at Kenyatta University. People like David Mulwa, Francis Mbuga, who now are, you know, the names of the people who put the foundation of theater for many of us. It was amazing because these were who are directing us. And so for me, I think it's everywhere I have gone. I mean, I could go on, but you know, masters and the PhD, it's everywhere I've gone in life. I've stepped somewhere and found where's my theater community? Where are my people? Even when I go, you know, I did my masters in Australia and landed barely knowing everybody. And the first thing I was doing was, okay, where do I find my people? Because once I find theater people, I find the community. So that's how I have moved. I belonged to a great, great company, Theater Workshop Productions here in Kenya. And they too have continued, I think over 30 years, I've been working with some of the community from there. So I guess for me, it's always been about finding the community of artists and then working together and learning with them. Yeah, what a wonderful way to think about even creating new friends and creating new community wherever you go. The theater just follows you no matter where you are in the world. Before we move on to talking a little bit about your masters and PhD, because I'm very interested about that part of your life also. I have a question because you mentioned Shakespeare and your love for Shakespeare and how that, you know, came from your family and the interest in school. And then also describing yourself as an oratorist and somebody who has also been exposed to performance at the very rural level. And what we would call, you know, Kenyan art or pre-colonial performance, whatever you want to name it, right? How do you navigate these two seemingly different practices? Shakespeare being, you know, British performance and then seeing rural work happen the way it does here, whether it's theater for development or whatever form it takes. How do you navigate these two seemingly polar and seemingly different practices in your own practice today? Okay, so that brings me back to that term, oratorist. So I am of that generation, we called ourselves the Huru generation, who were born right after independence. So Kenya gets its independence in 1963. I am born, you know, 1967. So we are that first generation who, as we come through school, through the school years, we also have, you know, those of you who know Keweth Younger's work, you find that they're changing the education system, and especially in the field of literature, English, and starting to ask, on one hand, we have theater, as you know, the Western traditions of theater, and especially like I said, I was very much exposed to those Western traditions. But on the other hand, you have African forms of performance and asking ourselves, is it that we didn't have this, was there such a thing as theater in African cultures before or not? I trace my use of the word orator to Austin Bukenya and Pio Zirim, who are the first ones who documented it. And so they, when they went to the 1977, which everybody should read up about the Festival of Black Arts that was in Lagos, Nigeria, they presented a paper and they brought out was this a Festak by any chance? Sorry, sorry, this is Festak. Festak, 1977, Nigeria. Festak, 77. And everybody talks about how it was so mind blowing because they brought us from right across the black African world. And people put on performances and there was a conference and all sorts of things. And at that place, they said, orator is a term that's already being used at Macquarie University. So I don't know who came up with the term, but they're the ones who gave it to us. Now, I use orator today to talk about the transcending of boundaries in the making of meaning. And for me, what that means is that I was learning very early that we don't, you know, we think of Western theater. And yes, there are traditions, you know, proscenium theater, fourth wall, all of that, that you need to know if you're practicing that, but that is a very thin wall. And that we often separate out the two. And for me, it became very clear as I was going through the schools, both through school and both through practice, that I needed to hold both of these traditions in my hands. And so after I left university, I was was a member of a group called Theater Workshop Productions. At that time, we were under the presidency of Daniel Arab Moi, and there was censorship in Kenyan theater, which meant if you wanted to put up a play, you had to apply for a license. Interestingly, the license was not a censorship license. It was a license to collect any revenue, you know, as people come in, but you had to give them your script. And if you gave them your script and they saw anything there that they thought was politically sensitive, they just wouldn't give you a license. So that's how it worked. And so we had, we wanted to do Dario Falls, can't pay, won't pay. And we were denied a license. And what I remember is out of those conversations, out of people's heartache of why wouldn't they let us do it? Somebody said something like what this guy had said was, why don't you guys just do African kind of stuff? You know, it's innocent. It hurts nobody. Just do a story. And we began talking about who tells you that African stories are not politically very weighty. And so we decided for the first time to make a play, to devise a play, but using traditional African stories. And that's what became Drambiton Kirinyaga, which Obio Birodiyambo then scripted as a play out of the many ideas that people brought. And so for me, that was my big life moment, that I don't need to separate those traditions. I need to bring them together. And up till this day, that's what I do. So that's one reason I, you know, that's why I have used, I have embraced that term, I'm oratorist. And then of course, I've also been really inspired by Professor Mishere Mugo, who's done a lot of thinking, a lot of work. So I consider her the foremother who has shown me the path to walk, because she's also held this tradition that comes from everywhere else. Very, you know, to say this is ours as part of our human heritage, but who we are and what our people bring has to be the foundation on which we build as contemporary performers and artists. But it's so clear to me from a practitioner perspective, you know, how you're bringing these worlds together in telling a story and the reasoning behind it. Your why is so clear to me. What I'd love to learn more, and actually, before I ask this question, I just want to jump in and say that our questions are on Facebook, where we are streaming our question panels are open. So anybody who is tuned in and would like to ask Dr. Mchai a question, please do post it on the chat and we will get to it whenever we can. But to continue, as I was saying, it's so clear to me from a practitioner perspective, your why behind the work that you're making and the work that is put on the stage. And you also mentioned earlier on that you pursued your masters and your PhD. And even as you're speaking, there's such a rich scholarly framework behind everything that you're saying you're putting on stage or the place that you're developing or the place that you've directed. How did you decide that you needed to pursue further studies? Why did you choose to move forward with a PhD and a master's? And how has that changed the way you look at your practice today? Okay, so when I left, I left, I graduated. I had done education for my degree with French and literature as you know, so in Kenya, you do your major, I majored in education, and my minors were French and literature in English. And then I know you speak French as well, actually. I am so tempted to, I am so, so tempted to turn this conversation all in French now, but I know that this will be very unplanned on our part, because I think our sign language interpreters might just go, okay, we don't know how to interpret the French. So anyway, I'm going to just go back. Two years ago, I had the most awesome experience. I was invited to Bukina Faso for a theater puppetry festival. So I spent a week in Wagadugu working with Bukina Bay theater artists, all women, and we created a piece from scratch on cloth. Everybody brought in a piece of cloth, and then we created a piece. But what was so hilarious was I had to, you know how you're so used to working in a language, so I'm used to working in English and Kiswahili, and they said to me, don't worry, there'll be an interpreter. And after day one or two, I just found that, you know, I found myself directing in French and I was, I was like half afraid and half, but you know, when you're in the middle of the work and you have to communicate and you feel the interpreter isn't quite getting what I'm saying. And so it was great because I learned all these French terms that perhaps I would not have otherwise learned. And I certainly didn't learn it. So that was great. Yeah, just to build off that tangent. Oh, sorry. I was just going to build off that tangent real quick and share that same thing happened to me when I was in Rwanda. We were in a room and we started speaking in English, but the minute the team found out, I was directing, and the minute the team found out that I speak French, Bas, that was it. The entire room just changed into French speaking, half French speaking and half Kenya Rwanda speaking thing. And it just, I was so shocked at myself that the words just started flowing, even if it was broken a little bit here, there. But it really, again, just speaks to the diversity in terms of language on the continent and how as Africans, it's so important for us to not only speak English, but speak the other language in Arabic, French, just to allow for that East-West, North-South communication in a more seamless way. So just, just to build up that, I think fascinating that you had a similar experience. It also speaks to the fact that, you know, when you talk about theater being a language, because we often see these boundaries that as if language, we cannot, we cannot communicate and work together. And when you start, when you're in the middle of the work, you actually find you're communicating and how similar it is to the way the things that we do. So yeah, there's that too, that's just so special. Yeah. So anyway, I was going to say, when I left university, I was a member of a group called Theater Workshop Productions, which at that time, there were three or four key major groups in Nairobi and Theater Workshop was one of them. Theater Workshop Productions was incubated at the University of Nairobi and many of us who were members of that group, not everybody, but a good number of them were from University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University, which was my, where I came from. And we also had, you know, our, you know, university lecturers like the Latopio Mooma, Agashigu, Makini, who worked with us. And I think as a result, it was very much a very academic theory, theory based, you know, if we do, if we do somebody, and we used to, you know, get really ambitious with some of the works, you know, we're going to do Waiting for Godot. And then we would really study it as a play, even before we came to perform it. Or I remember us doing Derek Wildcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain, which, which is not easy place to put up. And so for me, it was, it was a way of opening up our minds. But while I was there, I got an opportunity, we got an invitation to have, to apply to an African theater program that was three months happening in Zimbabwe. And nowadays, when I look back, I just smile because I said, oh, you know, I applied. And when they said, yes, you can come, I did not even think twice. I quit my job because my employer at that time told me, no, you can't, you can't just take leave and go for three months. Like who does that? You can't do it. If you go, you go, you've got to resign. And I said, okay, so I'm resigning. And she said, no, you can't, you know, I mean, you're going to be nuts to do that. But for me, at that time, I thought, I'm never going to have an opportunity to go off to, and first of all, I'd never gone to another African country for a long time. I'd been to Rwanda when I was in my third year, which was part of the exchange program we did with the, sorry, to Burundi, with the University of Burundi for French. But I just thought three, three months working with African artists, because it was a program where we had three master artists. In our time, it was Debebe Sheto from Ethiopia, Mombay Kalingai from DRC Zair, and the Nia Te, Francis Nia Te from Ghana. And I just thought, where will I ever get an opportunity like that? And what they did was on day one, they gave you a catalyst to a play. And then they said, at the end of the three months, you guys must have come up with a show, a complete two hour show that had dance that had, you know, drew from ritual and that drew from theater. By the time I was done with those three months, I not only made life long friends, but I knew that I wanted to do this more seriously for the rest of my life. I didn't want to go back to what I had been doing, which was have a day job and then do theater in the evening as a hobby and then put up a play. So that was the first thing. The second thing was going for a theater conference. My first theater conference in 1992, a new organization called Idea. It still exists in international drama and theater in education association was being formed in Portugal. And I was lucky that I got invited to be at that formation meeting. And it was sitting for the first time in an international space with people from all over the world who did theater and drama as a profession. And I thought, this is who I want to do. This is what I want to be. Even if it is teaching, I don't want to teach English. I want to teach theater. So after that, I went back home. I came back home and I just was like looking out for any opportunity. And it so happened that while we were in Portugal, my mentor, who is the one who had gotten me invited to the conference, was pulled into the, this is Opio Muma. He was asked to join the committee that was coming up with all the rules and the regulations. And so he said to me, we have a meeting. You go and run my workshop. And I said, oh, I can't do it. It's an international conference. He said, just go and do the kind of things that we do in our own rehearsals. So I went and I ran a workshop. I didn't know that somebody was sitting in that workshop. And this is Professor Kate Donnelly from Australia who would later invite me to Australia for another conference. And that opened the door for me to go to school in Australia. Because then at that conference, I went to the University of Melbourne. I did a workshop there. The director of the school of at that time, Creative Arts, invited me and said, we're opening up our master's program to international students. Would you like to come? And again, I just said, yes, dropped everything in Kenya and went off to school. So it was again, one of those things of just realizing that, yes, I was loving the performing part. I had a really, a group, a company I adored working with. I thought we were doing important work. But I also realized I had a lot to learn and that, you know, there was so much learning from other spaces. At that time, nobody I knew had ever been to Australia to go to school there. So I also thought that a lot of the people we were connected to had gone to the UK to go and study there. So we were getting a lot of influences from the UK, a lot of influences from Africa. But I thought going to Australia would be an adventure. And so I went to Australia and it turned out it was such an amazing adventure too. So that's how I got to do my master's. My master's was in theater. So my master's in the creative arts, but specialization in theater. And what I chose to do for my thesis was to look back at theater in Kenya. So my master's thesis is on theater in Kenya, but after 1990, because all the thesis I was looking at was looking at the early periods. It was looking at the work of people like Googie Wafiyongo. In fact, everybody, I would say I'm doing my masters of theater in Kenya. Everybody would say, oh, you're studying Googie Wafiyongo. Actually, by the time I got to university, Googie had already gone into exile. I'm interested in understanding where the work that I and my peers are doing. What does that look like? Where did it come from? What's the basis for it? And it was understanding that work, understanding why we were doing what we did in the historical moment that we did. Whose shoulders did we stand on? That then got me to want to do a PhD. And then I applied to do performance studies at Northwestern. And I went onto Northwestern University. My PhD is in the field of performance studies. And my PhD is on performing stories. Because somewhere in between doing theater, I started to get interested in the question of story, especially because when I went to Australia, until I found a theater company to perform with, the way I found myself in performance was to do a lot of storytelling, especially to the Kenyan community. And I was teaching storytelling in a school and also doing some theater directing. So in the US, I moved on to this concept of story, not just in the traditional way of telling story. But I realized that everything I was interested in was how we use story, whether it is dramatic, whether it is written, whether no matter the form it is. And so that's why I call myself a performance scholar, a storyteller, and also an oratorist. You know, my next question is actually building off of exactly what you've said about calling yourself a performance scholar and then calling yourself an oratorist. I think oftentimes you throw so many other words around and we're describing theater. We talk about theater and theater being the thing that word is used to describe Western performance in many ways, theater as a form. And then the minute people talk about Africa, it's storytelling because apparently African storytelling is not theater. Again, I ask, how do you navigate these two worlds of being a performance scholar having studied in the West? Are you still there? Have I lost you? No, I'm here. There we go. There we go. Having studied in the West and being able to develop your ideologies and theories and practice in that context, but also still your research still staying so true to home and so it's true to oratorist practice. That is the best way to frame it or storytelling for that matter. How did you find a balance between these two worlds? So part of it, especially when I got to the U.S. and so I was really in a department, so I'm not first in the department of performance studies, but we are in what was then the school of speech. It's now the school of communication. Our sister department is theater. And so we were in each other's classes between theater and performance studies all the time. And my graduate peers who were also there, particularly the ones who came from Africa, we were always having these conversations. I was with Praise the Nenga who was, I used to call him my senior brother and David Donko in particular, because both of them, the three of us, you really used to have conversations on where is the line. Praise was in the department of theater. David and I went performance studies, but it seemed you were doing the same things. And one of the things that we went back was to go and look at the definition. So somebody like Ruth Finnegan would say that there was no drama, drama in Africa was very much at its very primitive stages and then go on and talk about storytelling. And so for me, I began to ask, what is storytelling really? Now, Yvonne Orwar, the writer, really helped me out on this because I was, I did a lot of conversations with people. I would ask people, how do you define theater? How do you find story? And Yvonne just came out and said she thinks of story as the representation of lived experience. And when she said that, something just went off in my mind. So now I define story as the representation of lived experience, but sometimes it's fictional and sometimes it's real. Now, once I have that as my working definition, then I ask myself, how do we represent our lived experience? And then you enter into the art forms. And so you can do that, whether you're doing it in terms of poetry. And I do a lot of performing poetry. And I'm very interested in narrative poetry in particular. I do a lot of it. So right now, a lot of the work I've been doing is to take fiction as that is prose. So take novels and stage them. Whether it is also, I've been doing a lot of staging of essays, research essays that I find interesting. I put them on stage because at the end of it, they're talking about lived experience. And I want to represent them in a way that people can engage with. And I found that one of the ways that we, especially as African people, we engage with everything. We don't, you know, there's written texts, but we want to see, we want to hear, we want to smell, we want to feel. And when you do all of that, you're really working on dramatizing. And then the whole thing of conflict. I love, I realize I as a person, I love conflict, whether it's inner conflict or it's conflict between two people, which is why I'm naturally drawn to theater. Interestingly, I'm not as drawn, I'm drawn to watching film, but I'm not drawn to working in film. And I realized it's because I get a complete buzz on being in a space and creating at the same time with the audience. And knowing that even if I did this piece of theater, if I came back and did this for 100 times, for 20 times, for five times, the experience will never be exactly the same. Because the minute you bring the theater, you're with the audience in the space, you feed off the audience and the audience feeds off you. And one of the things I love is that you can never predict how an audience will react. You can do it exactly the way you did it yesterday. And people react in a completely different way. So you kind of can anticipate the love here, but then they might not. And then the love in a place you completely did not expect them to. Or the theater would get very quiet with one audience, where another audience was roaring with laughter. And so for me, I find that really interesting, because it means every time I perform, I am learning something new about the piece, because I'll go back and I'll think, huh, why did it happen that way? Why did they react in that way to this piece differently from yesterday? And so for me, I don't find a contradiction. Sometimes I am working in the form of drama. And so there's conflict, and I'm really thinking about how to bring out that conflict. And I'm on the stage. And so for me, that's theater. Other times, I'm not. Right? So, you know, I do artwork that's just visual pieces. And now I've become more and more comfortable with even saying, I can direct people to put up an art piece, even in an art form that isn't my art form. I'm not a musician, but I can work with musicians. I'm not a poet, but I can work with poets, because it is about understanding the form and what the form calls out so that you can tell your story. Sadly, the COVID pandemic has had us lose our fourth collaborators, so to speak, in the space with not having an audience or live audience to be able to engage with us. But I really feel you, you know, when it when you when you speak about the value of having an observer in the space, you know, an audience, because they shape the story and the narrative, regardless of the form in a very thought provoking and shape shifting way. And I think hopefully, you know, as as the pandemic slows down a little bit, and there's a solution for us, we'll be able to get back into the room and make together and see how that how that works. But while we are still stuck behind our Zoom screens, having conversations like this, instead of across the table, folks, just earlier before I before we came came on live, we were just talking about how this should feel like a casual conversation, or we're sitting on the table having a couple of drinks, coffee for those that are just waking up early in the morning. And we aspire to the day that we can actually make that happen where it's just a casual coffee table chat, just as Shai does sip on her coffee. Cheers. Yeah, so, so, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, let's hope that we can get back into the space in that way. But while we are in the Zoom space, I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about your process. You mentioned earlier that even adapting novels for the stage I think that you have done before actively doing. Would you tell us a little bit about what your process is to translating a form into a story that is accessible to audiences using different sensory elements? Okay, so there are two for two processes that I play a lot with. One is that I learned with them, especially starting with theater workshop, just the joy of devising, starting from scratch with just a seed, and then allowing yourself to go into the space and not trying not to preempt it trying to be open. And when I'm working with a group of people that for me has been it's a real joy. It's very scary when you start out, especially when you have a deadline and people are expecting that, you know, you've got three months or one month or whatever your time is, and you must come up with something. And so like I said, when we started out with drum beats, we really did not know where we were going to end up. We, we, we, and so the first bit was really very much people, which stories people bringing in the stories they had, and then beginning to try and make sense. And then having it was really interesting for me to go back and watch how Obyo Biro D'Ambo worked, which was we would come up with all these ideas. He would go think about it and then stitch it together. People who do that for me have a very, very interesting. About five, maybe five years ago, we worked under the direction of Dr. Wombo Imwangi. And it was an amazing experience because we were asked to write an essay as a group of African women exploring Pan-Africanism and feminism and the juncture between it. And what would happen is she would send us questions every day, not every day, but it would make a question every day. Yeah, she could have been every day. And if you had the time, you answered the question. And then watching how she took our answers, and answers were from our lived experience. And then she would piece them together. And then people would begin to say, that reminds me of that piece of research that reminds me of the book I'm reading that reminds me of that. And so when it was all pieced together, it became an essay that's now published in feminist Africa in the feminist Africa number 20 on Pan-Africanism that had voices. And then later on, I took that essay, working with a group of people, not even not even artists, I think half of them were artists, half of them were not, we turned it into a stage production. And that was another level, because we had a script, we had the written script. But then we had to ask ourselves, so again, reading and reading and reading the words and listening to them. And what is, what are the words telling us? And then going on stage and saying, okay, what, what, where is this directing us? And just learning to listen, because what I feel is that if you have a good story, that good story will tell you what it wants to do. And it's very much at this point, it joins with the way I work with script, that when I get a script or even a story that I want to stage, for me, the first part is just reading it again and again and again, and trying not to have, trying not to come to it with already preconceived ideas of this is how I want to stage it. It's trying to listen and say, okay, story, what do you want me to see? What do you want me to hear? And then I begin just reading it out, allowed to myself and literally just reading it, just reading it and getting the rhythm, because after a while the story will find its own rhythm. It'll start to tell you what it wants to do. And then from there, it's really getting into the space with the, wherever the artists are who are, who are translating it onto stage and allowing them to lead me. So, you know, telling them, okay, how do you hear this? What do you see yourself doing? And then slowly as you do that, I can't explain how and I should be able to because one of the lessons learned at Northwestern is it's not enough to allow instinct to guide you. Once instinct guides you, you need to take a step back and ask, why? Why did that feel right? I remember doing my first year paper performance at Northwestern, your performance studies first year paper is a performance. And I was really pleased with it. It came out, I could feel it had worked. And then when we did the review, the professors were asking us questions and they asked me a question about something. And you know, the way they described it, I was like, oh, okay, that's what we were doing. I didn't realize. And then they asked me, how did you know to do that? What told you to do that? And I said, I don't know, it just felt right. And you know, I was feeling very pleased with myself that, you know, my instinct, it felt right and it seems to have worked. And then one of them, Mary Zimmerman said to me, that's fine, but you're a performance scholar. So you need to understand, to go back and think why did it work? Because if you understand why it worked this time, next time it becomes something that you can use. If you don't understand why it worked this time, it just becomes an easy accident. And so for me, it's become really important. Even after a day of rehearsal, I would sit and think, what did we do? I'm I actually write it all down because for me, I learned kinesthetically writing it down, putting it down in notes helps me think about it. And then say, okay, this is working because of that and that. Or, okay, I still don't know why, but then I'll sleep over it until it starts to tell me something. And so for me, the biggest joy of performance is not telling people what I know. It's finding out for myself and finding out for, for, for helping my actors find out, what is it that they don't, they didn't know, even if we thought we knew the play, what is it that the play is telling us, or the piece is telling us, even as we are performing it. So, so inspiring to hear you speak about instinct, but then also being able to justify, justify your actions in a space. Haven't really heard of that being spoken about in the same, in the way that you've just articulated it, because I often find myself in the same place where somebody asks me why I made the decision I did. It's like, yeah, the instinct is, is what is guiding me. The spirit said that this is right. And that's all okay and said and done, but how do I make sure that the spirit can continue guiding me in that way, if this was a different piece, and this was a different version, it was a different time. So really, really, thank you for sharing that, along with many other pieces of wisdom in your, in your process. I should say, I'm a performer and scholar. For us, the word perform means how make meaning. So we're interested in performance callers are always asking, how do people, how do you know what you know? How, what makes people make meaning in a particular way? So I guess that's also part of it, that I was trained for all those years. Yes, it's good that you know what the meaning is, but how did you know that that, how did people come to that piece of meaning? Right, right. It's also a way of making the world of performance study so much more accessible, I feel, to practitioners in the field, but also people that have nothing to do with performance. Oftentimes I've heard that performance studies and the idea of scholarship is so alienating because it enters this big bad world of academia. And I think as accessible as we can make the work and the study to any common practitioner or any common person who's just here to make meaning is makes it all the more worthy. So it's very, it's very, again, inspiring to hear you talk about performance scholarship as just how to study making, studying the making of meaning, basically. So I'm looking at the tie. Oh, go ahead, go ahead. Yes, go ahead. No, I'm just saying, one of the before the classes I taught when I was in school was to performance interaction performance studies. And my best thing was working with non artists, working with scientists, because there's a distribution requirement, and finding out everybody can stage things when you take them away from the theory and having talent. The people are afraid I don't have talent. But once you tell people, just help us understand this point by staging it and making it, you know, use your five senses. It became the most the biggest fun of my life. And it has also taught me how to stage things and not worry about, you know, how you just just use your five senses. That's why you say you let me use all five senses in uncovering the thing that you have in front of you, which is what theater is. Yeah, I as you were saying that I just remembered a friend of mine back when I thought I would become a scientist before I became an artist. I was at this forum of the New England Biolabs. It was an award ceremony for a project that I've worked on. And I met a colleague who was receiving the same award in her field and a neuroscientist, and she turned all of her everything that she would map in a cell, she would turn them into art pieces. So she made wall paintings and lampshades all out of these cells that she would study. And it came from her dance background. And some of her pieces were also translated into dance performances. So I just found the intersection between her her study in neuroscience and her artistic pursuit so fascinating. And I always think there's a way to translate this the heady stuff into more accessible work through theater and through performance and making meaning. So I'm looking at the time and I'm also seeing that there might be some questions from our audiences. I also do have a few more questions to go. So I'll jump in with one of mine and then our team will see if there's any questions from folks that are listening in. If you haven't yet posted your question, now is the time to do so before we wrap up our conversation. I wanted to take us back a little bit as you were speaking about your PhD. What was the return to Kenya like for you? Why did you choose to come back? What was it like having left for so long and studied abroad to deepen your craft? What was it like to come back to Kenya? And I asked this question also because I find a lot of my colleagues and myself also having been educated abroad, struggling to navigate this space of, okay, well, I've been educated abroad, but my research is East Africa. It's focused in this region. And this is my bread and butter and being. What would you say is the value of going away? And what was it like when you came back? So I think the biggest value of going away is it gives you an opportunity to be out of the space and to be able to look in and to reflect where when you're in it, I think it's more difficult. Even when you say I want to reflect, it's more difficult because you're right in it. Zora Neale Hurston has this phrase talking about when she went to study and then, you know, when it's in the book Mules and Men, and she talks about looking back with the spyglass of anthropology. And it really is that space where even the familiar becomes strange and the strange becomes familiar. So for me, going away, when especially when I did my masters in Australia, because I had to look and I had to talk to people who didn't who are not at all familiar with Kenyan history, Kenyan theater, and I had to write it down. And my advisor, Peter Akersal knew nothing about it. And he was very honest when I got there. He said, I know nothing about this. It made me think and reflect and, you know, read up the theory to help me understand. And so when I came back, even though I used to come home in between, I didn't come home and work on anything because I was doing my research. And so first of all, I came back two weeks before Kenya went into post-selection violence, which we had never had. So it was truly disorienting. The second and the second thing, and I think that was very tight to that was, I was very clear when I went away, I always wanted to come back home. And I made a decision when I was in graduate school, not to even look, because people told me the this is a slippery slope. If you begin to look around and see, can you get a job out there, you will find a job. And then the temptation becomes, let me go just for one year or for two years to get the experience or whatever. And then it becomes so difficult to leave. And so I decided I would not look and I would come home. And I came home and really began talking to a couple of institutions. I already had some promises, you know, people who said, oh, this is wonderful. Yes, we will have a position. When I came back, Kenyatta University was just about to set up the department of theater. So they told me, this is perfect timing. But then I come back and this post election violence. And as you remember, the university is closed. And so they said, we can't, we're not tiring until we know what is happening. And so for me, again, it was a period of reflection that perhaps I would not have had. If I had not, if I came back and there was no job, because otherwise my plan would have been to come take a month or two to orient and then get into the university and teach. But they didn't get back to me. And you know, I kept, you know, I kept checking until I got a very clear message of don't call us, we'll call you. And so after six months, I thought, okay, I need to find something else because I can't just keep waiting indefinitely. And you remember, it took quite a while for the universities to go back. And then, you know, they were trying to figure themselves out. So I didn't know when this new department would come on board. And then I got invited through Ivona War and then head of the planning unit of the faculty of arts and sciences, which was being proposed at a university that was being planned by Aga Khan, to set up the plan. And I just thought, never ever in my life, will I get the opportunity to be asked to join a team that is dreaming up a university from scratch. I thought there will be many other opportunities in my life. But I doubt I will ever be asked to sit in the team and think it through. And so that's what I ended up doing for a couple of years. And what that taught me was that I didn't have to be in a department of theater to be able to put what I had been learning into practice. Because we were planning a curriculum that was drawing from all these different disciplines. And really my job was to help create a core curriculum that puts the sciences, the humanities, the arts all into conversation. And I started to use my own skills, you know, we would go into, I put together a conference and it was putting people into, you know, people who normally don't do theater, people who normally don't do, certainly never would think of going on stage or the arts, helping them use the arts to help us plan a curriculum. And so that kind of took me into a different direction with my work, which has tended now to go into the space of even when I'm working in academia, I haven't really taught in a department of theater, but it has been to, you know, I've worked in a place where we teach peace. You know, our big thing is leadership and peace and conflict and figuring out how to use arts theory in that teaching. So for me, I found myself working in that space in academia. I found myself working in policy spaces. So I came back and within a year, I was asked to join the board of the Kenya Cultural Center, which is the oldest cultural state institution in Kenya, which is where the Kenya National Theater is nestled. And I became chair of the board. And I sat there for six years. And so I went into the world of policy. How do you create spaces? How do you work with government, which is a whole other story, to be able to enable artists to do what they do. So I've spent a lot of time in the last few years really working in policy spaces. And then in my own life, I started to look for space because the biggest thing when I came back, I struggled with was that there was no place where at that time there was no place where artists could find money, could find a place, you know, where you could write off a proposal in Kenya, and somebody's happy to fund you to do a theater piece. And for me, I was determined if I'm going to do theater, I'm going to do it properly. And so that was the biggest struggle. It still is. I do continue to practice. I'm part of a group called the Orisha Collective, and we've been doing various smaller projects. But it's been very difficult because I think the way theater is practiced in Kenya is a space where I think it's a whole new generation. They're doing things that are really exciting and different. But then I think, you know, you have to be in it full time. And I haven't had the time to be able to do that. So I'm still trying to really figure out how to be able to do what I do, be able to work with artists who are full-time professionals, find the money to do it, because I'm really much more interested in exploring and creating new forms, or going back and doing the old classical. That's my new dream, is to go back and do the classics and stage them properly. Because many young people have never seen those, you know, plays like The Child of Dead and Kimathi, Betrayal in the City. People have heard of them, but there's an entire generation that has grown up and those productions have not been done in the last 20 years. So I'd love to get good money to be able to stage them and stage them properly. And so yeah, that has been a bit of a journey that I've been on and where I am today. Sorry, I realize I'm on mute. Thank you for sharing that. And it's actually a really perfect, thank you, actually a perfect segue into some of the questions that our audiences have asked. I see Oda Konyango and Robert Boilicky. Hi, Bob. Miss you. I tuned into the conversation and they both have asked some really similar questions. So in the interest of time, I'm going to try and merge some of their curiosities. They're asking, how would you describe the state of the arts today in Kenya? Would you say that the lack of adequate infrastructure has contributed to the underdevelopment of arts form and the critical thinking of our people? And what is the current state of the arts? I guess that's the first question. And again, I'm going to ask the second one, which if you don't mind, had a go. So you have a moment to respond to them together. The second question is, what is the current state of the arts today in Kenya? Of course, COVID has changed the landscape. What was happening prior to the restrictions? And what do you anticipate happening in live performance when it is back in circulation? So I think that's spot on. I think one of the biggest restrictions right now is infrastructure. And so I think one of the wonderful things I have seen happen in the years I've been practicing is when I started out after university and when I was with theater workshop, theater, for example, was very much amateur. So everybody had another real job or they went to school and then we came and then we rehearsed in the evening and we put up our productions. And if we got paid anything, it would be literally not even enough to cover your fare to rehearsals and back. Now what I love about where we have gone, not just in theater, but I think the arts in general, is that we have people who call themselves professional artists who make their living from theater, from film, from music, from writing and all of this. However, I think one of the biggest issues we have is that the state is doing almost next to nothing. There is so much possibility and potential and artists are surviving on their own. They just, you know, the term we're using in Kenya is hustling and that's got implications. It means that most artists cannot, I speak about theater because that's what we're talking about. They cannot spend the time that they need to really bring a production up to scratch. You know, starting from the writing to the rehearsing to getting all the design, all the elements, everything people want to do and to do it properly in a good theater and have a run that people will come and people will say, you know, do the publicity properly and all that and people, it will pay for itself. Unfortunately, the Kenyan state does not put money in theater. I think of all the art forms, theater is the one that has absolutely no support and that is partly historical because if you go back into the 70s, you remember the Kenyan state in the 70s understood theater as a place for troublemakers. So they shut down and as I said, you had to bring in your scripts because they were very much afraid of the power of theater. And even though, you know, so when I was at the Kenyan Cultural Center, what we were able to do was to refurbish the Kenyan National Theater. Now, this makes, you know, if I tell you that the National Theater was built in 1952, until we refurbished it at that time, the state had not invested in that building. And I remember when I first went over, like we were horrified when as a committee, we went round and saw the state of the theater. Yes, I had been performing in that theater, but I had never really realized how bad it was. And that's part of the reason why I've spent so much time since I came back in policy, because we realized you have to fix this. It's not enough to get people who come in for a short time from outside and they give you money to do one production. We have to fix it from the inside. They've got to put the policy in place. And the government of Kenya must invest in the arts. So part of the work that we are doing is to look at the laws, is to look at the policies, the cultural policy. People have been working on the cultural policy for close to 50 years, like literally from when they started writing it in 1970, 1972, I think it was, we finally passed it in 2010. It had taken like all those years just to get the cultural policy out. If you don't have a policy, you can't go to the government for money because that's the framework that it uses. So for me, that's one of the huge areas. The other area is, like I said, school was fantastic for me, because the drama festival in itself, the kind of infrastructure it had supporting it during that day, so that students could run everything in those days. That infrastructure, in some ways, more schools are participating, but they have less support. And the fact that we do not, theater is not taught in schools, drama is not taught in schools, art and music, we must put arts and music, all the arts in the curriculum, as not just as co-curricular, but completely, like making sure every child, regardless of whether they're going to be a doctor or a dancer, has the opportunity from primary school to really invest in the art. And I'll tell you why this is important. If you do not cultivate that from when children are young, when they leave, even if they don't become artists, they don't have the skills to enjoy the arts, to appreciate the arts. They don't understand that if I am a doctor, and I've had a really, really tough day, I heard this from the head of pediatric oncology at Agakan, and I remember him saying, when I lose a patient, it's the hardest thing to do to tell a parent your child is going to die. And so he said, when I lose a patient, it is so tough for me. So what I do is I go into my office after that, turn off the lights and listen to music for an hour or two before I can go home. Otherwise I will go and take it out on my children at home. I've never forgotten that. So we've got to give every single Kenyan the tools to be able to appreciate the arts. Because then, apart from the government, ordinary Kenyans will invest in the arts. They'll patronize the arts. You know, they'll celebrate the arts. They'll save for corporate social responsibility. Let me sponsor a play. Let me sponsor a piece of writing. I think that's what we need to do. But can I just celebrate? I think there's a generation that has worked so hard to make it possible to be a professional artist, and I am so proud of them. So let me just say kudos to that group of people. And what a profound, profound note to end on, right? There's a lot of work to do clearly in terms of capacity building, but also audience building. Nobody's going to watch the stuff if there's nobody to appreciate it, right? So thank you. Thank you so much for that. And I know we're a bit over time. So I'm going to sadly wrap up this conversation. I know we could go on for hours talking. I can't even have time and I'm thinking, oh my God, it's been an hour. I have so many more questions. I guess we're just going to have to invite you. It's always like this. It's always like this. I see that Rachel has also asked a question. So what I may be able to offer is if it's already in the comments on Facebook, maybe Shai will be able to respond to the comment directly and do a back and forth conversation there. So everybody's engaged. Thank you so much to everybody that has tuned in. And thank you for your wonderful questions. And thank you to our wonderful sign language interpreters once again for bearing through us with the conversation. Really, really appreciate it. Applause, applause, applause. Thank you. And thank you so much. So I mean watching them is a performance in itself. You know, watching them is a performance in itself. Just seeing the difference between ASL and PSL is to me just I'm like, this is fascinating. What is the difference? Yeah. Thank you, Karish, for you were wonderful. Such a privilege. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And this will be available on the HowlRound page for those who weren't able to watch. And we'll see you next week, same time, same place for our episode eight, the second one in the eighth episode in the series. So thank you so much. And let's keep the conversation going on Facebook. Thank you.