 hosted by Moenya here tonight for this 14th session of Unreversed Futures, which is an ongoing discussion. And I think it's becoming more and more of a discussion, which is really delightful. I will pass it over to you, Moenya, immediately. Just say that at the end of the session, we will introduce the upcoming session next week, but I don't know what the title is, so I'm going to leave that to you, Ja'han. So, yeah, over to you, Moenya. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for being here from your various parks of the world, from your various COVID-19 pandemic contexts, from your various levels of Zoom fatigue. Yeah, I really appreciate you spending the time with us. And to frame the conversation today, I thought I would, well, I thought I would frame it from the context of one of my Unreversed Futures quests, which if you have been here before, you've heard us, heard other curators speak about being on a particular quest and having these Unreversed Futures conversations really be part of articulating and guiding a kind of search for something. And one of mine is to try and figure out how else theater and performance skills, training, know-how can be deployed and leveraged in spaces other than making theater for the stage and to what end. And then I'm starting to, I'm trying to get my head around a nuance, a particular nuance that is about thinking, thinking about what the pandemic moment has given us as alternatives to these labored bureaucratically heavy location-based politically fraught ways of making and thinking. And I'm specifically thinking about institutions of learning theater and performance. I'm thinking about mainstream theater. I'm thinking about international festivals and all of the alternatives that are bubbling up around us. And particularly the place of resistance right now and how we can think about working reparatively. So they're kind of, it's an unformed nuance, I can say, but this is the stuff that is on my mind at the moment. And it's the reason that I've invited my dear friend and guide, Le Volme Chilet, who is a phenomenon of the South African performance and poetry scene. I'm going to ask her to introduce herself now. And yeah, as usual, please feel free to ask your questions, share your thoughts, even if they're half formed in the chat as we go, the idea is to really be in conversation together. And that floor is very much open. And yeah, so let's start, Le Volme, if you don't mind, introducing yourself and telling us who you are and maybe focusing particularly on how your work, your practice has shifted in the last year or so. Thanks. Thank you so much, Moenya. Thank you for bringing me into this really special collaborative community. I feel really honored. I'm grateful to have the space to be able to process these things that I've also been thinking through, working through. And I have, of course, immense admiration for you and your work. So to be in community with you and by extension with everybody else really is wonderful. So what have I seen? Okay, well first, who am I? I am a poet. I'm a performer. I've worked in media and television and on stage for the last 20 years. I've published two books. I've recorded two albums. I've done a bunch of theater productions. I've got 17 years of experience working in television as a presenter, as a producer. I also work as a voiceover artist. I earn my bread and butter as a performer, but the cord that runs through all of the things that I do really is poetry. So I earn a living as a speaker. I earn a living as an events emcee. A lot of it is corporate work that is, that I'm able to do because I am very well known in South Africa. But that work really finances my life and makes it possible for me to be able to do what I really, really love, which is making theater and doing arts festivals and writing poems and a bunch of other really wonderful artistic stuff that I hope will become my legacy, but that unfortunately in my lifetime pays very, very little as you know. So I guess what happened, what I've seen in the last year in terms of the way that I work is that I've had to leverage skills and resources that were not necessarily primary resources in order to be able to make a living. When we went into hard lockdown, thankfully about two years ago I built a home recording audio studio where I can record my vocals. And that studio kept me alive for three months when there was literally no work. I was able to work because I can record at home and it's broadcast quality and I could send that work out to clients and feed my family. I noticed after a couple of months when corporates felt brave enough to enter the market again doing events and interactions, very quickly people realized that we are making work for the screen. We're creating offerings that are going to be experienced on people's phones and on people's laptops and very quickly people made the connection that okay this is the screen, we're making corporate events have now essentially become television. I remember in the very beginning the kind of artistic offerings that people were making particularly the ones that were driven by artists were very much like homemade, had the texture of the kind of conversation that we're having right now where you see into people's houses and everything is being done low-tech if you have a device and you have Wi-Fi and you have a place to be able to speak from that is enough. I mean I think a lot of festivals have been able to survive because creatives have have taken that on as a mode of being able to operate. But of course corporations, academic institutions, government agencies have more money, they can do larger-scale things. When they realized that they're making TV, they started, it took away a whole layer of businesses that were centered around creating events. So the people now who are doing events are production houses who are making TV. And in South Africa what that means is that you need to have capital in order to be able to get high quality content in front of people, in front of a large audience. So we've had 20 years of black economic empowerment, essentially affirmative action as a form of economic redress, trying to transform our economy and bring more black professionals to rectify the situation that was created in this country by colonialism and by apartheid. So in the last 20 years we have seen the emergence of black eventing companies, of black creative companies, of black production houses, right? But we went into corona, went into a hardcore lockdown which immediately created an economic crisis especially in the creative sector. Most of us in the creative sector are freelancers, most of us in the creative sector are living gig to gig, most of us in the creative sector are running small businesses, most of us in the creative sector were hit the hardest by lockdown because once people were not allowed to gather anymore that it means that we cannot work, right? So the people who benefited from this were production houses that were very tech savvy, that had tech capacity, in other words had instruments, had equipment or had the capital to be able to invest in instruments and equipment, which immediately took black people out of the game. The most expensive events that I have done, the largest scale events that I have done, you know, the corporate events, the government events, not so much government because I don't think they really like me right now, but the corporate events have been have been white production houses who are doing these events. And I can't remember a time in 20 years of working where the the the largest scale, most heavily funded events that I have done, have been executed almost solely by white production houses. I think there is a kind of economic apartheid that has been entrenched, certainly in South Africa, I might, I would, I would, I would put forward and hypothesize probably even globally, you know, in environments where you're dealing with the same kind of post colonial condition that we're dealing with here. So in other words, societies where you have racialized inequality, societies that are post apartheid, post Jim Crow, post colonialism, you know, I, you know, we're racialized inequality is deeply entrenched. I think the gains of economic transformation that was intended to rectify that inequality, I think have been taken out by Corona, certainly within the creative sector. And it's a privilege to even be able to have that conversation, you know, after 20 years of working, I am back to living month to month, living gig to gig, you know, I am back to a very precarious situation where I've got to choose between do I use my savings to pay bills or do I fund my projects? And it is a privilege for me to be in this situation because I still have a roof over my head. My kids are still in school. I still have food in the fridge. The majority of my peers don't. And people who have been working as long as I have, people who enjoy the profile that I enjoy in this country, struggling to survive. So you can just imagine what the broader landscape really looks like, you know, a lot of I spend a lot of time wrestling with a kind of survivor guilt, because I feel like, you know, how do I even complain about the landscape? I'm still surviving, you know, so I mean, that's one thing. I also find that I'm working many more hours because of the nature of online work, you know, rates have gone down. So I'm working for rates that I was working for maybe like a decade ago. And in some ways that compensation makes sense. If I'm sitting in my house, and you know, I am wearing my pajama bottoms, but you know, I'm doing the gig on screen, it's fine. Like I don't have to, I don't have to travel anymore. I don't have to spend the, you know, those overhead costs of having to go to the venue and all those other things, a lot of them have been taken out, you know. But but now that you do have production capacity being invested in creating events that can be experienced on screen, you know, that should those that the the money that I'm being paid for doing those kind of events should still be the same, and it isn't. So we've taken a huge knock in terms of rates, you know, but the work is not less, you know, also because of this screen life. Many festivals have gone online, which is amazing. I think it's a bonus. I think we have now like reams and reams and reams of online data and archive for creative events and festivals that have gone online. I think that is a huge benefit and a huge a huge plus, you know, for the future, you know, that that and particularly on the continent. I mean, we really struggle with archiving because I think for a lot of creatives on the continent, the choice is between survival, do I make the work? Or do I invest in archiving? You know, artists who really invest in archiving have a deliberate agenda to do that. And a lot of them are people who have money to be able to do that, you know, but if your choice is between bread and butter and, you know, do I do I record this for posterity? Most people don't, you know, so the it's a historic problem throughout the African diaspora, right? That I think in a strange way, Corona has helped remedy because everything is digital. These things are being recorded, which is fantastic in terms of rebuilding a memory, a kind of creative memory and canon that has been decimated by by by the histories that we've experienced. So on the one hand, you know, there's there's some really interesting things that are happening because we've accelerated our our leap into this digital era, you know, because all you need is a screen and wi-fi and people who are willing to share, there's a kind of underground quality to the creative interactions that are happening, particularly the ones that are artist driven, particularly the ones that are being driven by creatives themselves, you know, there is there is this sense of us being able to find the people who are genuinely interested in what we do, truly create building tribes and communities around our own unique offerings. And I see particular communities doing that quite successfully. I'd like to give two examples. In South Africa, there's a there's a in the last couple of years, I guess globally, the world has been asking questions around decolonization, you know, as a as a practice, as a philosophy, as a movement. With us, this really became heightened about six, seven years ago when we had our student protests, fees must fall, the which which was born out of the desire to remove the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at UCT. So roads must fall, became fees must fall, fees must fall, led to this massive question around decolonization. One of the beautiful byproducts of us asking that question on a national scale has been the resurgence of an appreciation, a celebration of indigenous knowledge systems, particularly African spirituality, which is centered around our ancestors, understanding, working with our ancestors as a healing modality. And what's really interesting about this particular indigenous knowledge system is that it's the fusion of so many different kinds of of tools. So it's a spiritual tool, but it also involves the creative arts, you know, it also involves psychology, it also involves history and and it's we live in a society where what maybe 30, 40 years ago, this modality, people's culture, people's connection to themselves was illegal. We had the suppression of witchcraft act, which was in place for a very, very long time, which essentially made the practice of ancestral worship in South Africa, our own indigenous spirituality was illegal. It never went away. It was driven underground. It's a big part of people's lives. So, you know, we lived in this kind of dual consciousness for a long time of this was these were things that you did at home, engaging with your spirituality and ancestral worship and your traditional practices was something that you did in the privacy of your own home of your own community. It was kept in secret, but, you know, out in front of people, everybody's Christian, everybody goes to church. These other practices are demonized. We don't do this kind of stuff. We're too evolved. We're too sophisticated for this, but you know, but everybody's doing it is kind of an open secret. It was a weird, weird, this weird dual consciousness that, that, that a lot of post-colonial societies find themselves in. So now there has been this resurgence of indigenous spirituality. There are young people who come from a class, a segment of society that traditionally would not be open about these kind of practices, you know, these are people who are embracing this openly. And it has created a really interesting movement online. A lot of these, so these are young people who've been initiated as healers in as healers as shaman, as what we would call sanguamas in their traditional, in their traditional healing practice. And they've taken this practice and put it online. So they're doing console, what would have been done, you know, usually in person, usually in, in a sacred kind of consultation room in a particular cultural context, that context has been moved into the digital space. And they're using the digital space to educate people, re-educate people, create community, sell products, consult, you know, it's, it's, I mean, it's, and it's obviously not without its own flaws. I think every community that I know that I'm a part of this doing some kind of resistance, resistance work is also fraught with its own kind of intra issues and battles, you know, so I mean, this, this community also, you'll find them fighting on Twitter, just like you'll find feminists fighting on Twitter and black people fighting on Twitter and queer folk fighting on Twitter, you know, it's not perfect, but we didn't see this en masse in the way that we have seen it 10 years ago. And I find this very exciting. And the fact that it is that as a, as a practice, it holds artists, artistic express forms of expression as central to its practice. I also find incredibly interesting. I think we are in a moment where, you know, as you said, so beautifully, Moenya, where, where I think we're just about to crack the wall in terms of figuring out how to take the skill sets that we have and make them live with integrity in this new medium, you know. And I think that artists and creatives have to be at the forefront of that artists and creatives, particularly from the global south, from Africa, from India, from Latin America, we have to be at the forefront of that. I think that will help to dismantle some of the divides that have existed historically and been exacerbated by Corona. And if we don't do that, I think we are in danger of living in a world where, you know, we in the global south are going to be sitting and waiting for other people to book us for jobs. I don't want to be on the receiving end of somebody else's imagination in order for me to survive. I don't want to be a part of someone else's plan in order for me to feed my kids and in order for my work to be remembered. And I think if, if we don't find a way of accelerating the opportunities for, for African people to be able to participate meaningfully in this new digital era, then, then we will continue to be a kind of creative ghetto that gets, that gets mind, you know, where people come to harvest ideas, where people come to harvest our creative output, but where we are always on the receiving end of somebody else's plan, where we're not initiating our own plan. You know, this is what terrifies me the most. I'd like to share another example before I open things up. I know I've been speaking a lot, please forgive me. My last example is I want to talk about versus. So versus is it's a platform that was started on Instagram during hardcore lockdown last year by two very famous producers by Timberland and who's the other one? Alicia Keys' husband man. What's his name? That guy. Swiss Beats by Timberland and by Swiss Beats. And they had a conversation with each other, they had a conversation with each other that led to the creation of this, what's become an online phenomenon, a social media phenomenon. They created a platform where they would come and play music, play each other's music, speak about how the music was created, but essentially it was like, you know, it was like a show in the form of a competition, hence it's called versus. What's been really interesting about it? I mean, there are things that are kind of irritating about it because I think it's because it's the US and because you're dealing with these kind of multimillionaire producers and Hollywood and all of that, it got commercialized very, very quickly, you know, which kind of makes it irritating and makes it difficult to look at as an underground phenomenon. But I find it really interesting because it started as an underground phenomenon. And what it's done is it's highlighted a lot of the seminal work that has been created by African-American musicians over the last 40 years. So you've got three generations of people tuned in to Instagram to watch artists like, you know, Earth, Wind and Fire and the Gap band and Tevin Campbell and SWV, people who've made R&B and hip hop, people, artists who have not been on the charts for at least 20 years have had millions of people tuning in to these programs. So for me, it shows that it's a way of showing how the contributions of these particular creatives who are no longer marketable or sellable in the eyes of the kind of mainstream music industry, but showing the deep, meaningful prolific contributions that they've made to Black culture and to music as a whole and showing that that contribution is still very relevant and still has an audience. I find this very, very exciting. It's the understanding that there is a specific need in the community that we already exist, that the contribution is going to feed people who need it, who are already there, you know? And once you find it, once you're able to create the connection between the offering and the audience, it multiplies. The success becomes inevitable. So for me, I mean, apart from the fact that it's the United States, so we're dealing with a different, you know, like a highly developed music and arts entertainment industry, you're dealing with, you know, loads and loads and loads of money. But in principle, in principle, the idea, the inspiration that created this successful platform could be replicated anywhere else, you know? What is it that we value, that we know other people will appreciate, that we can offer, that we could not offer in any other time because the platforms and the space did not exist to allow us to make this particular offering? What is it that we can offer and which audience needs it? And then we can start to think about ways of creating new art forms, new artistic offerings, new communities. This is what I find very, very exciting. Apart from the fact that, you know, the majority of people in my sector right now are struggling just to make the rent, you know? There's a kernel, a seed of possibility that exists in this moment that is unprecedented, that I find completely compelling and fascinating and invigorating when I'm able to get away from the darkness of everything else that is happening right now. So juicy, so juicy and so rich and so much. You've said so much that is compelling and insightful and the floor is open, it's open, right? It's been open. Some of the things that are just sitting with me, a level of what you've shared in particular are, you have an incredible way of asking questions, like I really appreciate your way of articulating the kinds of questions to be asking in this moment and I really, I'm really grateful for that kind of clarity and insight and one of them is this, you know, to ask the question of what the connection is between the offering and the audience and to take, you know, in this moment in particular to be asking that question because it does feel like, you know, I feel like I'm in a context at the moment in the university for instance where that isn't necessarily a question that gets asked historically, right? You come if you can afford to come, you come if you can get a bursary, you come if your grades are, you know, okay enough to get you in, but to be in a position where you're really, it feels like it's a question about purpose, you know, and one of the things that is continuously, you know, as I imagine what the next thing might look like, what the alternative training spaces might look like is this question of purpose, what is it for actually, you know, if these other models of working and training are, you know, are on their way out or in crisis in a particular way, then what is the next thing for? It feels like a real privilege in a way to ask that question and to be able to build something from purpose, you know, to really be, to be clearer about even if it's like, okay, it's not that, you know, even if it's like, okay, you know, it's not that and it's not that and it's not that towards being clear about what it is then, you know, what the offering is then and who gets to participate, who, you know, how to be exclusive even in a generative way. And I say that cautiously because, you know, certainly, you know, I'm aware of the baggage around making decisions around who can and can't participate in certain things, but there's also, I feel like if the purpose is clearer, if the offering is clear, then it also dictates who then, who then it might attract or be for like who the audience is ideally. So I really, I mean, there's so many other things I wrote down, but that is like really resonating big bells of fire in my brain right now. Thank you. Anyone else sitting with staff thoughts? Questions? Resonances? Ideas? Jehan says he pulled the quote, I don't want to be on the receiving end of someone else's imagination that happened with a lot of the cultural funding projects we had over the last two decades here. Yeah, this is what happens. This is what happens in the global south. You know, I had a really interesting conversation with Sarah Machette a couple of weeks ago. Oh no, not a couple of weeks ago, a year ago, just before we even started this thing. And I kind of pushed back on the idea of south, like she was talking about south-south cooperation and the great need for it. And what I found with this huge ability of there's still going to be imbalances, but this democratization of the tools of production, this democratization of access, the sudden universal access to audiences or the capacity of it's easier. But then you used good examples of like what happens in America, et cetera, like people with capitals still have an edge and an advantage. But there is a new space coming up. But I almost feel like we're still framing things. Okay, I'm going to put myself out here. We're still framing things in post-colonial discourse. And I just feel like that might have also been destroyed and thrown to pieces in this moment in the same way that everything else has been. Now what do I mean when I say that? I told you I want to put myself out here. And this is a thought exercise because the pushback a year ago, two years ago, oh sorry, a year ago was that instead of it being south-south cooperation or whatever, but does that dichotomy even need to exist anymore in the new imaginings, in the new, this kernels that you think of, it has potential beyond the old framings where suddenly people in the UK, the US, Sao Paulo, Philippines, they're all equally accessible to me as somebody who wants to get something done or do something. And so therefore it's a whole new dynamic. Yes, there are still the vestiges and all of the legacy sort of issues of that thinking that still exist. And the legacy realities that still exist, like the first people to embrace technology and show us all the potential were examples from Australia and London of what this new medium can do for theatre. Or even the fact that there was one really telling moment where we were having an unrehearsed futures conversation. And one of the participants was in a rehearsal room rehearsing a musical and saying, I'm just stepping out of my rehearsal so I can be a part of this conversation while all of us were still in lockdown. So those hierarchies still exist and those things still exist. But I almost am beginning to think that I wonder if the framing, because you talked about the kernel and this kernel can grow in anything. And I'm just thinking that in the plowing up of everything, have we also plowed up the notion of those hierarchies and post-colonialities? Do we need to even think about those? Because the idea, you spoke about the underground, new undergrounds, right? But then we also spoke about the old, like we framed it in the idea of where does resistance lie? Like we have to resist something, we have to resist hegemony, we have to resist hierarchy, we have to resist this, we have to resist that. That was also pre-pandemic. Now is it resistance or is it a new underground? Because we've churned up, when the plow went through the field and broke up everything, we've churned it all up, including notions of underground, including notions of south-south, north-south, etc. And so that's what I'm sort of, that's what I kind of thinking about. And I was even thinking about the idea of the word democratization as well. Because I don't have a question at the end of this Moenya, I'm sorry. But the thought that is coming to me is, do we need to also reframe or do we also need to churn up some of the stuff that we have been framed and using all this time? I mean what you're saying is really explosive and important and exciting, because it demands a new language. We're in a new landscape, so we need a new language, we need new lenses, we need a new frame, right? But I'm also equally thinking about the fact that old demons also came to haunt us in huge ways during this crisis. So in South Africa, our demons are inequality. Inequality has been exacerbated by this crisis. Racialized inequality has been exacerbated by this crisis. There are people who got very rich off of this crisis, but those people who got rich were already rich. And corruption was also, the volume got turned up very high on corruption. Our government became even more, well I mean they've been corrupt, but they became even more corrupt. So how do you resolve those issues? Because those issues still exist, they're born of the old frame, they're born of the old paradigm. In many ways, I think it's the old paradigm kicking back and still saying, hey I'm still relevant, hey I'm still important. I mean you look at who died. If I look at South Africa, the landscape, who have we lost? If you have no medical aid and you are relying on a public hospital. I get that. I think that we've also realized that the pandemic just heightened the sense of every pre-existing inequality that existed. It heightened all of the schisms that we talk about. Everything was in that hyper-realism mode. Now we're living it all. And I like the image of the idea that it's almost kicking back to say that these old hierarchies and these old injustices and these old legacy issues are still extremely relevant and we're not going anywhere. So that also makes sense. But I'm thinking that what is the new response? What is the new place? Because there are people cohesion. I mean if we look at the creator response or if we look at the social community response in India, for example, during a really brutal second wave. We have seen all kinds of things that seem to be coming out, enabled by these technologies for whoever has them, that just are seeming to create a new community, a new identity, a new actionable, a new space, despite everything, despite the kickback, despite the old titan, the ideas of the old titans clashing above hand and destroying themselves in what is an inevitable journey towards destruction and ending. I think capitalism is on the way out eventually, I hope. But this is where the new replacement is growing. It's growing from underneath and it's growing regardless of what happens up there. And that's maybe too idealistic. I don't know, anyone else want to rescue me? You're speaking about the beyond that I aspire to. You're speaking about the beyond that I can see but can't touch yet. What in the now that you have been seeing over the last couple of months or couple of the last year and a half is showing you those kernels of the possibilities in the beyond? Because that's, by the way, that's my quest, when it hasn't heard. The international conversations, international digital conversations across diasporas, that for me has also been mind-blowing. Looking at the African diaspora as a global collective, as a global collective of diasporas and realizing that many of us, whether we are on the continent or outside of the continent, are faced with similar challenges. I keep coming back to something I heard from a conversation last year that was convened by the correspondent, which I think doesn't exist anymore. So publication based on Amsterdam digital publication convenes this round table of African creatives. And I've been a part of many of these kinds of discussions over the last year. Discussions that probably I've connected with people that it would have taken me a decade to be able to connect with had I been traveling the old way packing my suitcase to go and do the festival in the place. So that for one thing is amazing. But one thing Blitz said is that we are sitting in countries where we operate in countries where there's been institutional collapse. So as an African creative, you have to not just create your work but also be the institution that supports your work. And I was very aware of this in South Africa, but I didn't realize that this is a problem that exists throughout the world for African creatives. And I guess I don't know how to, he was saying one of the ideas that he put forward, which I found very interesting is that we should use each other, enable each other to be each other's institutions. So if we're struggling with capacity, marketing, financing, those are things that we can draw on from the collective. And I don't know if we yet, for me just being able to see each other as this collective was a mind blowing idea to draw on that collective as a resource, as a material resource for skills, for labor, for funding is a radical idea for me. I find that very exciting. Can I move some of the things that are amazing things that are in the chat into this conversation? Tell Kazane this, I mean, if you would like to summarize what you've written here and say it out loud, you're very welcome to. And anyone else in fact who has got a nice chunky contribution in the chat, Sive, Amy, please feel free to put some of these thoughts in the room through your voice if you would like. Let's talk Kazane saying, Oh, the pandemic redefined art, we saw young people engaging in dance challenges that indirectly promoted music, we saw cooking lessons being shared online, the art of teaching even changed. My only gripe is that governments in most countries don't realize the importance of artists who not only curate the presence but also project the future. How can normal people who fall outside of the scope of artists challenge the powers that be and also contribute to the movement which artists are forever engaged in. Thank you for acknowledging that post pandemic, things will never be the same again, how then do we reframe conversations around the art sector. A friend of mine, community health activist who's been involved in trying to get equal access to vaccines in South Africa, many of the people who've been involved in that movement, old activists who come from the HIV movement. And he said that, you know, that the game changer happened with HIV when people stopped seeing HIV as an issue that only affects HIV positive people and started seeing it as a collective issue. So the lack of access to ARVs became an issue, a national issue. For us, I think the, we suffer from the fact that the arts are still seen as, as a tool for the chosen few, you know, this is, the arts are for artistic, artifati people who belong in that special category of people over there, you know, we have not inculcated in broader society that access to the arts is a human right. We've not inculcated in the broader society the importance of the arts as a lifeline, as an imaginative tool, a healing tool, an organizing tool, an intellectual, spiritual, psychological processing tool that each individual, every individual needs. So we as people who care about the arts can see what the absence of the arts has done to our people and how detrimental it has been to the soul of our people to not have access every day to the broader arts, you know, but to get ordinary people to understand that, to see the value of something in its absence is, that's very challenging. How do you sell the importance of something when people have not seen and experienced the importance of that thing in their own lives? I think what you're asking is a very important question. I can just jump quickly to the comment that Amy makes in connection to what you've just said level. Just reading out of the chat, many of my friends in the US who've been working in the precarious fringe theater sector have moved directly into social justice and activism of acting. They're no longer making work for the critically sympathetic quote unquote church and are now militating. Is that right? Militating. Yes, directly. Seems like a cultural turning point. Yeah, absolutely. Amy, I don't know if you want to expand on that at all. You know, when you were talking about purpose, and I think that's, you know, sort of what it may come down to in a way is that it seemed like an effective thing to be creating work that was critical and that audiences would be sympathetic to that. It was sort of, I think, you know, the communities that would attend the theater were sympathetic and similar to the people making theater. In many cases, the same community, I mean, there's a joke in Britain that, you know, the 10 pound note is just being circulated, basically. So it was a sort of sense that, you know, every sort of making art for each other. And then then this curious thing in the States where in the midst of this terrible pressure to stay indoors and not do anything, actually, people did the exact opposite and just took to the street. It seemed like like it was actually the kind of birth of rebirth of some kind of activism. So just, I'm really curious about that's, I mean, you seem to be describing some things that look a bit like that, but not perhaps identical. I mean, I think with the this the centering of social justice politics in the mainstream in the last couple of years has been, it's been a gradual shift. And I mean, Corona certainly like accelerated that in ways that we couldn't have expected. But if you think about, you know, Me Too, and this wave of feminism that we are in, Black Lives Matter, Fees Must Fall, you know, these are these are movements, social movements that have been gaining enormous traction for the last couple of years. I mean, the fact that, you know, wokeness is even a mainstream cliche. Now it speaks to this moment in history that we find ourselves in. I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised that this is the transition that has happened in the United States, you know, I think that the kind of social justice movement and creative movements have always been very closely linked, you know, and I think as the social justice issues that are at the kind of poor society as they change and evolve, so too will the creatives who choose to respond to these issues also change and evolve, you know. But I think we're in this moment where these issues are at the center of all discourse. I can't think of a similar political moment, you know, maybe, you know, the anti-Vietnam movement right in the 60s and the 70s or the civil rights movement or the certainly the anti-apartheid movement, you know, we've seen these with these moments in history where that very obvious connection between the creativity between the creative and the political, you know, becomes amplified. And I think we're in that now. We are definitely living through that. I mean, who had no political consciousness? Well, you can't really say that because even not being politically conscious is a form of politics, right? But, you know, even artists who in their mainstream personas did not express any political views a decade ago, 15 years ago, are suddenly feminists, are suddenly black consciousness, are suddenly saying black lives matter, you know. And I find this very interesting, you know, I mean, how much of it is driven by the need to remain relevant? But I mean, even regardless of that, right? I mean, people, every creative is entitled to their own evolution, right? Even, I mean, that my political ideas are not what they were a decade ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, you know, so however you come to consciousness is how you come to consciousness. If you use your platform to share it, great, you know. But I think what you're talking about is something that I think it's a global phenomenon. Can I say something? Go ahead, Johan. And then Sister Zeissander, go ahead, Johan. Sister, if you want to go first, it's fine. This can be great. Thank you. I'm going to leave my video off because my internet's a bit unstable. I'm speaking to you all from Narm. I'm in Melbourne, Australia, so this is really interesting talking about diasporic, like African communities and how we create and engage with institutions and obviously the power imbalances that are still at play and that these institutions have never really been there for us. And I'm hopping in now on this thread of, you know, how social justice movements have entered into that space of the art and creation. And what I'm witnessing is and you know, because my art was always quite political and I think now it's kind of, you know, it's become quite the norm for folks to be quite political in these spaces. But I think it's also because the institutions have recognized that in order to remain relevant, you know, we can't keep pushing out neighbors without Black people. You know what I mean? And like everything is TV based. It's become very apparent that, you know, we're on a Black continent. It's stolen Black land and we're still very much in an apartheid situation here. And so just that I worry about that as well because I feel like our agenda as among specifically for the African diaspora that's creating here, but of course people from everywhere, that our agenda has actually been driven by a hijacking of that social movement by the institutions themselves because it is now a what do they call it? It's a condition of funding that they show that they have diversity or that they've considered diversity within their programming. And there's a lot of cherry picking of artists who well, toe the line, you know. And I think, you know, a lot of the work, like whether I think work actually stands off at the end of the day. And when I say stands up, I mean, the community can be brought in. So a group of people who would never in their lives go into the theater because it's not where they feel comfortable, right? It's just the space where they've always been excluded. If you can put on a work of art and they can walk out of their feeling like I belong here and that work spoke to me, then it stands. Right? But the people who are being chosen, and I don't want to speak out of turn here, obviously I don't like to disfolk, but I worry that the folks who have been chosen to put on work within the social justice moment that we're in are the ones who kind of conform to the status quo. They won't rock the boat nearly as much. So I'm excited by this conversation because I think, yes, it's important to take advantage of, you know, all the opportunities that are out there. You know, you've got to have people making moves on all sides. And I'm excited with this digital era that we're in because it does allow for these conversations to occur. Like the South-South dialogue can actually keep happening. It can actually create things, you know, like what you were saying before, about, you know, tapping into communities and networks that are global, you know, to put on programs on seats or to get the marketing or, you know, like that's really exciting. I think that that's where my mind is. I'm worried about the production quality and the cost. That's associated with actually being able to put something on that is great. That's what I worry about because I don't know if the low tech thing can go. I mean, personally, I've chosen podcasting because I have, you know, like 10, 15 years of experience in community radio and I know that I can, you know, like really control the standard and quality of that. But in terms of video, I'm just, yeah, that's, I think that's where we're all going to stumble a little bit because the cost, the cost. You know, I don't think we should be, I mean, first of all, thank you for your contribution. I think you raised a number of really important issues and I don't want to make them. Emmanuel Gamor, West African podcaster, entrepreneur, he encourages everybody to have a podcast. He says every creative should have a podcast for the, again, to address this issue of these absent archives, right? So what you're doing is really important work and a template for the kinds of work that could evolve out of it going forward. I think you write about access, you know, you are right about the question around budgets and around financing. I think this moment that we're in is a great experiment. It's fertile ground for lots of experimentation and reimagining. And again, like your ability to be free within this space, to truly push boundaries within this space is financially dependent. You know, you can only experiment when you have a full belly. You can only experiment when you have access. So even just being able to think in that way already, you have to have, you have to be able to pay your bills to be able to dream in that realm right now. And many people are not able to pay their bills, which again, you know, comes back to what you're speaking about when it comes to, to, to gatekeeping, you know, and gatekeeping is real. And there's many ways of gatekeeping as well, you know, in, in, in South Africa, we have freedom of speech, but you can very quickly be locked out of economic funding, public funding, public events that are publicly funded, you know, you and I mean, no one is going to come on your knock on your door and say, excuse me, you've been blacklisted because of that thing you said, you'll just see certain, certain kinds, certain kinds of opportunities will just go away and no one will say anything to you about it. You know, before earlier this morning, when Wenya and I were having our briefing about this session, Wenya, we spoke about the kinds of, some of the kinds of festivals that exist that are open to African artists around the world. There have been many festivals, you know, there are a couple of, let me not say many, there are a couple of particular festivals that I can think of that have been going for a very long time, you know, their bread and butter is bringing African artists to the West. And now, I mean, you think about vaccine apartheid and, you know, right now we are in the throes of a heavy lockdown, we're in the throes of the third wave, even just being able to get out of the country is an enormous privilege. There are artists, I can think of, you know, one incredibly wealthy South African artist who has been able to privately test and vaccinate his entire cast because they're going to Europe, right? And then what happens to everybody else? You know, what happens when we cross, and if you are about a part of that elite, what happens when you get to Europe, you know, what happens when you get to America? But sure, and I honestly, I don't know how to answer that. I do think that corporates, speaking about kind of corporate gatekeeping, I think that corporates have always done that. Corporates take what is happening on the underground, once it hits the mainstream, they convert it into their own language, they repurpose it, they mainstream it in another way that makes it lose value, you know? But I think what's interesting about this moment that we're in right now is that we have the opportunity to talk back. We have the opportunity to build our own communities that maintain the integrity of what it is that we are about, you know? Even if that is not reflected in the mainstream, it is still possible. And it's still possible to do so in a way that is visible because of social media that hasn't existed before, you know? People, I mean, that is, that's what this period of resistance has been about online, right? It's talking back, talking back to these hegemonies, speaking back to patriarchy, speaking back to government, speaking back to the corporates. I mean, that sends, that can easily, you know, go off into a whole another conversation about cancel culture that I don't want to have right now. These tools are imperfect, they're not perfect tools, they're imperfect tools, but they are available to us and they give us more opportunity to be able to, I think, have retained some kind of power over our creativity. No, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I, everything that you said really resonates. And I, I'm in a moment of deep reflection right now in terms of my practice and really where I focus my energy, whether I'm speaking back, who I'm speaking to, because right now what excites me is that I can actually speak to my people, wherever we are, I can actually speak to my people, I can connect with them, I can figure out what's going on, and I can create art that speaks to us. And I kind of feel like that's really where I want to put my energy. We'll see what happens because the funding then becomes a question, but we'll see what happens, you know, it's like, this is just the era that we're in. I mean, I'm privileged in that, you know, Australia has a social welfare system. So, you know, while that's, while that's here, then for artists that that works, you know, it's not perfect. It's not like, you know, it's expensive to live in Melbourne, but it's, I'm not, you know, I'm privileged in that, in that, in that sense that I've, you know, I can access systems and funding that can do that. But before COVID, oh my goodness, gig economy, precarious employment, didn't know if you could make rents, like, so this has actually created its breathing space. Like I've actually, it's like being on a prolonged residency, in fact. And I just think that this is what the art should look like all the time. But that's such a great question also, like, who are my people? I mean, you could spend your whole entire life revisiting just that question. And, and, you know, who are my people? Who are my people geographically? Who are my people politically? Who are my people spiritually? Who are my people ancestrally? Who are my people in terms of my values? Are my people who, my people, who I imagine my people to be right now? Is that who I imagine to be 10 years ago? Is that who they could be 10 years from? You know, I think these are really, that's a really fascinating and important question. I think that that's what I really, I think that that's, that was going to be a point I wanted to build on because, because the idea of who are my people, suddenly it doesn't have to become like it's, it's, it's like, who are my people? I don't have a social, I don't know, I don't have a social cultural identity. I don't have a strong identity reference point. I have a geographic one. I have an economic class identity. I have, I have an identity of experience of being, you know, one of the privileged children of post-coloniality and therefore being able to speak English and do all the things I do. In that sense, I identify completely with any, anybody who comes from a previous colony has gone off to the US or the UK and has studied and come back to their homes. Those are my people, for example, right? Completely right there. First, my first set of people. I think with the pandemic, the, if you looked at all of these identifying factors, be it geography, et cetera, as equalizers or graphic equalizer nodes, then you would pull down the one on geographic. You would pull down the one on, on, on, even possibly as for a while, but even possibly race identity. I don't know. I'm putting that one out there as a thought, because I'm trying to see what all is explodable in order for the new kernels to grow. And I just wanted to come back to this idea of more interesting about purpose, like what is the purpose of it? Because I was reading an article by Malcolm Gladwell a couple of years ago just outside the revolutions, the, you know, the Iranian revolution, et cetera, where everyone was celebrated the advent of social media in, in revolutionary practice. And he wrote a scaling article about why the revolution will not be treated. And he compared the whole thing to the civil rights sit-ins that happened in the South, where it took strong time networks to make a movement happen. And how the Iranian revolution, et cetera, failed. And then of course, to, to wrap it up in order to show how completely all the people celebrating social media as a revolutionary tool were blowing smoke up their own bumps. He just talked about how it successfully managed to find some New Yorker's iPhone in, because of a big social media movement that helped somebody locate their iPhone that had been left in a cab. And he said, that's what social media is going to do. It's not going to create revolution. But he wrote this before Black Lives Matter, before the George Floyd case. And he wrote this and I found him on Instagram and I know he's got 10 million followers and he's never going to reply to me. But I said, listen, you wrote this then. What do you think now? And so I'm thinking about purpose being this idea of how, and this comes back to what Ngani has been talking about. He's not here today. How can we create some kind of radical intimacy in this space so that we can create those strong tie connections that were, which is a contemporary equivalent of the strong tie connection that allowed four roommates from a dorm in a black college in Southern United States to go and say, listen, we're going to go and sit in at this diner until we get served. It was because they had a strong tie connection already. They were intimate with each other. They all lived in the same dorm. That was Malcolm Gladwell's argument. But it's happening now in this space. It's happening. There is a possibility for me feeling extremely close connections of bonding with the people I'm in this room with, for example, and to want to do something about it. So I'm just thinking about what theater can do in order to build that level of cohesiveness of social community in this space in a way as one of the purposes so that then real movements around new identities, institutional devising like Amy spoke of the idea that what you said beautifully in a different way is we all have to be each other's institutions or together we become an institution of another kind. All of that starts to happen. And this is what I'm imagining or thinking about. And I think it is important for us to keep breaking everything down almost to microbial. I actually think that when we answer the purpose question, we may not have a drama school to speak of. We may have a school that is purely about social activism or social engagement or about something else. And we won't even recognize the original tools that we used to build that space. That actually I'm feeling quite not good about that thought. But it is like if I'm going to say that we have to break up everything, including post-colonial discourse, then I have to say that we have to also break up the idea of what theater and theater practice is. I mean also wouldn't that be amazing like a digital applied art school for theater that's open to to everyone that's open to young and old, you know, based on, I mean, a set of criteria that is the purpose of that institution, right? So I can be sitting in South Africa and do a course at your school. Yeah, we're thinking about exactly that idea in terms of like united by purpose in what Amy has said, right, when we are united by common destiny. And I think that that's the thing that I'm trying to reach out to. And I don't know, I mean, there are lots of people who have been listening to these conversations, ongoing and seeing the build up to these thoughts. And I'd love to hear your perspectives because I'm also thinking about the need for such a thing coming out from the fact that I think many people right now who have access to digital media, who have access to cell phones, et cetera, but who are living in extremely precarious moments themselves, they're all looking around saying, institutions have failed us, the world has failed us, the disruptions, the ongoing disruptions have shown us how all the things that we took for granted as our safety nets as our ability to give us a safe space have failed us more than usual. I mean, it was already failing and everyone was there, but it's like now we see how bad the failure is. And so everyone, I think there is a common cause, a common destiny where everyone is saying something to the extent of there's got to be something better than this. There's got to be a better way. And the point is, if now you know that at least three out of six billion people are feeling this way, then how does one tap into that? Because it's also about the fact of a lack of empowerment, right? And if you can just find a way to give people, again, I think theater can do this. But if you can find a way to give people their voice, their ability to initiate themselves, their ability to commune themselves, none of this will feed you, none of this will put a roof over your head. But for whoever can, if that is there, then have we not really truly democratized resistance, rebellion, or not even that? Let me break those ideas because we're not, I don't really care anymore about what we're resisting. Haven't we just democratized agency? And I mean it, I mean, like I think I said it to this one's comment, Tokozane's comment. But I just think that why do we even want to look at what governments need to do for us? Whose permission are we waiting for? Those are the institutions that have failed us time and time again, year on year, decade on decade. The idea of nation-state has failed us. The idea of identity politics has failed us. Can I just invite Sive, if you would like to say you've been consistent in the chat with some really valuable contributions there? And if you would like to put any of it in the room through your voice, please feel free. And I particularly want to scroll back here to something that you said early on and with your permission to just read it out. So from Sive, I think and feel in my heart that the target audience should be the youth. I remember doing arts and culture at school as a subject and all I wanted to do was just stay in that classroom. I think and feel in my heart that we need to find ways of training young people to believe in the creative mindsets at a very young age and also provide those opportunities where they can utilize their creativity. And we need to allow them to lead and set up help, was it gone, and set the tone for the kind of change they envision, the kind of problems they seek to solve and truly flow with their perspective. I just wanted to make sure that was set out loud in case anybody missed it. Thank you for that. We have just a few minutes left of the formal, this is don't forget your thought level. I just want to say we need to officially turn off the recording in a few minutes, but there's the after party, we can just flow right into the after party. So please go ahead level with what you're about to say. So on the subject of institutional collapse and us looking at, we're looking at kind of democracy and our governments imploding in real time, you know, what exists beyond this, I don't know what exists beyond the nation state, I don't know what exists beyond the current identity politics that we are grappling with, I don't know, but I know that the creative imagination that is going to give birth to those content concepts is alive inside of artists right now. So artists need to be able need to give, we need to give ourselves and each other the space to be able to grapple with these issues. And I think that the reason why we do not have this space is what we must resist. So when Siva talks about how young people need to be given access to arts and culture in school, of course, I mean, we have a bill of rights in this country in our constitution that guarantees the right to access to culture. So culture in that sense is on is weighted the same way that healthcare is is weighted the same way that shelter is right is weighted the same way that education is, but to give substance and meaning to that right, you would have to also support creative endeavors and and and creatives in our society and that's where the rub is right. If you start inculcating an appreciation of the arts from an early age in this society, you are going to breed resistance because that's what the arts do. They create critical thinkers, they create people who can imagine, they create people who can problem solve no matter what it is that you do, you expose an engineer to the arts or a lawyer to the arts, they become better at being an engineer and a lawyer because they're exposed to a huge offer a huge scale of thinking that they couldn't imagine before that is what the arts give us. They give us imagination. They give us creative tools. Why would you want those tools in the hands and the minds of people who you need to oppress? Why would you want those tools in the hands and the minds of people who need to think just enough to be laborers, who need to think just enough to be economic cogs in a wheel that they didn't design, right? So I think really for us as practitioners, I think we really need to embrace for what has become, let me say, what has become helpful for me is to embrace the idea that my life in all of its facets, my creative life is an act of resistance. Me waking up, living, breathing, working, having a conversation with you is an act of resistance because I wasn't supposed to exist. I wouldn't have been, I certainly wouldn't have been possible a generation ago. I'm not in this country. My life wasn't possible for my mother or my grandmother or my great grandmother. I am the first, whatever the incarnation is, I am the first anomaly in this form of this thing to exist the way that I am as a creative. So I think we need to, once you understand that you are up against something, then you don't take on the ways that the system is designed to oppress you as a personal fault or flaw, right? It's not our fault that we don't have access to audiences. It's not our fault that our people don't understand what it is that they are missing. It's not our fault that our people cannot appreciate our lives, that our people cannot stand up and say, artist's lives matter with the ferocity with which they say, black lives matter. No one told them. Who taught them? It's not in the interests of those in power to teach people that they deserve art and culture because if they became those kinds of people, they would be people who tear down the system. So keeping that at the forefront of my mind, it helps me to put it in perspective, the obstacles and the blockages that I come up against. But also, you know, it helps us to understand why we need to make arts and culture central to the new world that we are imagining. And that, everyone, is a perfect place to pause before we take a breath and continue in the after party. So I officially just want to say, I mean, I can't thank you enough. I cannot thank you enough. This has been incredibly rich. And I'm so grateful to walk with you and to have had you be part of unrehearsed futures. We meet this happens once a week, every week. Please, all of you, come back. It's a Thursday situation near you. And speaking of a Thursday situation, Jayhan, do you want to set up next week? Who's up next week? Yeah. Next week we have our co-curator, Mugenie Insali, in conversation with Jackie Job, who is somebody who I have met and is just an amazing, she thinks in her body and it is amazing. And she's going to share as much as she can in this digital space, her thought processes. And the title is beautiful. It's called, hold on, Planetary Moves Dancing Across the Fault Lines. And I think it's these fault lines that I also want to explore because that's where we can break things up further and further and further. Followed by on the 22nd of July, we have Frank Chamberlain hosting. Hi, Frank. Big wave. Do you want to introduce that conversation? I think we have a title, which was Neutrality, Hindrance or Help. Yes. You're in conversation with Ellie. Ellie is here. Yes. Oh my God. That's great. Ellie and Madhu Natraj, who is a close fellow. Madhu and I are on the same fellowship. We're on something called the Aspen Fellowship. The only two artists in the room. And they're discussing a neutrality in actor training, Help or Hindrance, as Frank just said. Yes. So we look forward to that. We look forward to that. We're democratizing curation as well. And it's beautiful. Yeah. And beyond that, I have good news because I have Kamili feelings in conversation with Abhishek Majumdar beyond that. I think that's on the 29th of July. And they are going to be talking about writing beyond the show. And they're both creator writers. And they're just going to be talking about what they have discovered in this time in order to process the experience and how are we going to write for the future. And I'm thinking about the idea of writing as writing, not just writing for plays and script, but us authoring our own futures. So that's there. I'm going to quickly say again, and Falguni has done a great job. You can be a part of the ongoing conversation live, etc. Or you can build a conversation in your own head just by sticking in a pair of headphones and going off to the unrehearsed futures page, which is on the link and listening to all the conversations there. If it's too much to process the conversations orally whilst you're chopping your vegetables. Falguni, who is also an amazing journalist and reporter, apart from being an amazing theatre alumni of the drama school Mumbai, shout out to us, has written these lovely five page reportage pieces of each conversation, pulling out the most golden nuggets of each one. So Lebo, Wenya, in a few weeks Falguni is going to send you a little article and make you cross verify is this what you actually said because I'm quoting you. And then that will also get published on the website. So you can read the conversation in short condensed version, or you can listen to the whole conversation in all its richness. And so please do that. And yeah, and Amy, Wenya and Genny and I are binding our heads together about what a season three might look like and what some kind of bigger movement might look like out of thought into action. So if you have any thoughts on any of that, please write in with all our love. Thank you. I declare the after party.