 and a couple of other people just stayed on for hours, like hours, it was quite amazing. Welcome one and all, I will keep this very brief. We all know why we're here. We've all been here before. And if you guys want to, Jackie's, Jackie this is the first time you've come. Yes, but welcome, great. And I just, well, since we're all here and I get to say something different and we know it. Just so you know, all of us in the curatorial panel are trying to figure out what season two B is going to look like, or season three, or the second half of season two to be, not to be. I was like making a lot of jokes about that earlier. But we're going to take a little gap and then basically try and do another 20 back to back sessions, maybe come August, September, fall, we need our resident overlord is going to see to it that we come up with a plan. I'm really looking forward to Frank, it's you running a talk, right? Next, in the coming, yes. And you're running it with us. Yeah, it's fantastic. And you've got, I know you've got one of my co-fellows Madhu Natraj on the talk, and that's also beautiful. So really keen to, really keen to see if we can do more of those. So, you know, Kameli's here. I mean, I'm going to do, I'm going to sit back at Kameli's talk and let Abhishek and Kameli talk about Thomas. That's the plan. So that's the talk with Kameli. But it's clearly that a lot of the ongoing participants, the ongoing conversationalists are coming back and talking and having ideas for conversations. So the more of those can happen. I think it's really time that we start a group of people who think about how we can take this knowledge creation and turn it into small micro-actions everywhere and how that can then turn maybe into movements later on. I know that my own personal quest is to imagine a whole new para-institution which is tentatively titled Banyan where we try and figure out a theater-making organization for the future, for a future kind of theater's role in society, which seems to have less and less to do with the stage and the black box and much more to do with all the things that theater can do once you have trained in the stage and the black box. So I will leave it at that and keep coming back and keep going to the knowledge creation that is happening on the website. And Ngeni, Jaki, all yours, welcome. Thank you, Jayhan and hello, everyone. Good to see you again. Yeah, I'm super excited about this conversation. I'm joined by my colleague and friend, Jaki Jo from the CCDPS, and I'm going to hand over to Jaki to briefly introduce herself and just tell us a little bit about who you are. And then we'll jump straight into the conversation, which although, you know, I want to flag that it's very clearly kind of framed initially as a conversation on dance practice specifically. But my hope is that, our hope, rather, is that dance is a window into thinking more broadly about bodily practices, right? So not text-based theater or performance-based work, but about how working through the body kind of compels us to engage and possibly kind of work in ways that allows us to step across dance across kind of the various fault lines that kind of separate us and the world that we live in. Yeah, so even though we're taking off from dance as our initial footing, I'm hoping that it will quite swiftly kind of open up to the many different people in this room who I know kind of work through the body, whether that's in terms of the car or physical fears or any number of other ways to kind of address the core questions that we're grappling with today. Jackie. Over to you. I thought you were going to introduce me, but thank you. Oh no, I'm putting you on the spot. I'm the host, Jackie. Hello, everybody. My name's Jackie. I am a senior lecturer in the Center for Theater Dance and Performance Studies. And I have primarily, I come from a dance background. I am a dance. I still make work. I perform. I teach. And one of the interests, something that's really ameliorated my practice and my philosophy of the body over the last few years is I incorporate buttock principles into my teaching and my philosophy of the body. Brief introduction. Yeah, so just Mugenio is saying how it's true, to want to move away from just sticking to the dancing body and how we bend our knees and jump, roll and turn. It's what really interests me about the body is, and I think that really animates my practice is that one of the, I think fundamental pillars of the way I think is that I like to think of my body as not just this body, not just not limited by the class or racial or gender distinctions that we, the kind of way we signify bodies. But what really animates me is the sense that my body is energized by inside, what's inside, outside and around me and all of these different elements and difference here being very important word. All of these different elements kind of interpenetrate and create something that's much larger than any part in itself and much larger than just what this body seems to signify. And I find that very exciting. And it kind of gives me the imagination that I can carry on performing for a long, long time still because that there's not like a sell-by date for this body because it's not just this body. And yeah, I guess that's kind of a broad introduction to, yeah, where I'm at right now and in response to Bongani's introduction. Thanks, Jackie. Yeah, thank you so much for this dance. Yeah, so I'm not sure how familiar people in the room are with what's happening in South Africa right now. Even in preparing for this conversation, I was certainly confronted by a question that keeps on returning to me over and over again. There's this kind of massive crisis and I'll tell you a little about it now going on outside and trying to make sense of what it means to be sitting in a space of art making in the midst of doing things that seem frivolous for the federal road in the context of the kind of real pressing urgent things that are happening immediately outside our front doors. Yeah, and I'd like to circle back to the idea but just a bit of context for those who don't know. Since Wednesday, Thursday, Friday last week, there have been massive protests around South Africa initially in response to the imprisonment of former President Jacob Zuma on contempt of court charters had it done by the Constitutional Court, so it's our April's Court. 15 month imprisonment, there were protests about his imprisonment and those rapidly escalated into protests from service delivery and various other things, opportunism, just rank criminality. But there's been this massive losing on the scale we've never seen of warehouses, shops of malls being burnt down. It's probably crazy out there. So with all of this going down over the past week, I'm sitting here thinking, God, I have to sit down and have a conversation about how dance and about how performance and art helps us move across these imagined fault lines. And watching somebody who is empowered via all the apparatus of the state, the national president, having to beg practically people to control themselves to behave, makes me recognize that even with all of those instruments of power at his disposal, very little substantive capacity to change things immediately, right? So how much more so us in our little studios, in our homes and in our little spaces in relation to these big problems that are playing out outside? So I really struggle, I think, often with locating myself ethically in relation to what's going on outside and the work that we do. But I think something that I've found useful is to lean into that very simple question instead of running away from it. So in this context is why? Why dance? Why make art? What's the, you know, if one can defend the ceiling for volatility of what we do to what ends, right? And I think that there's some use, something generative in rehearsing the things that we think are of value and that we have to offer and being quite clear in naming what it is that we think we are doing when we engage in this art making. So Jack, I mean, to throw that back to you and also to everyone else in the room you may, you know, have anything to add to here. But how do we make sense of what we do and its capacity to effect real change in the world in the context of these seemingly insuperable kind of conflicts that we have to engage in every day without romanticizing what we do, right? Exactly. Yeah, no, it's a very, very important question, you know, and at the beginning of the year I had in January, I had been, we were in our second wave year of COVID and at that time in the, when we were experiencing the second wave in my immediate circle, I was, it felt very close to me. There were many people ill, there were many people that I knew that had died, et cetera, et cetera. And at the same time, I was putting on a live stream film that I've made of me prancing around as a praying mantis, you know, like seriously. The project is going back to literal prayer. You know, how do I justify this? How do I go and sit and go, welcome to this show when we know that we're experiencing such heartache right next to us, right, off screen? And then I was thinking, you know, like you said, like leaning to what it is we're doing and the idea of presence became I really started thinking about that. As I said before, the idea that it's not, I'm not just my body, but there are all these multiple elements into play all the time. So other than my being present as in, you see me in this space now in this particular body in a particular time, there's also this presence of the things that are invisible and that is carried through the practice. And so, and that comes through. It's about making that invisible visible in other ways, other than the toy toy and other than these all robust ways of saying that we are being activeistic and that we are acknowledging all the things that's going on in the world. But there are multiple ways of doing that too. And we can do it through our practice. I needed to remind myself of that, that how presence translates in that way too, the presence of what is absent, the presence of what's in one's imagination. And in that sense might be absent out there, but because through the performance, it becomes present. And then even the idea of time, the presence of this moment, that it's when one starts thinking about this interplay of multiple things, then you draw on the past and you shaping in this moment now, you are informing, reimagining something for the future. So that kind of, I needed to convince myself of that, remind myself of that once again, to feel, and I don't want to say justified, validated, but that it makes sense that I am here too. And even, and as I am here, I'm not here just by myself. It's not just me. And I think that really, this is another moment that we are, in the South Africa, seems like we're always having these moments, maybe globally we're always having these moments where we need to remind ourselves of why we do, why what we do in a very particular way as well. And as you said, when I said I was prancing around as a praying mantis quite literally, is even that, you know, the praying mantis is one of the big motivations of this latest work, my most recent work, is about showing the power of the invisible, the strength of the being vulnerable, the, you know, just how much can be said with what we choose to not see, what is present with what we choose to not see, et cetera, all of those, all of those things. And also how, you know, is the desire that we have to, you know, so for me, the praying mantis is all about desire and compassion. And I try, I work with those kinds of, I'm thinking about those qualities when I'm working through the praying mantis. And so just that, this desire that we want for change, this desire we want for transformation to be better, to be different, to reimagine. And at the same time, in order for that to happen, we need to allow things to happen. They need to be the sense of allowing things to be, which compassion can only do, that it's not necessarily within your own power to do that. It's about making space for everything so that things can unfold in a particular way. That's compassion. And so for me, I feel like I, that through the practice, if I remind myself of those fundamental principles, then I am very much engaged with how the world is at the moment. Yeah, it feels very real and relevant. Thanks, Trekkie. I love that you, pardon me, sorry, my dog is rather excited about something going on outside. I apologize, background wise. I like that you've kind of taken us to presence because that's one of the things that stands at the center of this conversation. Because in many ways, I think we've kicked this idea about in a couple of conversations that we've had here, is what the dental moment offers or perhaps prevents us from doing and it all seems to circulate on this question of, what does it mean to be present in the digital moment and the digital age? It also strikes me that this question of presence isn't something that's necessarily unique to Dan's practice in the theater, that all forms of performance in some way or the other kind of engage with this question of being present, of being present with others, of sharing space collectively. This is kind of utopian gesture, right? In sitting together collectively with performance. But I'm wondering what it is about Dan specifically or kind of body-based practices that don't begin from the text primarily or how they kind of produce a sense of presence that might be different or might complicate our understanding of what presence is in these kind of various performance contexts. And I made to go back to haunting because that's something else that I was picking up there. But I'm wondering whether the obviousness of the body, the centrality of the body and Dan's and these other kind of ways of working is conferring something onto our sensibility of what presence means. That is quite particular to us. That is quite particular to a human body that's different to perhaps a more conventional kind of traditional theatrical paradigm. Put differently, how do Dan's and presence articulate together and specifically in a way that's perhaps different to the theatrical kind of framing they are. Hmm, that's a really big question. We do have a question. You know, I mean, on one hand I think and this is just a conversation, right? So I'm not going to be like hell to these things. But my first thought that comes to mind is that the idea of presence because Dan's is so concerned with the body and the line of the body and the form and the musculature and how high we can jump and how perfectly we can balance and showing off the body, showing off the form of the body, not just the voice, which, you know, I mean, I'm being reductive, yeah, but like whereas maybe people in theater would be about the voice and how they can play with the different resonators, et cetera, et cetera. But the dance is like this whole body. And so there's a big ego that goes there. There's a really big ego with presence, with the showing how and showing, you know, and it's the back and the side and under the arm and under your feet. And it's like, you know, how you hold your head and the neck and it's all of this external that is so important, so, so important for dance. And it's something that I've really pushed against. And I say that, but of course I work the body. Of course I exercise and I work on the musculature and I'm working on all of these things with my body all the time because at the same time, I understand that this is the conduit that I'm needing to work through all my philosophies, whatever that might be, it's still a conduit. It's the way I navigate in the world, et cetera. You know, it's the car that needs the regular service, et cetera. So I need to look after this body and there's a particular, I need to eat healthy, I need to do all of those things so that I can present myself in the world. And so I think that one of the things, and so as important as that is, I think that often with dance, we get trapped, we just stop there. That the presence of the body just kind of, we get stuck with just this line form, et cetera. All of these things that we've been trained, you know, that we've been taught is important, but actually, there's, you know, when you talk about, I think when one looks at performers that there was like a real, could you say, oh, they had such a connection on stage. When we as audiences observe connection, it seldom goes to because he lifted her so high or because she jumped so high or because she could do the spit so wonderfully. It's never that. It's something else that's going on that we perceive as an audience. And when you're dancing, it's the same thing. You get a connection because of something else. There is this other kind of vibration that happens between bodies. And it's tapping into that vibration that is a lot more difficult because that vibration literally makes one shake, literally like pits you on edge. So yeah, there's, I think I'm going off your question is I started off saying that the, you know, that I think that we get stuck with ego, the dancers kind of sense of presence is stuck in that, I think, most of the time. And which is also another reason why you seldom find, there are very few dancers who are old. Like after 36, 40 years old, it's the old dancer. You know, it becomes this older body. It's like, and all of a sudden, it's like a completely different category. We stop, even when we're looking at presence of the dancer's body, we putting it in an age box as well. There's a certain kind of skin texture that we are requiring. You know, there's a certain kind of elasticity that we require of this. So it's a little bit messed up, I think. And I've really like tried to push against that, that there's a whole lot more to presence that what you think you're seeing is not the only thing. It's like, it's almost like scales have to go off our eyes so that we can see something else. And I think that if we can push into that more as performers, that's really exciting because then people end up imagining other things about themselves, other things about their own presence. They forget where they're sitting. They forget that they're in the theater if it's the theater or if it's in a field, they forget where they are. They get transported themselves because something else has happened in that presence moment because of the presence of the performance, the presence of the performer, the energy that's being conveyed, et cetera. It's an ongoing work. It's exciting. I love that you used the word connection because I think that helps me make sense of what I was reaching for, that sense of something intangible, but nevertheless public right around how we feel when watching these things happen. And I think maybe this relationship is about the relationship between presence and how it signals a kind of connection that exceeds just being physically present in the space. And I've seen the circles made a point here about witnessing, being witnesses and being witness and performance as a way of inviting that. And I 100% agree. I wonder if that sense of connection is founded in recognizing that these people, these bodies on stage, whether that's a kind of conventional stage or site-specific one of the case may be aren't just present in the space, but they are manifesting a kind of energetic presence that comes from being in the space together and recognizing the sharing of space collectively, both with co-performers, but also with the people in the audience, right, the spectator. So maybe it really is about co-presence, right, is that all presence is haunted by the things that are not present or the things that are not manifest or not tangible. And that sense of connection arises from being able to kind of lean into the sharing of space with others as the foundation of the thing rather than that egoistic idea. And it's just me. And so I'm also wondering the degree then to which we can think about kind of an additional step in that presencing, right, and how things like contact and touch, especially now when we're distanced by all of this, right, is around what being open to touch and being touched might mean then in the context of a moment when we are increasingly being distanced, when we are legally in some ways being prevented from being able to make physical contact with other people. And what that means then in terms of connection and in terms of recognizing our presence is founded in both a material contact with others as well as this kind of philosophical imaginative sharing of space with each other. Can I? By all means. Now, I just wanted to, before going on to the contact and touch, but it does link, you know, you're using the words, the presence of things and the presence of others. And I really, I think it's important to lean into things and lean into others. And that then when one leans into the kind of the sense behind those words, then it goes beyond just the people in the room, that the witnessing is not just about people that are witnessing because as soon as you start, or for me at least, I mean, over time, it's the centralizing being human, the importance of being human and only human and that we are above and over everything else around us has become less and less important. And so when it's about, when one is in communion with not just the performer that you were, as in the other human that you were, or the people, the audience, but also it's the energies in the space, it's the, the dust might, it's the, and I know I might sound ridiculous here, but it's this, it's like, there's so many elements that are witnessing, also from times gone by, you know, like from before, before you entered the space, there was something, there are other things, there were other people in the space, other worlds existed there. And so there's this, all of that comes into play. And so the witnessing is vast, you know? And then if one has that kind of sensibility, then you're not playing forward. You're not only playing for the audience that's there in front of you or around you, or what you're not just playing in that way, you're playing underneath and inside and you're playing and all of a sudden, everything becomes a lot more generous. And there's a, and then you begin to touch, I think. So, and then there's been, and so then contact, this idea of contact and this kind of obsession that we have that we need to touch with our hands, also is not that important. Why does touch need to be with my hand? And so for me with incorporating, so I say I incorporate butto principles, right? And so the ways of seeing is quite an, is one of the principles of butto where you've got like eyes all over the body. So, you know, there's not just these eyes that can see, but I've also developed these other sensibility of the body where, you know, if one were to imagine, for example, that the face was inverted onto the abdomen. So these, my breasts would be my eyes, my navel would be my nose, my mouth would be the pelvic area and vice versa. There's a whole other way I'd be looking at someone, touching someone, there's a whole other way that I'd be leaning on them, et cetera. And I find that really exciting. And, but what's interesting with this question is that, you know, last year, they were with COVID, we had all of these converse, everybody was all in a state of course, right? We still are, we're still trying to deal with how do we get to move together in the room? How can we, do we get past the cell screen thing? And what do we do when we're in contact? Because contact, touch, touch, touch is so important. And I joined in many of these conversations because for a long time I was, you know, I was, I've been teaching and really trying to think of the body and working and reimagining the body so that we touch each other differently, that we connect differently with each other. And not just in these conventional Westernized aesthetics, you know, where the feet are at the bottom and the heads at the top. And what was interesting is in dance environments, and I don't know if there are many dance people, I would, people would listen and nod their heads and then continue to talk about the 1.5 meter box and the importance of making sure that the bodies are staying apart and it would, we wouldn't talk about how do we, how can, what would happen if I were to touch with the back of my head? And what would happen if I were to imagine that the body was elastic lines? So if it's an elastic line and I touch, it's gonna move away from me and not towards me. And that's another way of perceiving contact, that it's moving away from you all the time instead of pushing against and doing all these roles and over and under and that's all wonderful. But it's not the only way to make contact. And I found that quite interesting. So I don't know if that's going to happen now too. I sound like a mad person talking and people go, hmm, lovely. And then we ask the next question because that's certainly what I found whenever I was in dance environments and I'd start talking about, you know, just let's just reimagine the contact work. It would get shut down with measurements of boxes and how many people can get into the space and that would become the obsession. So the administration of it would become a lot more engaging it seems for people than the actual work of trying to reimagine ourselves alongside someone else. Yeah, look, I don't think that's crazy at all. And, you know, there are two kinds of little themes that I want to pick up here that you've touched on again in relation to touch and contact and that's capacity to move us. And that pun is quite deliberate because I want to kind of group that word and all this expanse of kind of possible directions moving literally, but also moving affectively. And it's this question of sensuousness and how perhaps working through the body, I'm hearing you suggest, attunes us to firstly is feeling and sensing the world more thoughtfully through the flesh, is recognizing how the world is always sensuously embodied. So even when you're not necessarily thinking through or grounded in an awareness of how the body is registering things that there's always this kind of trace these ways that the body haunts everything we do and everything we do is haunted by the body, right? So it's sensuousness in those two registers is that we always collapse back into material flesh into a body in context and space and time. But then also we're attuning ourselves to engaging with the world through the matter of the body first rather than perhaps, you know, psychically or the other ways that we have preconditioned for entering into. So to the extent that I'm trying to imagine and seize onto something that does helps us to do that working through the body helps us to do, that's where it seems to be for me is that first we've spoken about this idea of perhaps shifting notions of presence or imagining other ways of presencing as J-Health suggests there, but also is this attunement to the sensuousness of the world that we live in and the kind of inviolable links between the kind of material, kind of fleshy body and kinds of concepts and ideas that shape how we engage with those. I'm just trying to kind of also catch the conversations on the side here in the chat. J-Health is saying, I feel like from previous talk, it was also about how we can deliver tools of creativity across this medium also applies to the idea that we can deliver experiences that build intimacy, that share suffering, that allow for catharsis and on all these dynamics of being present, but now it's a new kind of presencing. J-Health, what do you mean by a new kind of presencing? Are you kind of reaching for what else as well as perhaps it's a shift in what is that way of understanding? You already mentioned like as I was suggesting was exactly you already folded it into what you were saying. So I'm just listening in right now. I just, I'm just trying to think about the point of this is this yearning to go back to space, yearning to touch, yearning to go back to learning the way that we did in physical presence. I'm a little confused because we look at it, here's where I am. We look at it as sometimes we're celebrating what is now possible and the fact that you can actually create a lot of experiences in mediated environments across great distances now because the digital allows for that. And now it's just for us to explore and experiment on all the ways that we can have deliver and commune in different ways through the experience. But at the same time, I know that we are all people who trained in somatic, we trained somatically, right? We trained in space and we're trying to see how we can now explore this space with that prior knowledge. And so I am concerned about if I was to go rah rah, we can really do a lot more for a lot more people across this medium and still bring a lot of this stuff in but they don't have the original experience and I still, I don't still have an answer to that. And that's been a question that's been posed from day one. What happens, like it came in like, for example, when how do we end up people into the experience of theater if the first experience of theater is going to be digital? And yeah, so that old Chesna, he's still there. I don't have a way to get away from that. I'm not even sure if I'm looking for a way to get away from that. But I am trying to, I mean, one of the reasons listening to you Jack is really interesting is because I just feel like dancers and people working from dance, they seem to have adapted to everything much faster over here. They seem to be, they stepped into the space with much more alacrity than we did in the theater world, not to put a fake sort of dichotomy between the two. I think it's all part of a continuum. But I'm just, sorry, it's a chain of thought, Nene. It's not a, I'm still, the jury's still out with me on this. It's also me thinking about your idea and your quest of radical intimacy, like how do we continue to construct this? And just to give you a, and this is the last thing I'm gonna say and shut up and somebody else please take over. It's this idea of, I've been watching Elon Musk and everyone trying to get to Mars and, you know, and all of this going to space. And I love it. I love it for multiple reasons, right? But then I suddenly thought to myself that this is a physical corporeal manifestation of us and of consciousness, right? This is not just intellect or experience, it's consciousness. And I'm just saying that if we're pursuing, if we start going down the, if we start questing in the sense of radical intimacy, if we start questing in the sense of how we can bridge something where I can have a conversation with you, Nene, and we can feel for each other, even though we're in totally different spaces now. And we start building those out. Then who's to say we ever needed to physically move our bodies from anyone and Jackie, this is where you, yeah. Who's to say we need to ever physically transport our, why was the journey physical? Why can't it just be a journey of consciousness? And then, I mean, now that I'm thinking about it, think about somebody who's got total disabilities of multiple kinds there, either hearing impaired or sensory impaired or something like that. And we want to give them, or we want to give them, or they should be able to, they experience, sorry, but they should be able to, they do experience their own consciousness and their own, have their own experiences of the world, which are equally real. So now that I've sort of exploded all of that, I just feel like I don't have to map anything to physical, but don't I, I don't have to map it to intellectual? I don't know, this is where I'm at and it's a very swimming kind of space, sorry. No, thank you, Jaehan. Kamedi, I see your hand if you could give me just one second. Jaehan, that's a really, really rich kind of set of proposals as well, because one of the things that, and I know Jackie mentioned this in passing the other day, is this question of the assumption that we come to the digital space where is that we're assuming that we're engaging with this moment from an equal footing in terms of the bodies that are arriving within the digital space. Whereas in fact, people with different, differently abled bodies have always had to navigate the world that we've suddenly come to confront in ways that are not conventional, right? We're thinking about questions of access and all these other things, we're brand fresh with birds on that discussion, but people whose bodies don't kind of meet the standard of the typical body for whom the world is designed, have always already been engaged in these questions. So again, radical intimacy, but also thinking towards this kind of planetary outlook, I think that that's one of these opportunities is that we're being forced to reckon with the world in a way that we perhaps had not been compelled to in the past, and in doing so is to recognize that these limitations are unique to this moment now, perhaps, but that there are other people for whom the world is always limited in those ways. There was an interesting documentary that it was just kind of one of these short, I think, Fox documentaries or some of those Facebook shares where a lot of kind of non-neurotypically, I forget what the term is, kind of persons are talking about the terror that they feel about this return to normal because for the immediate kind of, you know, period of lockdown, the ways that we've been forced to engage with one another has actually opened up doors for a lot of people who otherwise would not be able to inhabit the world in a particular way. So absolutely, I think that there's a lot to be said for thinking from the opposite side of this conversation. We tend to lament what we've lost because of how we are compelled to work now, but there is also a lot that people who don't live in the world the way we do have gained from this moment. Camille. Yeah, I don't want to talk too long because that was already something really rich that Jihan left us. It's all just really interesting talking about just, even now, just as we're kind of transferring into talking about ability and disability in some ways too, just because I guess some of the poorer kind of arts, like basketball here in this country was always really powerful to me because there were a lot of young poor black guys. Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley came from deep south, very kind of very intense racial situations. And it always was meaningful to me. I remember Charles Barkley talking about, I was always listening because I was trying to find out what he did. It wasn't just that he's a talented, larger than life personality, but I was trying to figure out what he was doing. And he said, he knew because he was a shorter guy and he ends up being very popular because he was good at being able to get rebounds, which is a big man sport. And he was only six, five, most good rebounders are six, 10 or whatever. Sorry, I'm getting into the woods with this. But he said he would jump over a fence that was about, I think he said about four to five feet. And he just kept doing that for hours at a time because he knew the key to rebounding, even if he was gonna be a shorter player was to just keep, it was in his legs, not in his arms and strength, wasn't about being strong. And the guy asked him, he said, you did that specifically to try to get better at being able to jump and second jump, he said, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it was so precious for me to hear that because this guy is considered a world-class talent. I always had this impression that some athletes were because they were so creative on the court. They were rehearsing things that might not happen on the court with anybody on the court as if they were happening right there. And they had to put all the energy as if something was happening in front of them that wasn't in front of them. And it made me think, because I remember I came a lot when I'm talking about Michael Jordan and saying there's a creative quality. And I just never thought about basketball as being a creative thing, but obviously it is. And it just made me think about ability and disability and somebody being short at five foot 10 or somebody being seven foot tall. Anyway, this got me on to all these thinkings about the way in which someone expresses their body and whatever you got, you use and you find ways to be even super powered and whatever thing you have to overcompensate with. Anyway, let me shut up, I'm talking too much. But anyway. Not at all. Not at all. Jackie, I see what I have. Perhaps to put two final points on it, but the body is one of the things that is most easily within reach or you assume it to be, right? And that you assume that it's the same kind of body that is within easy reach for all of us. So it becomes easier, I think, to romanticize dance, these practices in the body as an open democratic kind of space for which we all work from an equal footing. But that's not necessarily the case. Those things are not as easily within reach for some of us. Yeah, committee. And that was the thing I wanted to mention too. These two were both the tallest people in their entire families for generations. And it made me think about what they were able to do with their families in terms of taking them out of poverty and transforming their lives in some way, just by playing this basketball. It made me think about the power of the imagination to push forward an image of yourself that doesn't even exist in reality, but gets pulled and stretched. So you're six foot five and six foot six to the length to which you've never, nobody in your family's ever been. Your arms and hands are bigger than anything. So anyway, just made me think about just the magic that Jackie's talking about translating into reality for some of these guys who were maybe in some of the poorer situations in their lives in terms of black people. Jackie? Yeah, I mean, I appreciate you saying that. I was, because when you were talking about him jumping over the fence over and over, I was thinking about the importance of iteration, you know, and it's like fake it until you make it. It's you have to believe it. You have to really imagine it and you keep on reinforcing that imagination. You keep on doing it over and over and over and eventually it manifests. It manifests in the way you are, to use the word that was used before the way you are being witnessed, but also the way you witness yourself, the way you experience the world. But to Jayan, you were talking about what's in, when he was saying, when you were talking about how does one get like, you know, people into these things, these questions that you were streaming with. How do you teach people for the first time, et cetera and all of that. And I was thinking that it's not so much about, you know, I think there's something about the quality of what we're doing and not so much like there's a certain kind of quality that goes into the consciousness. And I think, you know, you were saying so, because I don't think that it was easier for dancers than it's for theater people. I think both across the board, we are struggling with the same kinds of questions. But for me, when you were talking about consciousness, I was just, I started thinking, I was just thinking about this idea of consciousness. Again, Ben speaks about consciousness and experience. And this idea of that what we experience prior to speaking, prior to articulating that experience is consciousness, right? So prior to putting it in words in a language and in terms of our performance, I mean, I could speak reductively and say that the discipline of the dance or the way we're going to speak the words, et cetera, that would be a kind of the performance of everything that would be rehearsed, right? It's like of the experience of before the experience of the process then gets shown in that, in the way we articulate it. But that experience before we articulate it is consciousness. And that gets shown through gestures or through sound, through things, through actions that have not got no kind of particular form yet, that doesn't have a particular form yet. And that is a magical moment. That I think is what's leading more into that kind of consciousness. And only the body can, that is done through the body. So you were saying, so does this whole experience now mean that we just can sit and never have to leave our spaces because this digital space is so powerful? I don't agree because we experience things, we arrive at consciousness through the body. Before we begin to articulate it in a particular form, in a particular kind of style, it's our experience that happens with through our senses, et cetera. And then when it comes to radical intimacy, so you were talking about bodies that are struggling and bodies what happens if you don't have sound, if you can't hear or you can't see. So I have this one very good friend who is really sensuous. Really sensuous. And she had a gorgeous, gorgeous woman and had a very kind of active life in all kinds of ways prior to a terrible accident that happened when she was 21 years old, which rendered her paraplegic. And she's still, 20 years later, very, very sensuous and still having active radical, intimate love lives. Right? And so I think that word radical intimacy is also about how we perceive intimacy. So for her, for example, and I think that this is that looking at bodies that are not as capable, right? That are capable differently. I asked her once, I said, how is it that you continue to have all these lovers and how is it that you're remaining intimate? And she said it was about memory. So she remembered certain sensations. And even though, so she talks about the moment when she discovered that she was paraplegic and the doctor comes and he does the needle taste, right? You can't feel anything. He pushes and he pushes and she pushes and basically he says like, you can't feel anything. And yet she could convince herself through a consciousness because of an experience that she'd had in the past and really, really reiterating that imagination all the time, all the time, pulling that into herself. She could then begin to feel even at places where the doctor said she couldn't feel. Even where she was told she wasn't able to feel, she was, she's able to feel because of her imagination, because of drawing at her consciousness in such a deliberate way. And I think that that's maybe there's something there for us when we're looking at these bodies that can't walk and can't stand and can't roll and kick and jump and do all of these active things. That there's another kind of an activity that they engage in, that we can learn from, even in this digital moment, that it's about, maybe it's about us also remembering what it is about performance that needs to now be conveyed differently and that it doesn't completely deny the one. It doesn't say that this is the only way. It's actually calling on different things, gathering them together. And then in that gathering, something else is created. And I think that's for me, that's what radical intimacy is about. That it's not just, it's now be so radical because we can fall in love through the screen. But there's something that we have to do with the way we think. And that thinking is very much connected to what we do. And so we can't be talking about, because we're thinking all of these things, it means we never have to move. The movement is going to provoke the thinking. The thinking is gonna provoke, it's all kind of working together. I mean, yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking. No, 100%. Those two things kind of constitute one another, right? There's sensing and being in the body constitutes how we think and how we think informs how we sense being in the body. I think that's really... And how we remember, how we remember. And then when we remember, we remember, we push, we remember again, we put the things back together again differently. Something else is getting to happen. And I think that's really exciting and very scary as it must be for somebody who all of a sudden gets told you can't walk any longer. It's devastating. But then you go, all right, and now what? What do I do? And are we in a similar kind of moment? And it's interesting because it's... I think we have the examples out there. We've got people who've done that. We're just not drawing on them. So in terms of dance, for example, we need to be looking at how people with disabilities perform intimately. How do they touch? And they touch awkwardly. They touch differently. They touch with difficulty. They touch with... There's a whole other way of moving and there's something exciting there for us as performers. I think that we can learn from these other bodies as opposed to just holding the grand form and the upright body so boldly in front of us as if it's God. I think they're many gods. Yeah. Amy, I think your observation there in the chat is super, super genital. I don't know if you might speak into it. I'm worried about butchering its beautiful sense. I'm reading it all, so I'm handing it over to you. But I really love this challenge kind of physicality and distance, right? That you're taking it out there. I wonder if you could speak to that for a little more. Yeah, I was really interested. It was wonderful what you mentioned about the buttoe, eyes all over and this kinesthetic perception that you have as a dancer. And so much of what I think I contend with is just what I guess you could call the scopic regime. It's the domination of the visual. And how would we think about anything if we weren't dominated by our eyes? I mean, what would this experience be like if we weren't kind of like glued to this little screen with its little compartments? It's so, and the way we conceive of performance. I wonder if we can think of form being smell or form being touch. It's so visually encoded for me, the idea of form. And that seems to be so much of, well, and then as I was listening to you speak, I was, and about intimacy, I was thinking, for me intimacy would be defined also by what, where the shame boundary is. Where do I start to feel ashamed? Then I start to feel, okay, that's intimate now because I'm on some kind of boundary of what might feel a little bit shaming. And in Gestalt, there's a really interesting, Gestalt psychology is a really interesting idea of shame being that which just people aren't ready for. They're not able to deal with it. They just, they're not able to meet it. It's a space of contact that they can't make contact. But shame is so visual, like, I mean, who's ashamed of anything when they've got their eyes shut? Like it's, it's, you know, it's so, again, it's such a visually encoded thing. This when, you know, anyway, I think I'm just babbling, you know, this seems to be, but because there's so many ideas that get sparked, but that's somehow where I'm, how do we measure distance? How do we measure intimacy? What if we didn't encode it visually so much, I guess? What if it weren't just a place? Or if not visually in a kind of literal spatialization of distance, right? And what you're suggesting in the sense, right, I think you specifically said that, you know, somehow you're closer to me than my physical neighbors, even though we are literally thousands of kilometers apart is, I don't really, I think it's what we kind of might think of in terms of translocality is our capacity to be connected to multiple disparate places that aren't connected by a straight line necessarily, but that collapse into or over one another through whatever, you know, means connect us in that way. Me and you here, Kate, Tom, you're in Hobart, we are in the same place, though physically in great distance from another. And again, I think that that takes us back to where the conversation kind of began with this question of presence and presencing, but also witnessing and recognizing that shared space, perhaps the provocation here is to recognize that it needed to be physical. And that's deeply challenging to me. And I'm alive to the question that Jay Han is asking about this kind of dystopian future, right? We have the privilege for us to better of having understood what it is to convene physically and knowing what the absence of a physical kind of register of convening, of meeting, of presence might mean. What do we do then? How do you think about those things when, you know, people are arriving at this thing we do called performance down to whatever it might be without having had that prior experience through which to imagine and, I guess, vivify their sense of their own presence in the performing making, performance making kind of moment. If, I mean, I'm just, you know, I'm just, so I really also like, appreciate what you said there, Amy. And you're right, this idea of, you know, having the, the idea of having eyes all over the body is one thing, but also the way we use these eyes. So once you, if you imagine that you've got eyes behind your head and on your hands and everywhere, then we still have these eyes, right? And the idea of looking, instead of seeing what's directly in front of you, so one of the principles of Bhutto is to look peripherally. So you use your eyes to see what's on the side of you. So you're kind of forced to not like look at anything directly, right? And that kind of changes one's perception quite a lot. But what's interesting, and I started doing, this was interesting, an interesting exercise to do online because I now frightened every time I have to teach anything that's like this online and you can't, you can't actually hear people's breath and really feel how they are in the room. But one of the things that I extend the eyes to is saying that the room that you in also has eyes. And so once you've gone, once you've gone beyond like just you're looking at the space and you're looking at the world with all these eyes and wow, everything is so big, then you allow yourself to be looked at and you allow the space that you in to look at you. And now if you're in your room, most people are in their very comfortable spaces, right? They're in their bedroom, they're on their couch, it's a space that's familiar, it's a space they take for granted. Now all of a sudden you have to allow yourself to be looked at in the space that you in. And I can tell you like 99 at this being people have broken down online just and I'm having to do a whole other exercise to bring them back and say, remember where you are, you're in your room and just like, because there's this, all of a sudden you become aware of the power of the presence that's always there. You know, that's, and yeah, I don't know if you know what I'm trying to say. So this, I mean, we're going back to presence again, but ways of looking, ways of looking is not only from me outwards, it's also from the outside in. So, and that's, you know, and then that changes proximity completely in how we smell, in how we taste in a number of ways. It changes that proximity to things. You might feel very distant from the space that you thought you were so intimately familiar with or you might all of a sudden realize that you, you know, it might have the opposite effect. And I think that that kind of shaking up of the body and shaking up of ourselves and our certitudes that we have of who we are and where we are and how we are, it's the beginning of something. I don't know what, but I think it's something that happens in that moment that we need to, that we need to just look into and not be frightened of. And what's interesting, what happens as soon as, what I've found, as soon as people start becoming aware of the awareness of everything, they become softer, a lot more sensitive, a lot more careful and not so bold and knowing what we, you know, where to go. All of a sudden there's a sensitivity, even on their couch, you know, they feel their buttocks differently. And I think that's really important for us, just as practitioners with maybe very established in what we're doing and feeling like we know, and now you don't know any longer. Maybe there's something in like just, just looking at things differently and going with that. Yeah. Yeah, Jackie. Thank you. And you know, again, I keep on going back to the concert. I think our impulse is to want to experience and frame and name this moment as well as disorientation, but I wonder if it's more productive to think about it as not even reorientation, but a kind of unorienting moment, right? Where we are being compelled to recognize that we have been oriented in a particular way and to find ways of disentangling us from our fixity within those oriental structures in order to recognize the possibility for other ways of becoming oriented differently, right? So it's not the disorientation, but a kind of a process of unorienting oneself in order to become oriented in other ways. I think it's a really exciting provocation. We didn't lose anything. We lost. We're losing. It's gathering, gathering, gathering, gathering, gathering. You know, it's becoming a lot bigger. I think bigger than we could have imagined like what Camille was speaking about. That's, you know, the proportions change. Proportions will change. Let's see, I missed your hand earlier on, my dear. I see that it's been up for a minute. No worries at all. I was gonna basically say something similar to what you've just said because I find it very generative. What I've been trying to make sense of things through translation theory. And I find it very generative, this idea, even drawing from what Geron was saying about how are we teaching a thing that we already know as one thing. I think it's all just translation. If I move to France, I speak English. They speak French. So it starts with me saying, oh, wait, where I'm from, we say hello. Oh, you say bonjour. Okay, cool. And then it becomes, oh, now I know how to say commence à va. And then they know how to say, I'm fine. How are you, right? But it's that in this sharing of, oh, I don't know how to do that. So I'm gonna tell you how we do it. And the sharing of, oh, I don't know how to do that. So I'm gonna tell you how we do it. It's not so much that you absorb what is mine and I absorb what is yours, but that in the sharing something new is emerging and that something new is a new language. I always think of language as just disciplining instinct as systems that discipline instinct dance is a disciplining of instinct. I take a step because I am walking because there is my instinct. But then I am taught to point my toe when I take the step. And there is a particular kind of disciplining of instinct, right? And we have these instincts. We have the instinct to communicate. We have the instinct to share space together. The instincts are then we're just, I think finding a new system of disciplining it or disrupting the discipline that already exists. Thank you. Yeah, that was amazing. And the question of, I really like this idea of language and I mean to add language in perhaps form, right? More broadly conceived as a way of disciplining instincts or what would otherwise bubble up and govern and control. I think that's a really interesting provocation. We have about six minutes left in the official portion of the conversation, which as we know, ends at a quarter past the hour or a quarter two in India with its weird time zones with half hour increments. And then we'll go into our kind of water cooler chat thereafter. Yeah, so I guess by a way of beginning to close off, I want to take up Amy's provocation to think about intimacy as a shame boundary and the kind of radical intimacy being our capacity to kind of push through what we might experience as shame as being disoriented all of these other things. I think they're all connected by us about recognizing that precarity being off center, being off center to kind of use the dance thing for a second isn't necessarily a toxic or dangerous or unsafe or, you know, situation to be in, but that if we embrace and recognize where we're coming from in those moments where we're confronted with our boundary to shame, something incredibly generous that can happen if we open ourselves up to it and recognize that the stakes perhaps are lower than we think they might be, that that boundary is an imagined one. And all we need to do is orient ourselves differently as both ourselves to other ways to be oriented towards these questions of shame. I wanted to, yeah, I'm just trying to kind of pick up on any last bits of things that I might have missed in the chat. Yeah, okay, so Jay Han was asking again, but then how do I go back to school? I have to go back to school. How am I running a drama school through this time of the day? And I think Jackie... Carefully, carefully. Sensitivity. Sensitivity, like carefully says Jackie. Carefully. Yeah, I think, yeah, committee? Yeah, I just wanted to speak to some of what Jay Han's concerns are, because it sounds like it's connected with Jackie who was saying too. You know, I've been diagnosed as, I guess they call it socially anxious. So, you know, it's a difficult thing for me to be around a lot of people, right? I'm good with three or four people, but larger than that, and it's just a huge amount of input, right? So, you know, when I gravitated from writing to theater, it was always a thing that energized me, right? I was very nervous in front of people and on a certain level, I was kind of used to having to deal with that all my life. So, it was an engagement with a lot of input all the time. So, when Jackie starts talking about those exercises where you have to imagine your room is having a bunch of eyes around you and everything, I can really relate to those things because they really feel real to me, because I'm used to having feeling like that, right? Maybe, and so I just say that in some way to just talk about sensitivities and what those sensitivities mean in relationship to them moving through our bodies in some ways, right? So, there's some exercises she talked about I can really relate to, you know? And I wonder if that speaks to what we do as human beings to compensate, right? Like, what are our prosthetics that we use that we don't even know our prosthetics for us that allow us to do amazing things out in the world or amazing things on stage or whatever, right? Because I know I need prosthetics and I couldn't even tell you what I've been doing in order to compensate for the shyness. So, anyway, I just say all that. Interesting. I like this idea of prosthetics as well. Kind of may or may not, my dog has the worst timing that we may or may not realize that we're using. I don't know, I'm also trying to kind of think back to that example of the basketball that you were talking about and iterations, Jackie said, it's just the practice of jumping over and over and over that fence, right? Just building up some kind of internal reserve that is, yeah, it's a kind of physical thing that you're doing, but it's also an imagined thing is that you're rehearsing a physical way of doing something but you're also replacing yourself in a space where you are imagining the uses towards which you might put the skill that you are rehearsing over and over and over again without necessarily closing it off from other things. I'm also kind of ramming here as well, Jay, I know that I am. No, I rehearsed things over and over again in the mind of things that could have went better from socially awkward situations, being socially awkward. And so that puts you into a right zone when you have to play up a moment out in so many different directions when you're rehearsing or you're playing a moment out on stage in front of people who've never seen this before in their lives. You already know what's the most exciting way to get from A to B to C to D to A to F even if it's the most intimidating thing for you in a normal situation where everybody's eyes is on you. So it's just a question of how much do I want to raise the stakes sometimes and how much I really want to be honest. I remember back in Lisbeth, Thomas was suggesting that somebody was confident but they were being shy for some reason. And I remember thinking confidence is a word that really involves trust, right? Hey, I'm letting you guys know everything about me in this moment. Can I trust you? Hey, let me confide something in you. So it just made me really realize what this relationship I have to an audience, if you can call it an audience because I always feel like it's a participant too. But yeah, it just gives me all these ideas about performance. Anyway, I'm talking too much, let me shut up. Chehan? That just, it's interesting when you talk about prosthetics because that idea about why are we bothering to take our bodies across space when I came up with the Elon Musk conversation, literally came from this idea of Donna Harrow's cyber of manifesto and the idea that we have been social beings that have been using technology from day one. If you go back to sapiens, if you go back to everything that is now conventional mainstream, sort of understanding the human condition because I seem to get all my articulation from there. It is this. And therefore, the prosthetics thing just reminded me about how we are not purely, I mean, let's just look at mask. We were just using mask, right? That was the first, it's a prosthetic we use in theater to do something, to have something, use something, et cetera, et cetera. And so then you go, go, go, go. And then now this is mask or beyond and then what is beyond this moment. And then I come back and I just think, what are we translating into the continuum? And I just had a side chat with Amy because I feel like we have come so far in terms of our understanding of what is important. And Jackie, when you said it, is touch the most important thing? You suddenly de-centered it and said it's just one thing amongst many. And at least that's what I got out of it. And then I just wonder about some of the conversations in the first season where there was this like an admins of like the importance of the physicality. And I just wonder about how they're gonna, how people in those first conversations would see this conversation now because we've traveled a lot of ways since then. And then Amy said something about, maybe it's about the importance of seeing. And I just, yeah, I think, I'm thinking it's about the experience. It's about the construction, the sharing, the crafting of experience. If I can just, I don't want you to think that I don't think touch is important, right? No, no, no, I know you, I'm good. I'm just suggesting that we don't stick with touching in one way, that there are multiple ways of touching and being touched. And we realize that usually we, I'm going to the hands because that's how we touch. That's how we move around in dance with our hands and our feet, right? And it's, and I'm suggesting that if we start reimagining the body, then something else could be like a hand, something else could be used like we use our feet, something else could be used like we use these eyes. It's about reimagining ourselves in order to reimagine the world, you know? And they kind of, it kind of works together. So, I mean, it's, we need to, I mean, the digital age is even before, and if you think about it, even before this COVID moment, that's, that this has been a question. Like, you know, I know, for example, in South, when was it two years ago when we went through the, it started with the hashtag me too campaign. There, that whole touching thing that happened already. There's this heightened thing of when you touch, who gets touched, who's looking, all of those kinds of questions. They go to the gender-based violence and we had terrible incidences that continue year in South Africa. And there was a moment that there were protests around that at universities and stuff. And we were holding space for the students and they didn't want to have certain people touch them, like next to them at all. And this complete kind of sense of social distancing was actually happening before COVID already. And it's a problem. It's a real problem, the sense of not wanting to touch and kind of being hooked onto and then shaming people through the digital space and all of that. It's been happening before COVID. It's just now that we all kind of the people, so I think that touch is important. And I do think that we kind of, I mean, I make my daughter, I touch her. I force her to touch me. And so that because we learn so much through touch, we learn through touch, right? So, but it's not just our hands that can touch. And I think that I don't want to come across as saying that, oh, it doesn't mean anything. It means a lot. It's just that I think we've been cornered into it meaning only one thing. I just, it's now 17 minutes past the hour. And I just wanted to officially close off the first half of the conversation. And thank you everyone who has sat in. As I said, we're going into the kind of more informal water cooler chat immediately afterwards. I'm going to be continuing from there to the extent that there is a kind of takeaway here. I just want to say, I guess what I'm learning, what I'm being compelled to recognize is that these ways of working hopefully make us more open to experiencing, seeing, interacting with, being in the world differently. And that we must return again and again and again to the fault line in order to try and experience different ways of how to dance across it. And I want to embrace the word dance here and all of its rich joyous kind of sense of the excess here. Is finding that joy in standing at the call phase is finding that pleasure, the profanity or the ceiling profanity of stepping up to the challenge rather than feeling that we need to step to the side or away from simply because what we do doesn't seem to offer immediate tangible kind of solutions. There's something in stepping and dancing over that again and again that I find really, really attractive. We're closed.