 Welcome. My name is Ariel Julia Brown. This is our cohort of artists in residence from 2021 to 2022. Yes, yes, yes. I am the founder and director of Black Spatial Relics. We are a convener, a supporter of Black radical performance makers like the ones you see in front of you. These people are incredible thought leaders and in so many ways, conturers in their communities, nationally and for the world. And I just give thanks for the work that they do. Yes, yes, yes. So we are gathered for this moment just to get a taste, a little bit of an overview of each of their projects and work over the course of their residency. In the course of their residency, they worked on a specific project. They worked with our dramaturgs and residents, Carlos Serra and Diane Xavier, who want to give a look to this new project. Worked across two collective cohort sessions and also individual sessions with this dramaturg as they were just really being in the work of community building around and kind of a sort of ciphering around the shape of their work. So today we're really just going to kind of get into some high level nuts and bolts around what that looked like, how that work continues to live and breathe and make space for us, those of us who are in the material and those of us who are in spirit. So yeah, without further ado, we'll begin. My name is Avilda Sterling Dupre. My work develops in Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island where black women's art is silenced, especially in the context of abstraction in visual arts and dance. My practice in performance is an extension of my daily life. Uncertainty, the underlying conditions of life in Puerto Rico is a consistent platform for my work, which sustains itself from precariousness, debris and the ephemeral. Being an active senior female contemporary black artist, my installations and performances intertwine the marginalities of self-representation and resistance, confronting the silencing and invisibility of Afro-Caribbean women. Working with multidisciplinary and fitting from Yoruba-Caribbean traditions, I transgress the boundaries between drawing, painting and performance through a decolonizing practice that challenges conventions in Puerto Rican fine arts and traditions. Abstract expressionism is at the core of my practice. Through it, I find a means of objectify concerns about color, shadow, light and contrast as equivalents to particular states of being, which I then translate to the three-dimensionality of performative actions. Led by curiosity as a fine and good girl of Oshun, my mother, the aesthetic structure of my work is both fixed and improvised, nourished by elements and materials found, uprooted or decadent. Unstrongly driven to gesture, trained as a painter, I seek parallels in performative action. I like to think of my performing body as the moving element in space, using three-dimensional space as an imaginary canvas. The plasticity of my movements align themselves ancestral bodyments and contemporary aesthetic values. Hi, my name is Nikolai Mackenzie Ben-Rima and my piece is entitled Silsila. It is a part of the saltire cloud of works that are works in process that are sourced from ancestry research, as well as personal reflections on present, as well as my ancestral path. Silsila in particular is a solo that is a transgenerational conversation between myself and my ancestor Nicholas, who's my second great-grandfather. I didn't grow up knowing any information about my father's side of the family and when I was given a family tree by a distant ancestor, something that stuck out to me was, at the center of the tree is this person named Nicholas, who has a similar name to mine, a name that means victory of the people, which will come in handy later. I noticed that he is descended from both the enslaved and the enslaver, being the product of a marriage between those two seemingly disparate and remote elements of British colonial society. I noticed that he died on the 20th of October and I was born on the 10th of February, which is the same number as just transposed, which is a nice little baton handle-off. But all this to say, Silsila is an old man remembering how it felt to be young. Silsila is a young man raging against impending age. Silsila is also an infant with brand new discoveries all around them and the peace in an ideal world will keep going just as the name implies. The name Silsila in Arabic means a linkage in a chain or a lineage or a tradition. You can see that by the way that the word is structured, silsil is the same syllable twice as in two links in a chain and ah implies immanence and that it will go on forever, silsila. And so tracking with my own personal belief that we get reincarnated through our bloodlines, I believe that I am Silsila. I am a silsila of Nicholas. I am a linkage, I am a tether, I am a conduit, I am somehow so closely attached to him. I find myself incarnated in almost similar circumstances whereas my two parents are from two ends of the Jamaican social strata and how there are gaps in the information that I have about Nicholas. His parents didn't get married until years after he was born, after which they had many children. So what was it that prevented that from happening? I myself wasn't allowed to speak to my father for many, many years. And I'm in the process of re-acclimating myself to a family that I wasn't made privy to even though that it's my birthright. I feel like the similar thing might have happened to Nicholas at the time being that he was born before emancipation or vaguely, maybe there were some legal things. But that's all to say that all of the memories that I somehow have of things that I have never physically seen, all of the inklings that I have, all of the predilections that I can't really pinpoint as to why I have them, I feel like they come from him and I feel like he's revealing to me mysteries as I continue to deepen my journey as an artist. I found Nicholas's death certificate on the internet in my research and it says in very ornate handwriting under occupation it says cultivator. And of course that means he was a farmer or he was a pen keeper, land keeper. But Nicholas also had a brood of 12 children with a woman whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were also enslaved by Nicholas's father's family. So I feel like he was not only a cultivator of the land but a cultivator of mines. I aspire to, I envision him as having a revolutionary sort of view of the future of his country simply because he existed at a crossroads between two very different worlds. And I was born in a place called Crossroads in Kingston in St Andrew whose symbol is the St Andrews Cross, the St Andrews Saltire, which is the same image that you see in the Jamaican flag as well as the Scottish flag, as well as the flag of Spain which flew over Jamaica before the English took it. So I named my greatest fan of works Saltire because for many, many generations my ancestors have been looking up at a Saltire wherever they might have been, especially on the island of Jamaica itself. Yeah, Silsala is meaningful to me because it is an ongoing conversation about belonging and identity and birthright and distance and closeness to our creators and how sometimes we have to be the cultivators of our own garden, irrespective of what or how we were planted. My work called Where Is Foreign is an extension of Silsala as in if Silsala is a retrospective or it's a fast forward and retrospective going in between present and past and maybe future. Where Is Foreign is very much present and it reflects the need of many Jamaicans who feel trapped on the island, it reflects a need for them to want to experience something other than Jamaica itself. One of my cousins who came up to the states recently found himself in my backyard in Virginia looking around and just saying out loud, where is foreign? Where is foreign? So this place that I have been thinking about and everybody around me vances this place where you know, gold falls from the sea leg, you know, where is it? Where exactly is it and what is it? What I'm dealing with in Where Is Foreign is that mood of anywhere is better than here, anywhere is better than the suffering that a lot of Jamaicans are meant to endure. And you know, there must not be any corruption there, you know, there must not be any injustice, there must not be the stain of colonialism there, only to come here to the states and find that it is everywhere. And that you might have been better off cultivating your own garden. But it's also a reflective of my own aspirations about what I would love for all Jamaicans is to free ourselves of colonial mindsets wherever we may be, whether it be on the island or in the diaspora. There's something new about the future and I hope to be in the company of folks like the folks in the Black Spatial Relics cohorts who are future minded and have a different vision of what Black Liberation is. I say there's a line in Where Is Foreign, may never see such new things yet. And what I mean by that is not just the material things that one finds, when the convenience is that one finds when you come off foreign, but also I've never seen the opportunity or the chance for such clean slateness when it comes to the Jamaican experience. So I hope that you enjoy what you see and that my research and that my findings and that my digging and my reflecting can incite you to cultivate your own garden as well. Hello Ariya, welcome! Ariya, can we ask you to hold? We have just like one request. Beautiful. Yes. Is it at all possible for you to be on camera? I am not. You are not currently on camera? I thought I was. Oh good, hello. I thought I was, my bad. Can we pin her? No, no, no. Alright, so I was saying I have an assistant to my presentation this morning. Oh that's the... She's having a big birthday. Oh, she's keeping a great birthday. Yes, so this leader, her name eventually, she was called Mother Earth and the group of people they were called the Earth people. Some of the meditations that I took away from what she did, she lived in Port of Spain, she lived in an urban area and then, you know, moved to this corner of the country where there was practically no one else and they made a settlement there. So my take away from the project itself through the process and as an outcome is thinking about the idea that freedom may free, which is a saying that we have there. So essentially what are the consequences of choosing freedom? So I kind of broke it down into three stages. So there's the acquisition of freedom, this thing that you are, that is new, that is fresh, that you have chosen, that you've succeeded in and attained it. So that's the first stage and then this second stage is like when you're getting used to it, the day to day of it and there's a sort of a backlash where there's a response from the community, your wider community. People tell you things about, you know, you're making a mistake, you're being crazy, this is not real, you're not living in reality, where there's this kind of pushback. And then the third stage is maintaining the decision in the long term to remain free. And what does that look like? And in this way I wanted to, if this work was to continue, I mean the work is, I feel like it's kind of like a live project in a lot of ways. These are questions that I'm asking myself as I'm also asking kids and those that I make community with. And so those three elements are what I've been thinking about. So I came up with a kind of, what do you call this, some kind of diagram, the consequences of freedom. So there's a question, who gets to tell your story, which has been something within the African diaspora. That question, as soon as you're talking something historical, you're talking about the lens, you're talking about whose perception are we dealing with. So for example, in my actual project, one of the main texts actually belonged to a white European anthropologist who came to the island and he was fascinated by the community and decided to write this book about Mother Earth. And they actually became really good friends. He was actually one of the persons that she confided in, it was so strange. But still, this is an outsider who is both outside the culture, on a national level, on a regional level, on a racial level, and so many other instances, writing about this woman. I was also thinking about the Ecolonia approach, so what does it mean to step away from capitalism? What does it mean to step away from the institutions that a lot of us have lived in to make a really important part of our everyday living? So we're talking about education, healthcare, religion, spirituality. What does the Ecolonia approach to all of these things mean? What does it mean also to have a Yosanity question? Mother Earth, for example, was institutionalized more than once and by the wider society because of her ideals, her beliefs, how she carried about herself. She was questioned, her sanity was questioned. And it so happened that the anthropologist was also a qualified psychologist and conducted tests on her and members of the community. And according to his, we'll call it the European standard because I think it was some kind of standardized testing for sanity. Let's put it that way, I don't quite have the motivation to bring it. She was found to be very much okay. She checked all the boxes and she was a well-functioning member of the society in space. So even that was a very interesting thing because Lufos, people in a nearby village, people at the national level had already discarded her and her people as not being seen. A few more things as I know five minutes has to walk very quickly. What is the evolution of the relationships that you have with people? When you decide, teach was free and for yourself. How do people view you? How are you now viewing them? There's a kind of othering that happens in that space. And how do you make peace with those changes in relationships? I was looking at the idea of abandonment. How much are you living through abandon? I mean, there was this really interesting part of the story where she, right, and set as a flame in the backyard. Excuse me all I need to think. Set as a flame in the backyard and just throw away everything for her that represented western living. Right? So what are the things that you're abandoning and how harsh, how cool, how easy are those abandonments happening in the name of your freedom? And finally, I guess I can talk about protecting your purpose. If you feel within your heart space that you're being called to something, you're being called to live in a particular way, how do you guard, stand guard for your purpose? How do you perhaps hedge, put a hedge, put safety around something that you alone might understand in a moment that people may not be able to hold a vision with you. And even in that case, some people might be able to hold it to a point and then beyond that no more. Right, so these are some of the questions that came up for me as a person visiting Mother Earth and her own narrative and finding the intersections within my own and that of my legal making. So I hope that this was a line of some way with the intention of these moments and thank you for listening. Thank you. Yeah, so when Arielle asked us a couple framing questions this morning, she mentioned Susan Laurie Parks. And when I was talking about this play with some undergrads recently, Susan Laurie Parks was the bridge, so I thought I'd share some of the quotes that came into that space and then go into the workflow more. So this is from Susan Laurie Parks' possession. Some of the things that she asks and says, who do I write for to answer myself? It gets another question that is, who am I? Another quote that felt really resonant is, theater is the place which best allows me to figure out how the world works. She says that a play is a blueprint of an event, a way of creating and rewriting history through the medium of literature. Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theater for me is the perfect place to make history. That is because so much of African American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out. One of my tasks as playwright is to, through literature and the special strange relationship between theater and real life, locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down. Which I think is what you exactly quoted this morning. And then the last quote I'll share is, I'm working theater like an incubator to create new historical events. That felt like a great bridge. I'm going to kind of use this as like a preamble for this afternoon. So it's a little more fluid, but I'm going to start by just reading what appeared as part of the program note for the production that was recently in the world and helps kind of frame the play. In 1552 Miguel de Borilla, a black man born in what is known as Puerto Rico, established a new nation within the country of Venezuela, staging the first successful African rebellion there. He established a royal lineage with his wife, Guiomar. The nation lasted for two years before being overcome by the colonizing Spanish. Miguel and his wife, Guiomar, have persisted as folk heroes in the Afro-Venezuelan community. When watching this performance, it's important to know that Guiomar is a fact-based historical figure. It is also important to know that there were countless other people just like Guiomar throughout the Spanish-speaking African diaspora who have begotten hundreds of thousands of descendants. This play is for all of them and for this reason there is no specific country where it takes place. This play takes place in a time similar to our own, where black people are searching for ways to live liberatory lives in the face of systemic inequity and state violence. This play takes place in a world where, like our own, black people have turned to the spirit world of their ancestors. Cosmology is governed by the Yoruba Parishas to look for possible ways forward. While the people in this play turn towards these spirits, the rituals they perform are their own, specific to the world of the play and the imagination and offerings of the creative team. As Octavia Butler writes in Wild Seed, you cannot know how well people's bodies remember their ancestors. This play is a remembering of things never known and offering in the face of rupture and erasure. And I guess with the remaining time I'll just add a couple things, which is that when I think about where this play came from for me and what black spatial relics has come to me as we've shared space together and this question of the maroon, the maroon concept is so central because that is the word that was applied to Miguel de Goria. And I think for me it's so interesting to think about the maroon identity and fugitivity and directions and what changes over time in that in the 1500s this is a person who left a space and I feel like to make this play I had to chase a space. And so what fugitivity means for us today is just so, it's a different direction. And I think that in the making of the play and I'll get more into this in the afternoon it was really an understanding of how a container for my ancestry becomes a container for a collective ancestry and how to care take in that space. I was talking to Ariel earlier about result versus process and what is our responsibility to hold as artists and it kind of feels like it's all our responsibility. So I've done a lot of reflecting on what the form of theatre asks of us and how to start creating work that has that care taking in its premise rather than just in its result. Some of the ways that showed up for this, it was very clear I always wrote this play in a kind of loosely bilingual fashion kind of holding emotional realities of language and kind of switching when it felt right to switch. The more I worked with actors the more I realized that one of the character tracks attracted actors whose native language was not English and so it just had to be rewritten. And so I rewrote it, which was hard, and it was exciting because it really opened the play up even more. I think offering language as specificity meant that even the responses in English turned into more specificity. But to get into this in the afternoon, because I saw my time, it also was a big care taking question because we are operating in scarcity in a lot of different ways in the making of theatre in this country the actor who would have played the role did not have the right visa to be paid legally and there was a very administrative and institutional immediate response that felt out of my hands and felt violent in some ways of losing a collaborator based on paperwork, based on timing, based on urgency. And then working with someone who has my shared background with Spanish, which is it's a language that I chase, that I ran from as a child and I chase now. And so I watched someone have to memorize a lot of Spanish and I watched someone who is not a trained actor commit to this role because of their commitment to the collective ancestral space and watched an institution not be prepared for care taking. And so, yeah, I think I'm still holding what that means in terms of result and what this turned into in the world because I'm really happy with the audience reception and the fact that I heard what I needed to hear from audience members that this held them, that there was space for their own healing in watching it, but I'm still wondering about the ways that we care take during process. So, more on that in the afternoon. Thank you. Yeah, so we have Sonia Kimau. Thank you so much. My project centers around the middle passage and memory of the middle passage, but specifically because I come from a place of dance and movement and movement observation. It comes from a sort of wanting to know what vestiges of movement remain in our bodies and not just black bodies, anybody in Trinidad and Tobago, but maybe from the African experience of coming over in the middle passage, what remains in our bodies as somatic engagements with terror that now allow us to move in a certain way and survive, okay, both then and now. None of us was alive when the middle passage happened, but what is it in our bodies that survives that and lives in our bodies? Because of that, because of that moment. When physically you're bound and so your body doesn't have a lot of room to maneuver, your mind starts to act in a different way and that's really what somatic is all about. It's sort of mind-body connection and what happens is that your mind starts to inform your body and vice versa, but it's first from the mind to say, okay, well, do this as a point of survival and then do this as a point of healing and that's when we start to get these habits that we perhaps have as we move through space. So it's not just about dance, which is something maybe more in the performing arts area and what happens, it's about movement. How do I sit? How do I stand? How do I move through a crowd? Okay, so I'm looking at certain movements like, for instance, and I'm kind of locating it in Trinidad and Tobago because if I was trying to go to the Caribbean, I don't think I have enough lifetimes to do that. So, and even Trinidad and Tobago is going to be difficult because even Trinidad and Tobago are different because their histories are different. And for instance, when we raise our hands in the air, it's usually in a festive mode, right? And I noticed that other countries in the Caribbean don't do that in the way that we do that. So what is Trinidad and Tobago? Where did it come from? It could have even come from India because India, we have a lot of Indian immigrants that came as well on the indenture ship and so I have to sort of discover did it come from there or did it come from having to, you know, being free on the ship on some level and being able to stretch your arms out. That's all you could have done. You don't know. And so the question remains now why would I try to do something so nuanced and so almost inaccessible? And the answer is maybe I will find something and I'm going to turn it off to this, right? But it's also about not just dwelling on the trauma but it's dwelling on the resilience and the resistance and the way to survive mentally, emotionally, physically, socially. What happened? What is it that we have now? Where is that strength coming from? Did that strength come from some somatic decisions that our ancestors made? And so that's basically what I'm kind of doing and I'm loving every minute of it. It's not easy but that's kind of what I was investigating in this lovely space of Black Spatial Relics. Thank you. I'm Candice D'Amezza and my project is called Wale and it is centered around the Sugarland 95 which is outside of Houston in the suburbs of a city now called Sugarland. 95 bodies were unearthed in 2018 and it was found that they were convict leased inmates. Between 1877 and 1912, this convict leasing system that replaced enslavement which actually I came quickly to learn was even more brutal than enslavement. It was 100% profit whereas when you have humans owning other humans there's this kind of feel where you don't want to kill them because you lose money but when they're owned by the state that doesn't even exist. It was a very brutal system and so with this discovery of these bodies a lot of Houstonians don't even know that this history isn't right outside the city limits or isn't a lot of real engagement with it and so at the time I started the seed of this idea comes from I was studying with Malodoma Some who has recently transitioned to Dabara shaman and elder and during ritual I had an interesting conversation while I was married to the earth that was fun and with the earth this experience of like as I was waiting to be like cool like what you've got to say because I'm here and she laughed and she laughed and I just went what are we left now and it was this feeling like I'm the last arbiter of justice nobody gets past me which was that really caught me and then I thought about being raised in a Christian household I thought about in Jeremiah this concept of like the wailing women like when something has occurred a travesty against the earth like the earth agrees but it holds it and then I thought like where are the wailing women that come and wail about these things that happened and Malodoma Some talks a lot about in the west the absence of grief and the rituals presented selfish this anger and hatred and we're just riddled with it because we have no place to grieve and release I mean it's a mandate in our culture everybody must shed water like you have to for the culture for healing for wholeness and so I took that and I used the daguar cosmology which is five elements of mineral earth nature fire which represents ancestors and water so I had five of us embody those different like cosmology okay there's an F that's the right response it's an analogy for this but I just wanted to think about how these different elements might grieve as if we were like a court ancestral kind of primordial court that was on the site we performed on the site it was recorded also because of covid kind of research at the time so it had to adapt to be digital but just how might we have funeral and have court to be like this occurred here we're declaring this guilty there's guilt here, there's blood here and we're condemning it as these different elements and then in time with the elements funerary traditions so the funerary traditions of Jamaica and Haiti because of the connection of sugar and sugar cane so the comic these inmates were boosting the sugar the sugar industry imperial sugar which is still around that is the company and then the Congo because there was Congo crosses found in some of the sugar mills in the region which they were enslaved people were doing to basically ward off evil so we integrated that and then of southern traditions so integrating these different also elements visually and in the language about the funeral traditions of these different peoples in this the silences that were excavated was so the site is essentially owned by a school district which is horribly traumatic it's continuing the process of even getting the work done there were so many blockages like in the spirit realm it was blocks on blocks on blocks and the land is still currently in contention where the grassroots activists and descending communities are basically locked out the narrative is controlled by was then controlled by a superintendent who is white they are just getting to profit off of this narrative it's a really horrendous situation so it became also this documentary and interviewing some of the other grassroots activists about what has happened and letting them say on record whatever they wanted to say about the school district because there isn't that actual engagement nobody has really asked them so the issue is still ongoing and the school district does not like my project but that's fine and how has it changed me I don't know I think it's still ongoing we have an upcoming screening still working and trying to see how this project can boost the grassroots organizers to do their next level work how can we create more conversation I'm not sure it's just a contemporary issue with how descending communities are locked out of their own land issues for their own ancestors it's really traumatic and I still feel like there's still just a lot of grief around it but also trying to make more space for joy because so much of my work is really heavy which is hard to hold so yes that is well well Marshall and I my project is really about how do we take these historic sites these explicit sites of slavery i.e. plantation spaces and make them healing sites for black people so I am working with Historic Stagville which was the largest plantation in North Carolina at Emancipation there were over a thousand people enslaved there and those folks went and they seeded and started the black communities in Raleigh and Durham and Chapel Hill and beyond and so many of their descendants are still there like it's really hard to like you could throw a rock and you want to hit a stagville descendant whether they know what they got I had been doing work with plantations for several years before that creating an interactive and immersive presentation with my family run theater company with my mama and just like seeing the impact of what happens when folks get to not just like listen to the history or like like they have to activate their bodies they got to move through space you got to like come clean these potatoes okay now we won't go sit in this church you won't hear this message of domination like and then escape together so we did that for years and we like led over a thousand people through this like experience and then stagville reached out and I just felt really clear that that's not what that space needed what the space needs is like a practice that's grounded in baby suck sermon for beloved comes this land and like laughs and cry and dance and it's also really grounded in the brilliance of Harriet Tubman right literacies that are beyond literatures like having stars and plants and bird calls and how do we find our trusted allies right because Harriet just just a dumb brown because I don't know about the rest of the white people but she found her people so how do we find our trusted allies and how do we learn how to rest how is sleeping and dreaming part of our laboratory practice so I'm in a legacy relationship with stagville in which I laid out like here's what I want to do I want to trouble the archive I want to go in and I want to look for holes like Des Moines parks I want to look for holes and I want because I'm an artist and not an anthropologist or an archeologist I can say things and make things and like it's really about who that people are and just a little bit of like history the American doll, Addy she's based on someone who was enslaved at stagville that like her mother escaped stagville and was sending her child a letter back to the plantation and that letter got intercepted and that's how that letter became part of the archive and that child is inspires that dog right so how do we do more of that I mean there's just so many stories at stagville impeccable records white folks really love themselves yeah but don't know how to love themselves they love their own existence the idea of it so there's a lot of gifts inside the archive so that's one two, to have a suite of programs that are black only and again grounded in this like what are we going to do together with storage we're going to lay out on the grass and look at the stars and talk about stars we're going to just have a meal on the land we're going to eat food, we're going to dance we're going to have a fish fry we're going to take naps and wake up and be like what you dream about this is what we're doing and I really empathize with some of the challenges you're feeling because it is a state owned property and has been since the 1970s and because of that I have to have a work around because I cannot do black only programming on this plantation because that would be discriminating against people of the state so working around that as well and then lastly how do we shift the way that the docent program works on staff they have one black woman, one white woman and this one white man who is the groundskeeper it's just different when it's a state job with state benefits it's all I'm saying and but they don't have the capacity I was like oh actually I really wish the docent's looked like a captain planet you know what I'm saying how could everyone has a story inside of this plantation story if you are living in this country there's a story here for you and how can we tell a fuller story around how plantation history, how slavery visit sites of slavery impacts everyone's relationship to this land how do we bring in like Asian American folks, how do we bring in Latinx folks and to say you don't need to tell the black story you can just tell your story with us in it so there's a dream around that and then the last stream is this freedom fund I want there to be a fund that is held in partnership not through the state but with the foundation side where descendants can always show up and be like I have an idea and they're like write your name down just write one sentence we're going to cut you a check that black folks in the community can do the same thing and that indigenous folks in our community can do the same thing but there is just money because we deserve to just go and be like I have an idea or I don't have an idea I need a thing I want a thing and there can just be resources that are readily available for that so where we are in the process right now is as we are learning how to find the right language so that we can get the essence of the things we want to do and also find the resources because we have lots of state sites where only one that is committed to tell the story of enslaved people and it's often underfunded and we wonder why because it's not doing the school trips to talk about the master's family because they're not doing the school trips they become pick cotton on the land they don't get the same amount of resources we are working on a reflection space behind horton grove so right here you'll see horton grove there's three houses what you don't see on the other side is another house and it's the heart house the hearts are family and they lived in that house until the 60s from 1865 to 1965 there was a family still living in the same property on this land and then you see this chimney right here so that's a close up and those fingerprints you can go up and touch them are the fingerprints of the people who made those bricks so behind this house there's a grove and out in that grove they've cleared it and we are making spaces to meet and gather to just sit with the history just sit here there's no programming we're just making a place to sit by yourself or sit with three people or sit with ten people and just be and I would say that the thing that has changed or confirmed for me is how important it is to not just invite people but actually say I'm doing the labor but you're leading this work because I'm surrounded by descendants so the first thing we did when we started this project was gather descendants and that gathering was the largest gathering of descendants that they had on the land and what I told them was that I'm not going to do a project and your grandma's backyard without your permission so tell me what you want tell me what you want to see and what you want to feel and they told us so that's in the grounding of the work and I really love it and I'm grateful to do this work I'm so moved by all the work I think that I have a couple of questions for you and then I also really just want to open up some space for you all to ask questions of each other there are so many intersections in your work that you already began to point to and I want to hear you all talk amongst yourselves so I'll ask my questions so first I want to ask and some of you all really were getting into this I want to first ask how you understand the drama-tergy in your work and lifting drama-tergy as many ways of engaging many ways of knowing knowing in the body, knowing in land, knowing in spirit knowing from the archive from repertoire of performance and spent somatic memory and also other texts that you are in conversation with around this work you also were in conversation with Carlos Serra and Diane Xavier and want to lift them and what those intersections looked like and then finally we often talk about the work of critical gap deletion and Sylvia Hartman's work with really so alongside this naming, this lifting that Susan Lloyd Parks is offering about listening to the bone sing and working with silences and absences in the archive so yeah want to just throw that up and see what lands for you that you want to share about your process we can popcorn I think that that whole Sylvia Hartman thing was one of my inspirations which he talks about is critical fabulation and speculative history which is basically what I'm trying to investigate because there's very little tactile or documentary evidence of what I'm trying to do so that it then behooves me to try and imagine a world ecosystem that people can respond to so that I can sort of respond in return and understand maybe a little more about how people move so that I had in terms of dramaturgy what I find is that I like to it's an iterative process for me so what happens is that I create something or the beginnings of something and then I have a dramaturgy come and comment like having another eye on it that hasn't really been in the process which is very useful to me because sometimes in the forest we can't see the truth so that I think that was very useful in Diane she would ask me certain questions where she would pop up based on our conversation she would send me some publications of other documentary that might help she would suggest that kind of thing and that's always very, very valuable in terms of coming back to that whole creating of an ecosystem that's what I kind of did with the exhibition that I marked it was an installation that was immersive and I think that was one of my ways in trying to get people to respond to the idea of this little passage without having actually lived it and to see what they did and how there was I had people write stuff as well there was a book where they could write their responses about how they felt and it was very, very interesting for me to see what they felt I don't know if that gets me closer to what the people on the ships felt but it certainly gives me an idea of how people could respond to that kind of immersive environment in this era now and then you can get that platform to move to history to come forward with all the questions real quick Sonia I know that your work flooded and when that happened you were kind of emailing us in conversation about yeah in spirit what was coming up for you around that alumni here that was fascinating because what happened is I put out the installation I had to come to the United States and so I set it up a couple days after I left and then you were supposed to create the artist talk so I called the gallery owner and I said I'm settled in New York now so I'm kind of done with what I have to do let's talk about the artist talk and many more so I just thought I was having an administrative conversation with him and he said I have to tell you something you have to close the exhibition it just started and he said because water mysteriously appeared they could not find the source of this water it flooded the entire exhibition there was about an inch of water in the entire exhibition so I sat in him sending pictures because I know that in us because that's another round and I now I didn't do any sort of libations or anything so it wasn't a question of me having called any spirits or anything like that but I certainly felt that that was what it was and they still couldn't find it it flooded once a little bit and then it flooded a whole lot and that's when the one inch of water there's perhaps maybe 18 by 35 space of space when he sat me the pictures now the installation is a series of fabric strips of fabric about maybe 36 inches wide or whatever but they're sort of draped in the space to make it look like water so when I saw the pictures because of the reflection and refraction of light it looked twice as deep a couple of discussions with a couple of friends of mine who are close to the Arisha practice and because a lot of my work has to do with water I've done work with Yamanja as a centre and so both of them are writing a screenplay now with both Yamanja and but I'm not a practitioner but I dance it's in my body and the body is the people that I work with and they said well figure it out so what I did at the same artist talk I just offered I had a little plate of offerings so that was my contribution to it but I just thought it was an absolute I was thrilled that they came but they clearly enjoyed it they finally found the gallery finally found the source of the water like two weeks after which was actually another property where they had done some bad plumbing or whatever it was but they literally seeped through the walls and the gallery owner he was Trinidadian and now interesting enough he's a Trinidadian of European percent he whenever he came down to the exhibition he said he would feel something that he never felt before in the space and he's had the space for like 15 years and I just wondered if they were talking to certain people in the community they meaning the spirits and that they were trying to tell them something he's a wonderful person he's beautiful he gave me the whole space for free but I just wondered if they were the cosmic conversation cosmic communication you know in that way so yeah that's what that's my story wow I know I can talk a little bit about some of the really valuable things that Diane kind of put in mind for me getting over my notes from our last zoom together kind of prepping for for today and the thing I wrote down was what is something you need to know about your ancestor that you don't know now you know it and just kind of giving those of us whose ancestry has rupture in it in terms of knowledge the power to decide that we know and the momentum that you gave me and I think that this is kind of our conversation from dinner last night too about this question of knowledge and how we kind of mediate knowledge and just what happens when yeah you just decide you know and that's essentially really the dramaturgy of the piece because I took this historical figure Guillaume out and just thought of her as my ancestor and then allowed that for my characters as well and I think that my work with Diane just like yeah just helped me know that this can be the vehicle and we also talked a lot about this question of care taking and I think the thing that Diane prepped me for was accepting personal boundaries and knowing that we can be both and that there can be institutional violence and the piece can still offer people what they need it to be the way that feels I'm like isn't it both and I'm still kind of holding that but I think that it was really helpful to go into the process already knowing that I can only hold so much and that I take care of myself too in my spirit and I think that in some ways you can lead by example with that work and it helps other folks with their boundaries and then I think the last thing I'll say in terms of dramaturgy and I'll talk more about this in the afternoon is just building scripts that are porous and where there is space for future collaborators input and so that really showed up in kind of like the extra textual moments of like I kind of wrote okay and here we will have a chance to yeah my yeah or in here we will have a chance to a yeah and like people had in their own practices and with their own families had access to stuff that just worked so well dramaturgically that by the end of our process together it really did feel more co-authored than just from me and yeah so Diane was like in the space with the piece a lot of help always I hope it's okay to share this Diane some years ago we were having a conversation and she's really thinking about I believe Sylvia Winter's work with the plantation model and thinking about how that shows up in the American Theatre and the shapes of how labor is broken down who does what labor and how that really kind of lays out a foundation for violence to happen in groups and in process and I love hearing all of the ways in which like you held a space that stays in the text that could become collaborative, co-authored that in so many ways formally disrupts, structurally disrupts that and give thanks for Diane a good year I feel like my relationship to dramaturgic in this process is how do we rematriate the archive I feel deeply mothered by this work and myself also trying I feel deeply mothered and I think some of the elements that are mothered in shaping the dramaturgic the most is the land actually watching this particular growth move through each season and know that we are building something that's public art permanent which is 10 years and so how does something live throughout seasons in that way and being responsive to the land make it something other than what it is because really moving inside of a deep trust that important growth which if you ever have a chance to visit come call me I'll come you too has a totally different feel than the big house so the big house is also on a separate property so there was almost is autonomy possible under was autonomy possible under slavery was there a moment where folks like turned around and looked at these grove of trees and like the wind went by and they experienced a moment of freedom you know or got to dream about it like that in these cabins that there were children birds out of joy and not out of like you know oppression so those sort of things that are not there like how does that get woven into design the belief that there was not just one story that happened here and I think there are folks who don't know what dramaturgy is at all but who are guiding the dramaturgical process particularly descendants and then asking black folks in my community if they've ever been to Stagville if not why not and what would they need to shift in order to go to visit so like one of my closest friends and collaborator on the process named is Derek Beasley he grew up in Durham went through all Durham public schools and he was in his 30s when I brought him there for the project before he had actually been to Stagville they took him to Duke Plantation where they talked about but they did not bring him here so I think I'm so curious about what the barriers to people being like oh actually this is the place I can engage with so this is the place where I can find breath and know that I am seated here so I think I'm really curious about the ways in which the trees and the air and the way that the grow looks different in spring than it does in winter how that impacts the way that I am designing space for people to be there in the long term can I ask you a follow up question sure I am really moved by and curious about structurally how these plantations across the state of North Carolina are marked are like owned by this state now and yeah I'm curious about yeah because that's not the case in a lot of the other states and I'm curious about how you understand that we're generally for your work with Stagville but also these other ceremonies that you were holding in other states like what does that governance and oversight what does that mean for North Carolina the folks who are over there's a black woman who is the head of all of the historic sites her name is Michelle and she is though and she's a descendant of Stagville and she also knows that she's inside of a system and can do her thing but she can only do her thing but so much so like one of the reasons why this is not a monument this is not a honoring of any people it's because Michelle during all of the uprisings in 2020 that monuments they decided to take she made the decision to take down the confederate monuments that were surrounding our state capitol and they were like okay but what if you leave them and we'll just like put some monuments up other places and she's like no take them down so because of that our state legislator then wrote there's laws that say that there could be no monuments on any state property so that is why that's the reflection space that's the reflection space we're just so clear that even though we know this is not like we also want to honor the people it's about reflection and not about honoring so I think the governance as much as like there are people in power who are shifting things the culture of historic sites is still the tele-particular story that coddles and cares for particular groups of people and you even see that in like the Instagram, I called them up on Instagram last year because they put up a post from some place and it was one of the historic sites and they were like yeah and you know and people worked here and they and I was like did they work or were they enslaved and I took the screenshot and then Michelle emailed me and she's like I saw the message you sent to the people because they're all individually run and they do not actually have a clear culture on how we talk about these things and other folks are so entrenched and have been doing this for so long and they are in counties where they are not challenged around them so it really, it feels like the work at Stagville for me one of the values that I hold in my work is like waves not craters the work we do at Stagville would then have a ripple effect out across these other sites of like actually you have a responsibility not to these buildings not to like the history that's on the paper but to the living people who are living with the impact of what happened on this land so and if we are not doing that if we are so busy serving like we got preserved the brick they're like what are we doing because also inside of climate change there's no guarantee that one storm will come so the materiality that we have to serve that's right so here he is can I answer a little bit please the dramaturgical process with this it was a shit process I don't know how to say that it was the worst process I've ever been a part of because I during ritual I at it was part of my request to the ancestors to take the project off my lap I did not want to do it it was very clear from the jump like actually I don't want to do this could you move it move to another time move to another space I put all the things in the ritual I was like yeah this is about to work I'm about to go back by to have this conversation they'd be like yeah you know what this no that did not happen that did not happen and I feel like it was a spiritual dramaturgical process because the more I had in my mind it would be very cut and dry we're going to do this like um this ritual theater piece on the site there was no plan to film it there was no plan to record it it was not a digital project I was like boom boom boom yeah everything first of all we couldn't even get access to the site because there was stuff going on behind the scenes with the school district we're trying to connect with these organizations that are usually like super responsive like we know people you know everybody not happening it got pushed back and even the curator was like what is happening it's almost like like something doesn't want it to happen and so it was just like so much questioning that was coming up based on just like I realized it wasn't blocks they were forming it into a thing that I didn't get to choose which I hate that's not my favorite thing ever and it wasn't blocks but it was like no not now this and then I get a new piece of information and now I have to get I have to ask a lot of deep questions and then I had to really kind of sit with the elements and be like okay I get it what do you want what do you want to say about this and how do I translate and it just was a lot of questions questions questions questions that came up that I don't necessarily always have answers for even still because there's no there are no answers there's just like process um and when we got the final even looking at the final product the curator and I were just like this is not what we thought this was going to be had all creating the documentary that wasn't necessarily the way in which we had planned or even us performing on top of the so there's um Lisa Harris does like the vocal scoring so I sent her my send her the script and just was like you do she's amazing you know she's amazing but then the idea that like while the documentary like people are telling these like stories we're like just talking just it just is all the way that it combines so it was really um allowing like the questions that I felt like these different elemental forces kept presenting just kept changing the piece because once the question got posed then you can't for without without having to add another layer because now the spirit of water is saying well what about there were 107 bodies and why would I wash away 5 you know or 7 I don't know but now I gotta go go ask what happened to the other bodies like what so it was really really um poopy I like to be in control that doesn't work well obviously I never get that but this process was the only process that was um so layered that even like I said the curator was like it's very clear like do does this at some point like do they want this to happen because I mean even like where I lived I get all my Amazon packages like nothing ever gets $900 worth of stuff got delivered to an address we have no concept of the address where it got delivered there's not even another street in the state named my street it was like so then it was like no not even you can't film the day you film you gotta wait so I feel like it did it forced me into this constant questioning process about process information what my role is in a translator what where I step forward where I step back how do I allow spirit to move and not get in the way um even when we did the ritual on site an ancestralization ritual a white woman who came it was open to the community she came listen she was in there it's in the film she was there with this so everybody's grouped by clans according to the dagara right and I helped them understand this is what your contributions are typically in ritual everybody has roles so people got to be with their clan and um her part of her clan is we were ancestralizing we have the names that we have we're ancestralizing them on site this white woman she was making her song girl making her song I mean for like 7 minutes for the section I mean I'm sorry I bless her but damn she was moved okay I said she's going in on this like vocal giving right she was part of the mineral clan so she was we care we swear I'm getting emails phone calls I did not give this woman none of this information cause it was through the organization she contacts the organization she is like I don't want to be in the film I woke up I didn't feel right at 3 in the morning something woke her up it was wrong this is what she did she goes to my website and she saw the word voodoo had a fucking you took us through voodoo I said what do y'all want do they call you might want to talk to your people you only did it you should talk to your people you live here you live in this city nothing but it was just like it could have been a barrier to the process cause she contacted the organization we already had her release form though so it was like pushing through it was like the piece is just so many blocks it was a lot it was a lot and that was at the very anyway but she's still in there her voice in the editing I said make sure you get that um but just kind of allowing back to like allowing that to shape and knowing that it wasn't a barrier like letting the questions that got presented like okay well what process is needing to come up what ritual process would need to continue to unearth this stuff how would we continue to facilitate that like that was the process for me like dramaturgically and this concept of orikey to introduce to one of our calls of like um a birth name like a birth song a praise song um felt really important for me because the process started to feel like death and not like a birth any ritual is a birth of joy that's really it's a washing of grief so joy can come back into the village so having to remember that this isn't a rikey for joy at the end of the grief we will laugh at this white woman which we did but no we will laugh at the place where we cried and that's the point so yeah Ariel we would love to hear from you you heard the original question correct? I did I did yeah and um I'm happy to go up to the last speaker she said really really resonates um in the sense of all the plans that I had um within this particular project really went in a different direction um in terms of the dramaturgy um conversations I have with Carlos he was able to help me think about um what does it mean to have a trained eye um when thinking when thinking about um green space natural space so coming all from an urban setting even though I grew up in a rural area if it was to be a return to a place where there's farming or there's just wide open space right um how do you then map out things according to you know perhaps what is it in fruit trees when do they flower what's in what season what are the curves that are available how are they used to serve the needs of our community that family um I'm just thinking about natural space in very specific details I was one of the things he helped me to kind of set up um not very happy right now but one of the what what um the last speaker I'm struggling to remember your name um in the vein of things not necessarily going the way for them to go um it was interesting I speak about this more in this afternoon's video is the idea of um looking at somebody called mother earth and then entering into unexpectedly somewhat entering into the work and the rhythm of maternity um this I felt like I came to what's completing the script and then boom I was pregnant and it was a very it was a very difficult pregnancy challenging on the medical side of things um so from very early I have to go into bed rest which meant that um my ability to move um this this this was supposed to be a movement because it's not feasible moving away from I wanted it to be kind of not I wouldn't go as far as to call it dance I'm not a dancer like like Sandra but um incorporating lots of movement right physical movement and uh that suddenly became very very impossible so I had to think about you know I had to think about movement in different ways and terms um and something that is it is not the first speaker um all my mother's dream in Spanish also trying to remember your name you were talking about having a script to the citizen level of porosity um that for me looked like um being able to break up the script in such a way that even though I didn't get to perform it as one complete production one single production um every time that I would be invited to perform at any event I would try my best to see if there was a way I could perform part of the script if there was a way I could work one of the one of the poems or one of the pieces into that performance so that it became this kind of very um yeah it became this broken up thing that I was doing any and every way um as a performance a performance poet um instead of like one theatrical piece that hasn't happened yet for me um so having that adaptability in that regard was important for me because uh like Cistrin will say and you know um you plan, you make plans for things in spirit, redirects um so definitely I found myself living inside more of the text as I was researching um this mother earth person for example one of the elements she speaks about um is her doing away with the hospital particularly as it regards to giving birth um and because of the complications of my pregnancy I had to go to um I had to have my birth at a hospital even though I would have preferred to do it at home um and so my interface with the doctors, with the medical staff um her story and her narrative kept playing at the back of my mind and I really had to set my boundaries with books, I really had to make sense in terms of what I wanted what I didn't want for my child um and it comes, her story comes out of a place of trauma and it just it just allowed me to really view um our hospital system and I would think you know through all the west as a really oppressive system and the hospital I went to is meant to, it is a public hospital and we are thankfully we have free health care here to that extent um but it was still really traumatic inside of it so I felt like in some ways I was still kind of meeting the journey with mother earth um thinking and reconsidering on lots of things that she brought up in her process and in her journey um and ultimately I gave thanks that I'm still inside of the script, I'm still moving with her words I'm still finding truth and resonance in a lot of the things that she came forward with and um still exploring, still in the background of exploration um with baby and so I'm so very grateful for that thank you, thank you beautiful um so I have one last question that I actually want to toss up and like maybe I might also invite you to mix the response to this question with um responses that you will ask questions that may arise for the collective right like our larger body that wants to ask so this question is really like how did your work how is your work changing you changed you um and this you all have really beautifully answered this in so many ways um so I just want to like offer that as maybe a filter um as we move into also other questions um yeah just lifting that filter and then opening the one for questions and opening the panel for questions for each other I think I was wondering we heard of water from Sonja um and Sonja sorry um and um earth with Candice what elements do you all identify your work as representing that's a great question um all of the elements were elements were another dramaturgy for the piece in a lot of ways um in that the we kind of tracked which elements seem to I which characters seem to identify with which elements most um some of that was accidental some of it was evolutionary and then it became intentional kind of in the last bits of the process but the first kind of seed of the piece was locating a lot of the conversation among characters in what for me is the ancestral space which is a patio of a house in Venezuela that's very much like my family's house and there's a mango tree there and so mangoes became this massive kind of cosmology in the world of the play um and thus one of the characters kind of became an earthbound um person in terms of element and then uh you know they're all over the place it's like this person was fiery and then the costume designer was like well I thought they were water so I made this costume and I was like oh wow I think you might be right so just I think the elements just were another language that we played with both visually and also just in terms of actors being able to kind of really get inside the the bodies of these characters can I clarify so the project engages five elements from the Degard cosmology um and so that is like mineral mineral is the element that archives information so mineral clan people are the artists typically are mineral interesting to see who's I'll tell you but um so um rocks gems that's mineral then you have earth um is indigar, tingan, tingvalu it's a female and a masculine presence so it's nurture anise protector it does both um unlike some of how we know in the west which is like mother only maternal it's not a fuck you up um indigar so there's this duality to it uh water um water is the energy of reconciliation so water bearers are the reconcilers of the people they keep the peace um they're tasked with creating a wholeness in the community um then there is let's see mineral other than there's nature so integrating nature also I linked it with the Congo I think in that section but nature clan nature represents anything above the earth trees plants including humans all animals um including some other uh beings that are not human as well they have a range of other beings contomblay that all interface with nature um and nature bearers are considered the natural witches of a society they're shape shifters the tricksters but they can connect and then fire which was really important because fire is the realm of the ancestors so integrating fire and it's all like explicit in there like earth fire mineral um because they all have a different type of ritual connected fire is the ancestral ritual which is what we did with the community opening um when you want to talk to the ancestors that's where you go through fire some other cosmologies just through water is that fine I can't care I don't do mental math how many? earth some some some some else yeah that's fine okay cool yeah so it's uh explicitly five elements that the work connects to um and then five uh diasporic and practices and everything then those fire yeah I feel like mine is definitely earth um but earth specific to earth is trees um I think that there is um there are just really beautiful trees on the ground and there are old trees on the ground and um we were very clear that in the design we weren't um we weren't cutting down any trees all the design is like inside of the grove in which it exists um and then the what we're using is like found materials that are already there so we're not bringing in a lot of materials um and just also so I really feel like my my master plan is that and doing this work actually in black folks can heal their relationship to the place of rupture then we can also step full more fully into our place inside of um environmental justice and but but the rupture is so real with the earth that it it needs a healing and it needs a healing on plantation spaces is part of my life my thing um and and so I think about trees one the reminder that the trees did not want to harm us and two that the trees are hungry for the specifics of free black breath that like the trees themselves would be different um when black people are breathing freely um so um just stop um and each of the sharings there's a lot around how people outside of the peace were in communication with it um and I'm thinking about easing this notion of caretaking in particular ways and what does caretaking look like you said in the before and the during and I'm also wondering what does that look like afterwards where there are multiple people who are community right um in ways that are really beyond the scope of how we conceive of our projects but every burger weighs out so I'm just wondering with in each of your projects what that sort of looks like do you use the word caretaking when you think about the ways in which people outside are communicating and communion with the kinds of topics spirit that comes up in the first place actually was actually from both of us I should go first on this one um I think my relationship the words relationship to time allows me to be in a caring process like this is slow work I mean like I was in conversation with that girl for two years before we even got to the contracting and this wasn't even for the project I wanted to do this is for the project that they wanted me to do I'm still in the process of trying to get to the initial but here's the thing that I actually wanted to do with y'all so I feel very clear that this is a long term legacy project um also so I bought a house in uh 21 and my house sits on stagville land because stagville was so big so I think there's also this thing around like this is what I'm doing at home literally right so I think there's something about I am learning how to care for myself and also know that like the answers has been waiting a long time so even if you know that's not happening in one grant cycle or two years or whatever that like I am not late this work is not late and we can slow down enough to take care of ourselves and take care of the land and take care of the people as we do this work um and that I do not even though sometimes when I think about the possibility of political regime change um and what that would do to the work I do feel some concern but I also I trust the ancestors in the land more that's right that's exactly right that's exactly right so caretaking I'm gonna echo Candace's desire for control um because I I wear a couple different hats in the theater world and so I as a playwright was really trying to stick to that role um air quotes for our virtual press um but it was it was it was really hard for me I think more than anything it answered or gave me more questions about what kind of theater I want to make in the future because I think that what happens with an institutional partnership is a question of scale I just couldn't have produced this play at the scale that it was produced on my own and I think I had to accept that in getting scale I had to build certain boundaries for myself around what I can claim as my responsibility and I think that I just know now that's what it means to have an institutional partner I think with each iteration of my work it's a question of does this need scale or is this small intended just by me um and it also looked like questioning perfectionism because I think that there were times where I would watch the process of this and ask myself why did I write anything down why is there a right answer do you know what I mean there was something about you know what I've made I've been in so many rehearsal rooms I've been an actor I've had off date off book dates you know I've been in the process but there was something about watching people memorize these words that I wrote that were precise to me and them getting it wrong that felt really not okay like it just it made me ask like what are we making when there's a right answer even the spirit of what this work is supposed to be it's ultimately it meant that the actor who stepped into the role um with the whole visa situation was on book for about a week and a half of the run and I think that that scandalized the institution and it put my I had so much peace of mind because I just was like I just want the words to get heard and I want her to feel comfortable and ultimately it was fine and I think that was the thing right so like all throughout tech everyone's like she's holding the script what are we going to do like what if you know that interview you do they're going to ask like why was she holding a script none of that happened because there's so many different ways of knowing and yeah it was fine you know what I mean and I think that that was really the takeaway that like we're allowed to just do things differently and then I think the only other thing about caretaking is caretaking of audience we talked about this at dinner last night too of recognizing that I wrote a piece where people who do not speak one of these languages will not understand half of what they hear and building other languages into the presentation so making body language and movement and choreography and ritual elevating them to the same status as text which I think just doesn't happen in America so that when people didn't understand what they were hearing there were so many other languages that they could access and just making sure that the audience was getting that message in hundreds of ways from the moment they came into the door so that was a lot about you know what we put the body display the fact that the play morphed into having a drum score and there's a drum you'll see in the video later that there's a drummer who was on set throughout the piece and just the language of percussion being something that is so universal for any human body so I think that recognizing that that is also caretaking of just like offering multi-lingual and also just I think you know when you apply the lens of an educator to a theater and thinking about oh multiple learners, multiple learning styles like if I have a message I want to share with folks it needs to be heard in more than one way and that just becoming again the dramaturgy to make sense because I did speak to one Yorisha and she said you know you're doing work that's important for not just for yourself it's for the ancestors right you're working on their behalf so even though you're not necessarily a Yorisha practitioner you're working in concert with a lot of the spirit world that you have to be even though you're doing this for academic reasons there's a different level that you're doing this for and she's told me that even about my museum she says you are a teacher you're trying to teach people things you're trying to open doors for people to be conscious of that so it's not just about care taking it's about taking care so that you have to understand what be in conversation and be aware of what people in this realm and the spirits of other realms are telling you even though it's an academic exercise at the end of the day because it's part of my work for my PhD it's beyond that she's a piece of paper okay what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to search for certain truths and that is a whole different realm so that I try now to walk through the world with that kind of sort of philosophy so that when I do approach even the academic things that I'm looking at a document or whatever because I'm a very you know I have an MBA so I am I'm all about gotta get the facts gotta get the facts gotta get the facts and see how many people got lost cause it actually does exist now in a sense Duke University did a very massive project about that but that's not really important what's really important is what the felt history is and what it is that we carry with us and how does that help us heal for the future so that's where my care taking and taking care thank you yeah if you want to turn to Mario to hear responses so can you hear me so yeah just extending what I was saying earlier care taking I had to attend to my birthday I had to prioritize rest which I am so grateful I think this has been one of the few organizations that I've done with in the last few years where there is so much for the super number in both spaciousness and spaciousness in process where I did have that freedom without feeling continually pressured that I needed to meet a deadline with this work and so at some point I was ready to perform the piece on my bed and record it and do it as a film but at one point but what I was able to do is just kind of there is a possible mind while I get my body back up and running and again I speak about this more later on so that is care taking on my part in terms of the people that I call K and the people who I refer to as tribe who I have been in conversation about this work with just you know it's as simple as being intentional about the communities that I become part of being intentional about how are we providing to each other how are you gifting me seeds how are you giving me a plant for my garden how are we sustaining each other taking proofs to each other's bones discussing how are we going to homeschool our children together how just about anything in the rounds of organizing and care taking and collective aid really how do we continue to find ways to forge that interdependence as we release our hold on the state as we decentralize from the ways that we constantly entail our new ways to place particularly in a peaceful space like the California so yeah care taking is continuous community organizing which starts with my family with my own part and it is awkward so in terms of the question on central the finger that I'm examining is mother earth and it does help with farming and the land and sustainably living something as simple as machete, she didn't believe in using machete to cultivate the land the plant you know we believe in a violent way so everything is done by hand almost done by hand right so so there is that the land is to see because they were in a coastal region and the sea and the river wasn't important or a transformation between them and there is the outside world I would call it because you know all the different purposes were an isolated community but they would see additionally there is the fire and I told you that she put everything that represented western or so called civilized living and then there is the element of wind which presents the change all the changes that is script those are the changes from urban to rural the change from that cross between me and some other which I myself am making and just yeah all those changes in terms of letting those longer right then and now I'm not going to win elements so yeah I covered for I know there are more elements in other cultures but those are the more I was being at this side of the ocean thank you thank you I want to close the door gently though I know we will move into lunch and continue to be in this conversation but for this space this gathering I want to give thanks to each of you for your brilliance for your power for your work you were making this work and as you were in this residence yeah I want to lift them yeah thank you for being here yes and yes thank you