 of liberty and free speech and they are generous people, people who really care about the world, the society they live in, the city, the community, the neighborhoods and their own company. It's remarkable and their models I think for all of us and I think we all have to listen much closer. They have been warning us for a very long time about these things, they aren't working, they aren't right and perhaps no one has listened carefully enough. We, after a little summer break, opened up again in the fall when we also move a bit more to the political and the theater because we feel this is the time of change, things have to change. We are also in this time in America before the elections where we all feel the weight of history actually on our shoulders, the Black Lives Matter movement that galvanized so much and also showed what is wrong. It's a revealing, the word apocalypse, which says actually it's a revealing of something and it also has some wisdom in it and it doesn't mean this is apocalyptic time that times come to an end, actually no, things are seen how they are and often a manifestation of all the circumstances, the divine ones and the hellish ones and we have to come to terms with it as Bruno Latour said, in Friedrich Atui, this is what we're going through in the pandemic is a general rehearsal, what is coming with climate change and everything else is much, much bigger and we cannot screw this up. And artists have now also, I think the responsibility and also the mission to be part of this change, to create an area of exchange of ideas, of presenting, imagining new worlds and making people feel comfortable that these worlds are okay to live in a new world where we are all really truly, hopefully listening to each other. This week we are still in the prelude festival mood, something we've done for over 15 years at the single center where we bridge academia professional theater, international and American theater and it's dedicated to New York theater artists, New York theater ensembles and we always have great young curators who take the pulse of the time and show and select and curate excerpts from great New York city artists and they're just representing many, many, many others who do important work and we ask them to share work in progress but also to talk about it and to learn from them and to see the way of thinking, the mechanics behind it, the brain because we do think theater and what's happening on stage is an extension of the brain of directors, actors but also audiences that this is what theater is all about and there ever is a time where we needed it now. So with us is David Brun who is one of the curators next to Miranda Herman who is presenting tomorrow so she can, or today so she can't be here with her bridesmaids Ben Williams and Greg Sargent, Shesan Choi and Brian Herdrich, Bryn Herdrich and so we will all ask them to introduce themselves but David first give us a little overview about a prelude and this idea of revolutionary side what it's all about. David is a drama talk, a critic and a doctoral candidate at Yale School of Drama so he's in the middle of it and he's one of the people who do research in academia the people who really do research are open and take the time, these students it's the PhD students and so many others because we all are so busy but maybe we have lost contact already it's so hard to do that work so this is great to have him with us he studies contemporary theater and performance and so David tell us a little bit what's the idea behind what you guys put together with us? Sure so long with my co-curator Miranda Heyman we came up with the theme sites of revolution that would animate the festival and the idea perhaps obviously so was that we saw the repertory of revolution playing out daily as we were coming up with the festival thinking about the uprisings on the street for Black Lives Matter and other movements but also the slogans, the rhetoric and we were very excited by that but we also wanted the festival to be an opportunity to explore other sites and other time signatures at which these revolutionary activities and revolutionary thinking is taking place so for instance with ERS we were very excited about the idea that in some way those Baldwin and Buckley debates are still present with us I mean some theorists I enjoy think of 1968 as still happening you can think of emancipation as an ongoing project and the counter force against that is also an ongoing project so we were very excited about the way in which ERS was thinking about using this digital platform to return to a different time but that's also our time in certain ways and with Penny thoughts we were extremely excited about any project that wanted to talk about money last night we had a panel called Get Rid of the Gala with a great group of administrators and artists thinking about how the nonprofit industrial complex is wrapped up in what we do in the fabric of our field Penny thoughts was a more personal even confessional way of approaching that and these beautiful objects coming up on Instagram these hand-painted pennies I'll let them talk more about it but I was just thrilled that this project Penny thoughts was taking place through postal mail in some ways especially when the post office was being attacked and so that was those kinds of multimedia pieces were really thrilling and of course Penny thoughts will have a showing of its work of some kind on Friday I'll let them talk more about but those give you a sense of just kind of the the expanse the kind of mutability of this rubric of revolution that we were trying to capture on the website PreludeNYC2020.com and today I think especially with having people from ERS a very storied group so when I actually studied in graduate school and I can still remember my formative experiences seeing their work along with G Sun and Bren who are at a different point in their career but working on equally adventurous exploration so this group is just really excellent I think exemplary cohort of what the festival hoped to bring together so maybe I can kick it over to John and the ERS folks they can do their introductions and then G Sun and Bren can follow suit. Sure, I mean, I'm John Collins I'm the artistic director of elevated repair service I feel like in terms of this particular project that we're here to talk about I should kick it over as soon as possible to Greg Sarge because this was his baby and but just I'll just say that it's an example of the way we work I try to listen to my ensemble to tell me what we ought to be doing where we ought to be going and even in the case where I pitch an idea myself I'm usually sort of secretly hoping that it's gonna fail in some interesting way because my brilliant ensemble discovered something more compelling or a truth that I hadn't seen when we started to work on it so in this case it was me going to Greg what Greg in back in September of 2019 and say, what do you want to do? So can I kick it to him now that I've said that? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, hello everyone. My name is Greg Sargent I'm a member of elevated repair service a long time member of elevated repair service and I would just like to thank you for choosing us to be in your festival to preview this new and very important work for us. As John said earlier, an opportunity was given to me by him asking me what I was interested in doing with the company specifically and for a long time I wanted James Baldwin has always been one of my heroes personal heroes, especially being a black and gay artist and I said to John, well, I'll get back to you and I went on to YouTube and I looked at every interview, read as many articles as I could about Mr. Baldwin and quite by accident I came across the debate which I was not familiar with before and I watched the debate and in the conclusion of watching the debate the feeling that I was left with was a complete utter anger because I was so shocked that the debate 55 years ago touched on issues that were still so relevant today and this is pre-pandemic and so I took the, I tried to find the, I found a transcript of the debate and I took it to John and we had a reading of it and we were both very excited at the time and that's how the project came about. I called Ben, Ben Williams, my dear, dear friend and a brilliant actor and sound designer who has played Buckley before and I immediately asked him with John's permission if he would like to be in the project so that's how we got started with the whole thing. More? And so we started and we had a couple of readings and we had an initial live reading where the reception of the piece was so powerful that we knew we had to do the piece and work on the piece. Of course, the pandemic happened and stopped everything but we did have a few rehearsals to work on it and we are well on our way now in trying to figure out a performance platform where it will work that we will do the debate in the future and we're very grateful to you because we learned so much from the filming of what we've done that we were able to submit to the Karelin Festival. Personally speaking, as a black artist, my parents are immigrants to this country and they come from a third world country where they come from an environment where you're not really allowed to have a point of view. So coming to the United States in the early 60s via South America and England, my parents were very clear about the fact that I have a sister that we would have to work very, very hard to make our dreams come true and my parents had envisioned certain lives for their children and opportunities for their children where opportunities that they did not have. And so from a very young age, I knew that I was different and I would have to try to carve out a way to have as full of life as possible and to make a long story very short, when I was in the second grade, my mother read an article, I'm from Brooklyn originally, that's talked about a certain school district on Long Island where 97% of the people that graduated from that school district went on to university. So my mother got it in her head that we were moving to this town. And so we moved to this town an all-white town out in Long Island and my father sat my sister and I down and had the talk. And the talk was that there are many people in this town that were very upset that my family moved into this town, that we were not allowed to express any anger. We had to be the representative of our race. And when I heard this at the age of seven years old, I was furious because I felt like I don't understand why I have to be treated as a person less than somebody else where I have to be conscious all the time of my behavior. And I was very, very angry and my parents were very, very concerned about that. And one of the major reasons why I got into the theater, my goddaughter was asking me the other day, why did you get into the theater? And I said, well, it was the only way as a child where I could speak for two hours and people had to listen to me. And in a way, I'm still doing that. So the fact that I am now the vessel of passing on the message of James Baldwin about our society, our past and our future and handing that over to a new audience is very thrilling and exciting to me. And I'm very grateful to John Collins, the artistic director of Elevator Repair Service who has always been very supportive of hiring people of color and giving us opportunities. And which is why I'm so excited to do this piece. That's all I really have to say about the situation. So... Thank you, Greg. Well, no, thank you, John. So... Ben, would you like to introduce yourself and maybe say a few words about the project and then we'll move it over to Jason and Brent. Hey, I'm Ben Williams. I'm an actor and sound designer in ERS. And it's Greg said, I've played William F. Buckley before. But I think one of the things that's fun about what we've discovered just in some Zoom rehearsals during the pandemic, which, you know, we feel that as a theater artist, everything is kind of crippled, you know, in terms of what you can actually work on over the internet. But we made some discoveries. We actually made some progress on this piece over Zoom. It was really, really great. And one of the fun things has been finding a way to not play William F. Buckley. And kind of, you know, speak his words in a voice that isn't so caricatured and isn't so cartoonish, but is actually... I don't know, it sounds perhaps more like Jared Kushner sounded like this week when he basically made the exact same argument. Exertions. Yeah. Yeah, so just a bit about the project. You're re-staging, you know, the discussion that took place in Cambridge in front of an audience actually interestingly divided, you know, like a Japanese theater, you know, like audience on the right and the left in a long hall in front of the discussions and Baldwin and Buckley, you know, basically had a debate modeled after a college debate. And, you know, as Greg said, you know, why do you have to prove it and why do others defend the indefensible? But it was acting out of what was where on people mind. And it's quite stunning, moving and sad and perhaps also inspiring presentation they gave. So I look forward to hear that. But let's move on to you guys. Jisun, maybe you, that was a good. Sure. Hi, I'm Jisun Choi. I'm a playwright and a physical theater artist. I'm currently in Rainey Crown Heights, Brooklyn. And I'm one of the creators of Penny Thoughts. And it is, we call it a digital companion to Bust, which is a live performing, you know, performance that we're currently developing through Soho Rep's minor director lab. And with the shutdowns, with the theaters closing, we needed to find an avenue to get the research, which was real life people's stories of their relationship to money. Our project first started, we came up with Bust. I think like summer, spring of 2019, way before we could ever imagine this happening. And I'm sure Brent will talk about more too. We have a common experience of having grown up in Southeast Asia in early 2000s, when the economy was booming, foreign investments were flowing in. And there was such a sense of like immense growth while the gap between the rich and the poor was widening at the astonishing pace. And because of the experience, personally, I felt like, and where I come from, which is Korea and Thailand, I felt like money was something that was very evident to me and was present everywhere. And I could talk about it. But as soon as I came to the US, it was, oh my gosh, it was the only thing that you couldn't talk about. You could talk about drugs, you could talk about sex, you could talk about class, race. But when it came about personal wealth or wealth that wasn't dealt in an institutional or structural manner, people clam up. And I just found that so interesting all throughout. And Penny Thoughts is a way to kind of open that clam up a little bit and really starting with the very first memory of money. You know, when was the first time I encountered, I first encountered this concept that is man-made and kind of going back to the very beginning, the origin stories and all of us and trying to figure out what is this relationship complicated, sometimes beautiful, sometimes devastating relationship we have with wealth and value. Yeah, over to you, Brynn. That was, G-Sun, that was great. You did the hard part. Hi, my name is Brynn. I am a director and theater maker primarily. And as G-Sun said, we are partners in the creation of Bust as well as Penny Thoughts. Yeah, I mean, I think you articulated it really well. Penny Thoughts, like the gist for those who have not made it to the Instagram are basically that we ask people to contribute their first memory of money via a Google form. And then what we do is for every memory we receive, we take a penny and paint one side of it with a design or an image that's inspired by that memory and then that penny is sent back to the person who contributed their memory to us via the mail. So it's like, it's a literal penny for your thoughts. Love upon, but thanks, gang. But so yeah, so I think for us it was very much, we in our kind of work around part of Bust is we have always wanted to sort of like get massive, massive, massive amounts of personal narrative surrounding money. And the pandemic has made it very challenging, but I think we also sort of have also realized that, as G-Sun said, it feels like people are very willing to discuss money in a structural way, but people have a really hard time once they start talking about their relationship to it. And so we were trying to help, we were trying to facilitate that exchange and maybe make it a little less scary or a little more joyful by asking people to tell us their very first memory of money, sort of like trying to get back to what is our relationship with this object before the structures that surround all of us, that all of us grow into and are shaped by a lot of that structural baggage comes along with it. So yeah, that's kind of, and I think it's also been really interesting because what we've realized over the course of this project is that our first memory of money is often our first experience in some ways with narrative. It's one of the first moments of symbolic thought that we're asked to embrace, like very small children, to them a coin or a penny or a dollar is just a piece of paper or just a hunk of metal. And it's oftentimes one of the first moments that we're asked to treat a symbol in a very literal way. It's a symbol that we learn and then are required to, and then becomes more and more important and sort of more and more real to us throughout our lives. And so also like re-approaching what that moment is of like this first story that we encounter with money. Yeah, so it's a money race, politics, first memories, like also Greg shared his memory. And how do you all feel creating theater at the moment, theater and performance? What is on your guys' mind? It's pretty hard to think about that right now. I mean, I was gonna add before, like part of the concept for redoing this Baldwin-Buckley debate was not so much about showing you exactly what it looked like in 1965, but creating the experience of two, 300 people or however many we could get sitting in a room live together listening to those words by real people speaking them in real time in the present. And of course, those are all the fundamental powers of theater and I was very excited to see what they would do to these words. And now, I mean, I'm also extremely grateful for Prelude for giving us an opportunity to work on this and get people to hear it, but not to bring everything down, but it's crushing not to be able to follow through on that impulse to, and I know I'm talking about the pandemic situation right now, but it has really put into stark relief what's powerful about live theater and what we're missing right now. And I feel like what our piece is missing and I'm just, you know, biding my time here trying to, waiting to get these words in front of a live audience. Somebody say something more hopeful. Well, I mean, you know, I come from a theater background and not really television and film. So having to have rehearsals on Zoom and trying to make that work and trying to relay a statement and get a response when you're not dealing with an audience has been very sort of interesting and challenging. Who knows how long this pandemic is going to last, but if this is the means now where we get to create, it's been an extraordinary, you know, learning opportunity. So that's a positive, John. I also, you know, it's also hard. I think we're so used to being surround, especially theater people, we're used to being around a lot of people working with a lot of different collaborators at the same time in person. And to have that, you know, and for the first few months, you know, it was kind of like everyone's lost that seed. Like we don't really know the Zoom it is Twitch it. Like we, none of us really know or really are interested because we're live, you know, live performing people. But one thing that I am taking away from doing this project with at the prelude festival online is that, you know, we get a memory and this is the literal process. We get a memory, we read it and we take a penny and we think, hmm, what's the picture that really represents something that this person has shared? And we paint it and we reread it and paint it. And Brent and I have so far painted like 40, would you say? Sorry, we've got a back, we've got a little bit of a backlog. I think we're to 55 painted. Yeah, so like each that's like, you know, about 20 memories and like, you know, we show each other like, oh yeah, that looks cool. Like, oh, that doesn't look like anything which you should redo that one. And by doing that, what I realized is I have spent so much time with these memories in a way that I probably wouldn't if it was a research and we're moving quickly onto a devising process or in person rehearsal, like sitting with these memories and reading them multiple times and, you know, and kind of exploring in a textual and visual way, you know, whenever I see a penny, I instantly remember what that is and like the feeling that it involved. And I think just having the time to expand on that kind of library of thought and library of raw material that I can actually digest as a person has actually been kind of incredible. And I don't think I would have had that time if I were in a, you know, day-to-day grind of a theater artist because like who has time to paint like 55 pennies by hand? Not before the pandemic. Yeah, I think it also just like speaking, I think for me that just like talking about what we're saying, right? Like the idea of like what is liveness basically and like that I think for, at least for myself, I think for a lot of theater people, a lot, there's tremendous importance in the audience being physically there, right? Like that is, they're having them, having that exchange is so fundamental to the form. Like you might, we can debate, right? Like we can like debate even if story is vital to theater or like narrative is vital to it. But like actually the audience, that interaction is the thing that's so, that like to me that is what theater is. That is like the defining characteristic. And so it has been mostly depressing, but sometimes fascinating challenge of like how do you create that sense of liveness if you can't be in the same space? And like, is that possible? I like to think that, you know, when we paint this penny and then send it to someone in the mail that exchange is distended, but it's not broken. Like that there is something, there is still a sense of connection there. That's it. I think that's a brilliant way of putting it because in a way like, you know, I started off by expressing all this disappointment in our lack of our live audience. And I agree, like that's, that is, I feel deeply that's what's essential. And like you said, Bren, like taking away, you know, you could take away narrative and still have, well, you could argue, maybe some wouldn't, but you could take away narrative and still have theater if there was some live exchange. Of course, a narrative would then happen, but you can't take away the liveness and still have something you'd call theater because then you might call it something else. Then you've written something or you've filmed something. But to hear you talk about it like that is giving me some hope in a way because it's, you know, I'm always interested in the ways that our medium fails and breaks and falls apart and then reconstitutes itself. And so what's happening to us right now in a way is a massive failure. You know, it's like the whole system has been as broken or has been sort of legislated out of existence. And it's nice to have a sort of hopeful thought about it. Like this is a really insane challenge. Okay, so find a way to make liveness real still. Find a way to connect to that thing you do even though you can't do it. So that's, I just wanna like amplify that thought. I like that. It certainly is a new way to reach audiences, to be in dialogue with a theater performance audience through mail and we had the Paper Moon Company from Indonesia as one of the talks and what they did, they put little boxes with how to build puppets to all people who came to their theaters and then the people create the puppet and do little things, they instruct with them. Or what they also did is they asked people, he can give us an idea of pay me $50, $20, like very, very low and skip the story to a healthcare worker or a friend of mine. So people, they commission plays, works, little stories from the Paper Moon Company. And they create something and send it to them. And they say, well, you would of course never do that. And your idea was the penny in the mail. It reminds me of it. I'm sitting here thinking that this is, first of all, I'm really excited to, I'm inspired by the description of your work, Jusun and Bryn. And I think it's interesting in a way that we're on this panel together today. I feel like these two pieces may have some reciprocal relationship because one of the things that James Baldwin articulates so powerfully is how the concept of wealth, wealth obtained by the Southern agricultural economy in the early United States, how that wealth was basically obtained through the labor of black people in the South who received nothing for it. And this is one of the favorite parts. And Greg, I feel like it's one of the parts of the performance that you inhabit most passionately is talking about that wealth that was taken away and the idea of a relationship to work and money. And I just was listening to you guys describe your project made me think a little bit about James Baldwin just now. Yeah, and I was also reading something about the 60s and the civil rights movement and there are like civil rights movement also was an equal part in economic justice movement. They wanted to bring the economic justice to the people who were disenfranchised who weren't given anything. And I think like, I didn't go to a public school here so I don't know how it is taught in the school systems but there is a distinct lack of just common narrative about when we even when we talk about the civil rights movement that that part somehow gets left behind. You can empower the people but you have to give them tools to do it. I just read on Trevor Noah's memoir and he says, you can teach them to fish but you have to give them the fishing rod too. You can't just give them the knowledge and not giving the tools to actually execute it. So yeah, that's definitely on our mind as we are developing bust and penny thoughts and what do we gain by talking about it so openly and what can we get from that? And I think in the slavery project, the 1619 project it clearly pointed out that one of the motivations for the American Revolution against the British was that the British Empire finally said, we have to end slavery. And many in American states said, no, that's not in the currents, that heroic cause of the revolution also has an underlying of these economic exploitation and murder and killings and that the wealth of, also at the East coast and is built on slavery and exploitation. And there's still, over the centuries it's the waves still reach us. It's so burned into the thinking. And so hopefully this is a time of change. I have a question for the group we've asked others thinking about a time of change. For me, I've been in the field maybe about a decade now have seen some changes. But what I think has happened in the pandemic in part is there's been this, well, two things. One, we've seen the interconnectedness of all these issues. I mean, to go back to making theater in the time I think I won't speak for Miranda, but for us we've been extremely excited by the artistry that the theater community has presented, manifested, worked on during this time. And we got over a hundred proposals for Prelude. And there was just an immensity of ideas. We can do five Prelude festivals, all of them equally as variegated in terms of form and content as the next. They're still great acting to be had as the ERS show proved, I think. But the thing that I think frightens us the most is the actual theater industry and healthcare has been a constant source of anxiety for so many people I've talked about in my peer group. And I think that's true now, whether you're at my stage or you've just moved to New York or perhaps people who are older than me and felt more established but are subject to the same precarity. So this is a long way of saying, maybe a two-part question. One is, what have you seen since March that has been inspiring to you, motivating? It could be under the rubric of theater or it could be in some other field and maybe what also, and or, what is causing you the greatest anxiety? What is your greatest fear? It could be something very material, the healthcare for people who are members of the actor's equity. It could be something much more lofty, the future of experimentation and innovation in the field. I'd like to start, if I may. I have personally found it very encouraging and rewarding with the amount of people of all races who have embraced Black Lives Matter, just witnessing the rallies and the marches throughout the last few months has really made me feel hopeful in the way I haven't felt hopeful in a long period of time. So I have found that to be very encouraging. At the same time as a Black man living in a pandemic in New York City where I now have to wear a mask and being even more conscious than I was before about going out at night, I am filled with anxiety about that. So in one way, there's been a positive, but because of something that is affecting all of us, I'm going through a negative which reminds me of the worst kinds of racism that I have experienced my entire life. So there you have it, a positive and a negative. Yeah, going off of what G-Sun said that John, that these are live audiences and how do we struggle with it? I mean, the German playwright, the great player, Heina Müller, I said, everybody thinks it's, theater is because we have a live audience. And he said, actually theater is theater because the audience member potentially could die. He said, this is what theater is about. It might be the last show of that person. It might be, the mortality of us is coming out. And I think in these times of corona, this is even more open that it is actually something we don't think about. We say, if we die, of course we will. So what are the real, what are the messages? What is underlying for ERS and for Penny thought? You know, what are those messages you want to give? And most perhaps some audience member who look at preload will be the last thing they see, you know, it's not conceivable in their lives. And for some, it might be the first time they see something on the screen. So what do you feel is the, but what do you want to convey? Well, I guess if we're still asking people on some level to imagine something live, even if we're not able to do it in the, quite as literally as we'd like to, I feel like there is a kind of, there's a kind of out loud struggle going on that sort of taking the form of all of these, you know, virtual theater things and having a panel discussion like this on Zoom. It's, it is inspiring in a way that there's so much effort right now, so much pushback against this, you know, that people are doing whatever they can to be heard. And even if it's not, you know, live in person like we want it to be, you know, I don't feel like anybody's really laying down, you know, where everybody's, there's so much standing up to this whether it's like trying to do something socially distanced in a backyard somewhere or finding ways to make live online stuff feel, you know, reach for the feeling of something genuine live. I do think that's inspiring. I mean, I worry too that, you know, that it's, you know, it's gonna demand more and more of us the longer this goes on. And that's, that's, that's scary, you know, and I do worry for, you know, we have, we've been fortunate enough to create a company that can support some people, including a small staff of people full time and, you know, it's been a tremendous reward to have the work make that possible. So I do worry about how, you know, a company like ours that I feel like, you know, we have responsibility to people who work with us. I worry about our ability to keep, you know, to take care of the people who we've asked work of, you know. Yeah, I, it's, I think when the first, when we first went into shutdown and it was like May and June, July and I had this moment when I was talking to a friend that the worst thing that could happen is if we, if the pandemic ends and we go back to exactly how we were before. I, you know, that is the most terrifying thing to me. I think there is a great reckoning happening now. And I hope when we look back that this was the moment that triggered big changes institutionally and systematically and in the government too. And, you know, so much of that I have agency and in the circles that I move in and the people that I have, you know, relationships with and they're also the bigger circles and the just kind of it echoes out from there. And, you know, that is like both my biggest hope and biggest fear is that when the virus is done and when we go back to whatever that we are going back to if things are exactly the same, that would just, that would, I think that would depress me quite a bit. Yeah.