 Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Thank you again for being here for our final event of the day. For those of you that have been with us from Ph.D. Theater, a student in history here, Collective International is an award-winning international touring disability arts dance theater ensemble based in the UK. The company is comprised of artists from Cuba, Wales, Brazil, and more. S.T.C.'s creative directors David Bauer and Azolta Villab began creating and developing sign dance theater in 1987. Their work lives in the intersection of sign language and movement theater with and or inspired by texts or music. Most recently they collaborated with BBC Radio 4 and broke new ground by enabling deaf people to engage with radio play Bad Elvis. They have started their international tour of Bad Elvis right here in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I will soon be performing it in Miami. However, this evening they will be presenting an excerpt from Carthage written by playwright Kelly Gatsvich and directed by Beatrice Cabour. So, that's it. These Catagenas, so much seen, vent. I've been punched, this. I'm done. I have to think I just like shopping this word that I had used most of all. What does it mean now? I wait. I spend days waiting. Sometimes shopping is all I think about. And with those black smashed, I think about things. Crate, toys, big pops, candy, Pactito's collection. Things of childhood. I started things. I could make a living. I could make a drink. He sold a thousand items. He made a killing. Use that word. Use that word. The shells metal cased to the dead. Do not find me. Do not find me. Leave me to the dead. I say, leave me to the dead. Do not find me. Sugar dusted. From straight from the earth. A joyous man of the land. Whom we don't think they never ever did complain of being. Former, some of you may not. There were workshops earlier this week with some members of the LSU community. But they've traveled. Many, many have been opportunity to talk about their process, their work. Heather's relationship with them is also been an actor in the company. Also been a director. So I'm not going to speak for you all. But if there are questions in the room, and I know he's getting you on. Okay. I'm going to ask you about your original impact. How was the percentage of your attacks and what you see that is sort of correct? That's a good question. Beatriz Kabur, the director who started the workshop of this piece in Graz, Austria. Negotiating, first of all, scoring the piece into British Sign Language. First of all, then making decisions about what images in the piece would become just your vocabulary and part of the dance book vocabulary of the company. There, the, how could I expect you to know the play? You don't know. But if you knew it, it's built into ten poems that deal with dislocation, displacement, exile, migration. And the through line of it is human trafficking in terms of the storytelling. And so there's, there are different kind of what I call explosions of text. And some of them are quieter, like the children's section, what I call that memory flashback. And others are, you know, these sort of more punk kind of energy behind them. But it does start with this idea of prayer and looking to the heavens. And that's sort of a recurring theme. In negotiating, and this is still very much in development. We're looking at three year heaven notes. It's depending on grant and money. Development process, because it's a very layered vocabulary that's being built. How much of, quote, spoken text is there, how much is not. For me, this is a version, right? Because the text exists on the page in a certain way, you know. And it's also an invitation. You know, so this is one invitation to play. So it's a hard question to answer. I can just say that really we started through very, very easy improvisation. Because we work a lot through improv. But David had the responsibility of the text at the beginning. And he was, you know, given that responsibility by Beatriz. And that allowed for the rest of us to play. So that he really brought out the images in the sign language. And kind of gave us the movement language. So all of our movement comes from sign language. All the movements. So because he was able to create the sign theater. So it's signed. So Caridad's amazing words into David's sign theater, which he annotated. And then from the annotation, which is visual into the choreography. Very powerful. I always thought about corporal commitment. I just thought that the way you were also committed with your body and using sign as a means to create this hybrid aesthetic. That was very powerful. And touched upon the mythic. You know, in Spanish, he said the rough word is tabamu. The tabamu was a really heavy word. And listening to David. Listening to him was like, wow, it was kind of mythic. The way that the language, because you've heard this and our biases towards those ones who can articulate. It was just really profoundly beautiful and moving. And I kept thinking of that haunting word. Because in the family, in my family, and in all our families, and thinking of that word, that the movement seemed like creating this new beautiful aesthetic to present and use what a stigma or a handicap is and it's transformed into this beautiful art film. Can we just take you back to London so that you can say that to the Arts Council? I love when gathering is such a thing. Because I'm right. I love when work inspires an inner pen for me to conceptualize what I see. And it does. That's the biggest gift. You see something like, it's not like I want to go out long or I want to go out, but I just want to. I love seeing hybrid aesthetics. So, yeah, I can do that. And I will email to the Arts Council. Thank you. Beautiful. Thank you. I'm sorry I don't go here and wasn't able to attend your workshops. That would have been really fun. But I was just wondering how this very international company formed in the first place. It's open to the Catholic community in New York. It's about an explosion of dance theater. And then it's so proud to work with this sort of art position. And then there's a dance theater in the country you've had. She was with a couple of deaf people in the company. She's putting a link up the faulty now. But the refugees from a links company. So they gathered outside the church in London and talked about what they could do now and finished. So this is a new company 26 years ago. Like June, about four years later. Since that point on it's always been about between South theater and contemporary dance and South dance theater. It was like with disabled dancers as well. To find a way to keep going is an interesting kind of puzzle. How do you keep going when your body... I had childhood arthritis so when I was 25 I could not do any more mainstream dance. So Rombert Dance Theater. True. Anybody know you? So I was there for a year. And I couldn't really dance the repertoire anymore. So in their great thinking, their amazing company. They said, oh go into this workshop with ten young people. They were all deaf. I was like, hi. I never learned sign language in a class or anything. So I just... I didn't learn English till I was 18 really. So at Cala Arts they used to make me do English in the morning. Before ballet class. So I didn't want to learn another language. But I learned from the deaf community and I was very inspired by the language, by the beautiful language. It's a hard language. You know what I mean? It's that kind of very rich source. Is there slang in sign? Oh yeah. It's a bad word. They did the slang in sign language. Dialect in the same language as well. Yeah, David had to teach the whole of the BBC the other day. How to say bullshit. So he sat there for like, you know, teaching them how to do bullshit so that they could sit in meetings going... Shit. This is bullshit. Save my thing, I think it's a subject. From England to America. And so even though the spoken language is English, the sign language is different, same different history, has there been collaborations of people speaking different sign language to do the sign language dance work together? International sign language. American sign language. Australian sign language. British sign language. There is all over the world. But international sign language is growing. So it's becoming a universal language that you can go to the other side of the planet talk to somebody, even though your language is respectable, languages might be completely different, but you sign language to communicate. It's really growing. And it's really influenced by ASL. The European Sign Language. That's what's mainly signed at the United Nations now. It's really interesting. People with different signing traditions coming in. The company mostly the basis is BSL, British Sign Language and International Sign Language as well. It does Filipino sign, no. What do they sign in the Philippines? ASL, you see. Thank you everybody.