I'm actually checking out this movie review video. So this is for the 1978 film Piranha. Yes, the original Piranha But it feels kind of weird saying that because Piranha is not so original because it's totally based on Jaws from 1975 Now another thing I want to say real quick puts put down in the comments Do you think I should review the Jaws films because at the moment? Well, I watched Piranha on HBO at the moment because it's there So if you have HBO you have the HBO now or HBO go up go ahead and check Piranha out on there But at the also at the moment they have all four Jaws films So put a comment down there should I review all four Jaws films because I will do that if you want to But anyway, like I said Piranha was based off of Jaws It was totally a Jaws ripoff and I actually like the fact that they kind of make a nod to that in the film Basically making fun of it making a joke and just being like ha ha. Yes We ripped off Jaws, but I'm gonna talk about that a little bit more as we go on So this is directed by Joe Dante if people don't know Joe Dante has done a ton of stuff But some of the most memorable things he's done gremlins gremlins to the howling and the burbs All movies I quite enjoy especially of all those I'd probably say the burbs is my favorite because it's very funny and it's very Horror driven to at the same time but tons of awesome comedy in that one Rick this was written by Richard Robinson who did films such as Kingdom of the Spiders and Highballon which I've not seen Highballon or Kingdom of the Spiders, but Highballon sounds like it's not even horror But Kingdom of the Spiders obviously yes also written by John Sayles who wrote the scripts for Alligator and the howling Obviously the howling he's then again working with Joe Dante. So very cool This is a Roger Corman produced film and if people aren't very familiar with Roger Corman He bankrolled a lot of very low-budget crazy Type of horror films like Piranha like Death Race 2000, which is one of my favorite Corman productions like chopping mall, you know fun cult classic type films like that and for that reason I love Corman I think his body of work is great and inspirational and just a gift to the horror community if you will Kevin McCarthy in this film by far is my favorite actor Even though unfortunately, we don't get a ton of him in the film because he goes out relatively early in a very stupid way Which I'll talk about later Which you know, it doesn't make sense for his character, but like I said, I'll talk about later. So Kevin McCarthy played Dr. Hoke, you know, he's the guy with all the knowledge He was working with these creatures for the government He was in some films such as the howling as well and the original invasion of the body snatchers Which I've seen and it's very good. You should check that out The budget for this film was seven hundred and seventy thousand dollars and it ended up making 16 million this thing was a cash cow for Roger Corman Kudos good good for you awesome that congratulations. I I love the fact that that's the case Uh, obviously this was based off Jaws Universal it was so based off Jaws that Universal actually considered placing an injunction against against the Piranha coming out because it was coming out at the same time as they were releasing Jaws 2 So they really didn't want the competition That was stopped from happening though the injunction that is because Steven Spielberg actually stepped in and gave Piranha a very positive review And encouraged universal to not File that injunction against Piranha. So thank you Steven Spielberg for not crushing a film basically That's a lot of stuff. I've kind of heard about Spielberg is that he's a A nice guy a good guy a fair guy if you will and I think that definitely shows that So this film actually had a sequel in 1982 which I've not seen But I really do want to see and obviously they in at the end of this film Which I'll talk more about they leave it very open to going to a sequel which you know a lot of films Have done that and still do that because hey who doesn't want to make more money So it was Piranha 2 the spawning which was the sequel in 1982. It was then remade in 1995 for tv It was a four tv made for tv movie and then in 2010 there was a more modern remake And then there was a sequel in 2012 to the remake in 2010 now directing wise the The 2010 one was done by Alexander Aja who had done things like high tension and the hills have eyes remake And the 2012 follow-up to that one was done by John Guliger Who was probably best known for being on project green light which he won and then he made the feast movies all three of those Which I could review those at some point Roger ebert when this came out known Enemy to horror films roger ebert. Um, I have a lot of respect for the guy, but he just inappropriately hated horror films in my opinion He mocked the practical effects of this and also called out the fact that characters Upon hearing that there were piranhas in the water would then jump in the water So it didn't really make sense.  I honestly think for the time that the practical effects were good You know, yes, it looks a little bit corny when they're showing the the shots of like the school of piranha Kind of coming through the water that looks weird It looks corny because they're not really moving all that much It's just like very stationary thing just being moved through but the attack scenes. I think look appropriate appropriately frantic Um, you can't really see what's going on There's a lot of thrashing But you see little bits and pieces of like the people's arms the blood flying Some bites that they put on the bodies and obviously like little pieces of the actual fish And I feel like that's a good representation of the attack because when piranha swarm Is that the right when they attack? um It's it is frantic and it's it's very um confused as what's going on and especially underwater So I think they did an excellent job Cinematically capturing the attack scenes so eberts off on that in my opinion You okay, so now going into the actual like film itself You just know something is going to go wrong when you see the no trespassing sign in the beginning and people hiking up to that Sign and going past it and that's when we had these teenagers these horny teenagers who won a skinny dip and In a what could be sewage treatment plant as the one guy lays out? He's like we don't even know but the funny thing is too in the beginning What does he say he says exact quote besides a little law breaking will do you good? And I was like will it the a that's a really really weird quote Especially because he doesn't expand on that. He's just like a little law breaking will do you good It doesn't do him good and it doesn't do her good But it's funny because he initially is like let's break the law this dude's risky things And then they get to the water and she's the risk-taker at that point and she flips it on him and is just like Hey, let's skinny dip in this and then he's all of a sudden afraid and it's like Is this poop and pee water basically this could be a sewage treatment plant We don't know but then he just gets in because Boobs and then you also right there within the first few minutes have your blood your breasts and your beast Being shown because you see the eyeball Open up the eyelid open up and show the eyeball of one of the piranhas as the woman kind of splashes in the water with her hand So how fast they get to the boob the sorry the blood breasts and beasts is crazy in this film But it sets it up to be a crazy fun film in my opinion Uh, and I really by the way love that moment of showing like it's just dark and then you just see the piranha eye open I think that's such a cool moment, especially because it's done at night You know everything's scarier at night The music when they find the water has underwater sounds to it like kind of like bubble-ish Which I thought was really cool like incorporating the actual music to make it sound underwater That's a cool thing. The other thing is there's this kind of um This particular noise that they always use to signal that the piranhas are in close proximity and when they're actually attacking And it's kind of like this this rolling warbling underwater type sound like You know If you've watched it, you'll you'll know what i'm talking about which if you haven't watched it You should probably shouldn't be watching this because it's like all spoilers, but so stop go watch it.  Basically. I I love that moment. I think it's super funny It is like this kind of nod to the audience of you see what we're doing here You see we're doing we're fine with it. We're proud of it. Actually, it's funny Uh, the old man talking about his life revolving around the river indicates how catastrophic The piranhas being released eventually is, you know, that's when the guy when we're first introduced to grogan The old guy who ends up getting eaten up Is kind of talking about like, you know, I live by this river You know, I do everything with this river basically and he just goes over all the ways in which the the river impacts his life That's a really good moment of showing how important the river is to that community and the people who kind of live along it Meaning that it gives more Importance to it being infected well infected being Overrun with piranha. Basically it it makes it even worse for those types of people When when he kind of like points out the dog though I did kind of initially get this feeling of like, I think the dog's gonna get it Like I feel like that was indicating it. It makes you a little nervous But luckily the dog ended up being fine, but the old man not so much Uh, they do a good job of establishing grogan as a curmudgeonly hermit boozehound This is the perfect reluctant hero for a corpsman film I wrote down, which is totally accurate This guy is pissy with life. He just wants to drink and be left alone He's a mountain man hermit and when the person trying to track down these teenagers shows up He literally tells her to go away And is just a mean dude, but you know what? He's the hero And I love it when you have kind of like crazy heroes like that And especially in a corpsman film The secret lab scene is amazing in this all the creatures being developed and the one that you end up seen creeping around Which is not a piranha, but what is that you see a bunch of creatures in there like preserved and actually alive Where you're just like, what is this like? What's the government doing with these things? It further kind of deepens the mystery of what's going on at that lab and why that's the other thing Which the great thing is we actually get a why in this which is cool At least for the piranhas we get a why for the all the other creatures You just assume Well, there's other things going on with the government Along the same lines is what they're doing with the piranhas They're tie in of the creation of these Like mutant piranhas basically to the vietnam war is actually a good story point It's really good backstory in my opinion and it kind of deepens that Can't trust the government type situation that was going on with a lot of horror films back then And this kind of impact of the government doing all these things in secrecy and not telling the the The people of the united states about it will eventually come back to literally bite them in this instance To literally bite them in the water and kill them So I just like how they set that up plus the lab that secret lab just looked good Like it looked cool. I love that scene Um, it was a good touch finding a dog skeleton at the bottom of the hatchery that after they had The hatchery pond after they drained it. I thought that was a really cool Kind of extra like oh, they've been feeding something's going on here Which then it begs is a question like did the dog just Happen to wander in and fall in there or were they keeping these alive by feeding it dogs and other things I don't know we need to find that out, you know, maybe Dr. Hoek could have Could have spoken to that but he ended up exiting real quick I love the foreshadowing of that, you know, main counselor guy saying to grogans kid People eat fish fish don't eat people Oh, is that how it is because that's how he feels an audience member like when he says that you're just like Oh, you are so wrong, sir And you're about to find out how wrong you are especially when the fish Eventually jumps out of the water and bites him in the face, which is a really hilarious moment that I just love in the film I feel like the way they shot the attack scenes was good. Yeah, like I said, it was frantic And hard to fully tell what was going on which which feels realistic for these mutant piranhas feels very Brutal, that's another thing very violent very brutal. And that's what you want in this film basically The old guy's body with the stripped legs looks really really gnarly I thought they did a really good job with the practical effects there The actual attack was a little bit, you know, quick and I feel like they could have drawn it out a little bit more But when you see his body actually on land and you're just seeing like the stripped legs It's like it's pretty nasty and they did a good job There's so much blood bubbling up when the guy In the boat gets his arm in there and it gets it gets attacked The guy who was in the boat with his son and then the son gets on top of it On top of the boat and he's fine. Just like all the bubbling that was going on and how much blood was going You're like, whoa, that's a crazy amount of blood It doesn't make sense This is the moment where hoke jumps in and he's like going to try and save the kid And it really doesn't make sense that that hoke would jump in the water to go save the kid because one They were almost close enough to get to the kid like they could have on the raft gotten close enough to get Him safely there and the other thing is hoke is the guy who knows what these mutant piranhas are And he's also been warning people the whole time like don't go in the water. Don't stick your hand in there Um, so he knows the dangers He would not like it doesn't make sense for his character to actually jump in and go after that kid So that's a big moment that where ebert was kind of right where it doesn't make sense That these characters kind of just jump in the water him being the main one Uh, and then hoke's hoke dies and with him all the knowledge of these piranha and how to defeat them The situation at that point becomes so much more dire in the minds of the audience because they know There's the guy with all the information. He would know how to kill them and he's gone Um, by the way, sorry if you hear someone mowing their yard in the background I hope it's not showing up in this It seems like the piranha are intelligent when they're biting through the ropes that hold the raft together That's an interesting thing. So it makes me kind of think they don't really talk about this I don't think unless I missed it But the are the piranha intelligent kind of because it seems like they're intentionally trying to Pick apart this raft in order to get to the people there. So it's this extra You know extra aspect of you're dealing with intelligent beings potentially as well, although they don't really go down that road too far Uh, the government shows up and acts like they know everything and they can take care of it But grogan actually lives there and is actually the best resource of knowledge And he actually shows that first of all, he's a jerk to the government people Rightfully so in this instance because the government created the problem grogan is going to solve the problem But how he points out like your logic and what you're saying here doesn't make sense So let me show you the path that they can take to get to where it becomes a problem Uh, and then obviously they need grogan That's set up very early It's never a surprise when dick miller pops up in movies like this. I loved him has buck gardener in this film He's great. He plays perfectly the guy the politician who's like We're just gonna deny that this is a thing so that we don't make people panic And then once he's faced with the the reality that people are being eaten in a funny way Actually, it's delivered where he's like, I don't want to hear I told you not to talk about that now What about it? He's like the piranha are eating the guests and then he's just like Ah Then he has to deal with it. You can't deny it any longer and he just dick miller as usual does a great job with that They really work up the peril of the kids getting in the water in this film It just gets it keeps creeping closer and closer as you know During the film the piranha are moving further downstream So they keep cutting back and forth between grogan And everyone trying to stop the piranha and then the kids and what peril they're going to be in Now you kind of get the sense that they're not going to go fully go there though And have the kids get attacked, but oh they do and to great effect and I'm surprised they went there back then, but i'm glad they did because it adds to the horror of the film really it And it's more realistic because what are you going to do in that instance? Have the piranha just go for the counselors and not go for the kids No, they would go for whatever they find first whatever fresh meat is available first Even though actual piranha don't eat people, but you know That's the thing Um, you kind of feel like they won't oh, yeah, I already talked about that. Sorry And the one jumping out of the water like I talked about before Biting that guy's face awesome surprise moment in the film Uh, I love the shots of people having a good time in the water because as an audience member You're thinking oh these people have no idea what's coming That's one of those awesome things where the audience's experience of having the full picture Like really knowing what's going on and then observing people who don't know anything And you're like oh you like you see and you're projecting ahead in your mind What is coming what is going to happen and there's a lot of that that goes on with this film when you're watching it They just keep throwing potential victims at you in this film That's another thing I love because it really creates this situation of wondering like who's gonna get it You know of all these potential victims they've thrown out Who's gonna get killed? Who's gonna get eaten up and live or are all of them gonna get it?  You wonder how much action can be worked into a piranha movie in the first place and then there's actually an explosion Uh, the fact that they have an explosion in this is just like yeah, we're gonna take it to the next level We're already giving you a ton of actual piranha action Why don't we just throw in them a michael bay type explosion before michael bay, but you know what i'm saying Why don't you get now you think that Uh as soon as people start swimming to the floating bar Which by the way a floating bar is awesome and that floating bar looked like a lot of fun I would like to participate in that Um, but when people start actually swimming to a floating bar, you know, it's gonna sink You know, it's potentially gonna go down because they intentionally let you see a sign that had the maximum occupancy Which I believe was only 18 people Um, so it kind of like ups the ante, you know as these people are going there. You're aware you're thinking Oh my god, it said 18 people maximum and all these people are climbing on and Here it goes and then everyone's in peril Breaking glass underwater sure looks cool. I wrote down The part where grogan gets tied up and he's gonna go underwater to try and like Uh, let the pollution go he um, he breaks through the glass of the window And it just looks like it's an awesome visual. It looks really cool. It's like the glass just like floats away Um, I just like that Uh, the piranha really messed up grogan by the way I didn't know when I initially watched this which when I just watched it was like the second time I've seen it. I think um initially when I watched it I kind of felt like grogan was gonna end up getting away unscathed But I actually really like the aspect of him getting pretty messed up by these piranha and being in kind of a bad shape at the end Um, because it feels more realistic like those things are relentless They were getting pretty much everyone So why wouldn't they get grogan and they did and I like that aspect of it But when he's getting attacked it kind of feels like he's not gonna survive that And you kind of get that scare when uh, the woman I forget her name in this is pulling him up and the rope is severed at the end and you're just like, oh, no He's done But then his hand comes up and he's alive and they're like, oh grogan And I wrote down and pollution saves humanity Well, maybe in this situation the idea to pollute him and just kill him Is funny because it runs opposite of kind of what we know as a society Where we have to, you know, take care of the environment and not pollute things because then that's going to take us with it Eventually because you're destroying the environment, which we need to live But it's just this kind of funny thing in the film where it's like pollution will save us And it kind of does at the at the time being well for the time being at the end of this film But they don't fully resolve things. They don't Um, tell you or they don't fully, um indicate to you that they're all dead Like it's just this kind of we think we solved it for now And that's kind of how they leave it and I really like that So it's just real unknown and obviously it sets it off for doing another film, which I really really love um And this fits in with a lot of films at the at the time that likes That like to focus on government secrecy and how they basically lead to these dangerous catastrophes I already kind of talked about that a little bit But this was very common with a lot of films back in the 70s back in the 80s It's still being incorporated from time to time into horror films and it works, you know Like people a lot of the times like you don't really know everything that the government's doing at at any time You know, that's why there are things like fbi cia And what was going on with the piranhas in this feels a lot like, you know, of fbi or cia cia operation You know, it's it's that whole thing of what is the government doing at any time and and could they be doing something Super dangerous and and something that's really a bad idea that can end up backfiring on the people who live here, you know That's what piranha is at its core And this film is fun. Uh, that's pretty much all I have to say about it, but I like it a lot I think it's really fun. I think it's actually a good film Now it's interesting because when you look at it and when I was talking about, you know Piranha and then it had the sequel and then it had the made for tv version And then it had the remake and then the sequel of that remake It's crazy to think that those all spawned off of Jaws So and Jaws spawned a bunch of other stuff too. Like, you know, I know Humanoid creatures from the or humanoids from the deep or I have a review for that on the channel and there were there were a bunch of other films that kind of were spawned from from Jaws Including its sequels, but it's just crazy to think about how impactful That film was on horror, especially underwater horror And I feel like when people make underwater horror even nowadays a lot of it Feels like it's still inspired by Jaws. So anyway Thanks everyone for checking this out. Let me give you my rating on this film So out of five stars with half stars in play It's not a perfect film. Obviously there are it's hokey. It's low budget. It but it's it's a good time But you know what all things considered I'm going to give it a Four star rating. I think it's a four out of five stars I really do and I quite enjoy piranha. Joe Dante did a great job with the directing the acting for the most part for what it is Is pretty good And the writing the writing is fun. Like I said super smart having that kind of like vietnam tie in to The whole thing with the piranhas. They could have easily just done this film and just been like The piranhas just exist because it's the government doing bad things in secrecy But they they gave it backstory which makes it so much better and so much richer So I love that but anyway four out of five stars for piranha If you haven't seen it check it out. Um, put some comments down here. Let's talk about it Do you have differing opinions or you just want to talk about piranha? Let's do that Do me a quick favor though If you like anything I do this review or any other reviews hit that subscribe button That's your way to repay me not making money doing this. I'm just spending my time doing this for For people to reach out and say hey, let's connect as lovers of horror And we can talk about it So if you've already subscribed give me that thumbs up just to keep me going and let me know. Hey, I'm still watching. Good job But thanks again for checking this out and until next time keep it brutal


I'm very pleased to introduce the IOM Handbook on Protection and Assistance for Migrants, Vulnerables of Violence, Exploitation, and Abuse. This handbook was developed within the global action against trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants, a program funded by the European Union and implemented by UNODC in partnership with IOM and USF. The handbook's development was prompted by growing concern about the protection risks faced by migrants. Sadly, migrants face numerous forms of violence, exploitation, and abuse, including trafficking in persons, labor exploitation, and sexual violence. It has become increasingly clear over the past few years that greater efforts are needed to understand the dynamics underpinning migrant vulnerability, along with greater efforts to protect and assist the migrants affected. This handbook responds to this need by providing a structured approach to understanding migrant vulnerability by analyzing risk and protective factors at the individual, household, community, and structural levels. It includes guidance on how to conduct research on these matters to inform evidence-based policy, but also on how to analyze how these dynamic affect individual migrants and how to best respond to the protection and assistance needs of vulnerable migrants and their families. The handbook also aims to support comprehensive and coordinated responses. Violence, exploitation, and abuse of migrants is the result of a broad range of factors, including social, political, and economic factors, which require investment in action by an equally broad range of actors. It is our hope that all actors concerned with migrant protection will find this handbook a valuable resource, and that vulnerable migrants themselves will benefit from its implementation.


Appalachian Wireless now has new forward pay pricing, where you can pay up front and get the data and features you desire. Five gigabytes of data, just $39.99, unlimited, just $79.99. Better service, bigger savings, that's today's Appalachian Wireless. The latest in the ongoing battle against pension reform in Kentucky finds thousands of educators packed on the capital plaza in Frankfurt once again. For the second time in two weeks, Kentucky educators and supporters invaded the state capital. The latest rally comes at the end of the current legislative session, a session in which many teachers believe they have been belittled and betrayed by state government leaders. Many wanted inside the capital building but were locked out after 500 people were let in. Some at the rally had hopes the state legislature would override the vetoes by Governor Matt Bevin on the recently passed budget and revenue bills. Some didn't, but all in attendance wanted education in Kentucky to be fully funded, and eastern Kentucky was very well represented. To override, not to override, I don't know, I think where to point is the devil. We know the devil, we don't know. I'm here for my students, I'm here for all my family members for children, it's all about the kids, funding for children, for our schools. We will always stand up for our students, our children, and the future of our common wealth. All of us, all 120 counties are here and we're standing up for all of our students. This is about the future. We would rather be in the classroom, we'd rather be with our kids. This is not where our hearts at, our hearts is with our kids. And we want to represent everybody in Kentucky because we are one and we want to, we just want to be, stay together and be united. We are hot counties strong. There was no denying the political atmosphere at the rally and the momentum Democrats seem to be riding following the extended pension reform controversy. You have a mobile phone, raise your hand. You just pledged to register 10 new voters. Let me hear you say, go vote Kentucky. That governor has called you names.  I think you're amazing. He's called you unknowledgeable. Well, I think he's ignorant. The crowd at this latest rally exceeded that of the previous rally, April 2nd, and the raucous crowd promised to remember this fight over pension reform in this year's and next year's elections. Reporting from Frankfurt, Chris Anderson, EKB News.


at the Graduate Center CUNY in Midtown Manhattan. In New York City, it's a rainy day, a bit colder. We had, especially after the elections, incredible temperatures here, summer days where we were all celebrating was over 70 Fahrenheit, 23, 24, quite Celsius. And now reality, in a way, is setting in. We are still in the aftermath of the election. And today, many people say, for the first time, it was called a humanitarian crisis of the COVID situation here in the US. Doctors without borders are actually focusing on the US as a country in crisis. It's shocking, and also the loss, of course, of leadership or the non-existing one. And we are, as the Native American company, Spider Women, told us, we are in a creation myth where we have a mad leader. The country has the plague. There's wars going on around the world. And people are starving. And we have to find a way out of this. We have to find a way. We are condemned to hope, as Rabbi, our guest, said about Salah Banu's playwright. We hope this will work out. Vaccines information are good. But it is a time of uncertainty, a time that perhaps the West, as we know, it has never experienced or not in a long, long time since World War II, and it's a more serious moment. We do believe that in times like this, the work of artists and what they have to say to us is more important than ever. If it doesn't count now, when will it ever count? If it's not important now, when should we ever listen? So we do need to hear from artists next to the politicians and biologists and economic advisors because it is down to what our lives is all about, where we come from, where we are at the moment, where we are going to. We need better questions. We need to explore. We need to think. And this is why we have been talking since March to theater artists, and we have to listen to them. They are on the right side of history, as you always say, on the right side, on the complex struggle for freedom. And they have answers in their daily practices, and they are so connected, I think, to the moment, but also often anticipate a future and help us to create meaning and to get accustomed to it. With us today, we have one of the great artists in the world, in the field of theater performance, but also the visual arts. There's Rabi Muray, who is from Lebanon, living in Berlin at the moment, is a great honor to have him here with us. It's a big deal, and what he has to say is significant and it is important. And a co-host we have, for the first time I have one here, we have the great and brilliant Carol Martin from NYU, who is a professor of theater, her work on the theater of the real term she kind of created or reinforced, like Hans-Tis Lehmann's post-traumatic theater, she made a contribution to the field about an aspect of contemporary work in theater, important that is very, very significant, very important that I sing in the last decade, since the one that is growing as much perhaps a site, inside specific, but still I think it's something of perhaps even greater significance, the engagement with the real, the political, the search for truth and how theater and performance can be an arena of open discussions. So my name is Frank Henschka, I'm the director of the Segal Center and we would like to thank Hal Round again for hosting us, for making this happen and I'll hand over to Carol now. Carol will give us a short overview, a little bit on the field, on that term, the theater of the real, why it is significant, why we have to keep that in our mind and also for us to understand the reality we live in at the moment. And then she will talk a bit about Rabbi, but Rabbi first of all also says hi there in Berlin. I think it's six o'clock in the evening, somewhere there. So welcome and for our talks here and we'll come to you soon, but Carol, give us a little overview. So thank you, Frank, thank you very, very much and welcome Rebea, I'm so happy to be with you Rebea. I followed Rebea's work as much as possible. I have seen it in Warsaw and Paris and Berlin and the US and New York City. But first before I characterize a selection of his work because it's a vast body of work, both theater and installation, I just wanna make a few remarks about theater of the real. So the term or the phrase here, the real really signifies a variety of methods and a different nomenclature that describes ostensibly different methodology, documentary theater built from documents, verbatim theater built from verbatim interviews, reality based theater, more generally theater of fact, theater that aims to locate and perform facts, theater of witness that aims to state implicitly and explicitly we are here, we are watching, we've seen this tribunal theater, which is a kind of public legal reckoning in many instances, non-fiction theater. There are in the United States restored village performances which attempt to reenact different moments in history or different entire villages and war and battle reenactments and of course autobiographical theater and theater of the real I think is a umbrella term that embraces all of those and sees them in conversation with one another although in very, very different kinds of ways. So overall, I think there's been a shift from definitive representation of real events to representation that is somehow more indeterminate that doesn't complete the story that is told, that questions its own sources and ability to draw definite conclusions, theater that mixes fact and fiction or the real with the fiction. And this is where Rabie comes in since 1985 Rabie has making work that he calls semi-documentary and he's made a series of extraordinary theater works and installations, several of which have been in collaboration with Nina Sene and early work, three posters which I think was 2000, year 2000 was made in collaboration with the poet and essayist, Elias Gray. And three posters is a work about that uses the martyr video of Jamal Satie a combatant for the National Resistance Front in Lebanon. And so martyr videos are kind of determined genre which have a number of specific features and the same work also used a kind of facsimile of a martyr video played by Rabie. And it's this intermingling of fiction with reality, this work that in this particular work led the audience to question everything that followed in Rabie's words over the course of the performance. We hope to convince an audience that recognize the actor, hear their use of repetition especially of the sentence, quote, I am the martyr, those quote, that the performer could eventually be the martyr. And the work asks several questions but two in particular, how did the secular resistance against the Israeli occupation end up becoming a fundamentalist Islamic movement under the aegis of Hezbollah? And why did the resistance of the left thing up? So I, at least from an outside vantage point, understand these questions of being questions of a younger generation asking what's happened to our culture, what's happened to our society, what's happened to our country. And this particular work is, I think, instrumental conceptually to Rabie's subsequent work. It poses questions within the work itself. It poses questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. It perhaps proposes that playing a role is related to becoming a role that the rehearsals of theater have real world consequences. And I think we've seen some of this and some of Milo Rao's thinking about theater and the way he stages his works, that theatricality itself can be an inquiry into political reality. And the very, very, very important question of sanctioned sources of information. And I think Rabie was one of the first, did not be the very first artist to really to call into question the kind of, what the internet, how the internet and the omnipresence and proliferation of endless flurries of information is shaping and unshaping the realities in which we live. Looking for a missing employee, the missing employee, 2005 is the story of the civil servant Rafat Suman, who went missing. This is Rabie and Lina Sene's work. They use half lies, invent truth, newspaper clips, diary entries, found objects in propaganda to make a work that is exactly about how the flurries are reported to convey truth and never create a definitive picture. So certainly everyone today is familiar with that. The pixelated revolution is an amazing forensic analysis of the images that Syrian protesters uploaded to the internet and provocative commentary on the aesthetics of post-911 warfare and revolution. And that was performed in New York in 2012 as part of the Coyle Festival. And I believe the BAU were brought here on the occasion of having won the Yoko Ono Award. So that was, I think, one of the only times that you've performed in New York. And then I just want to mention that installation work, which is different than the others, 33 rounds per minute and then some, which I actually saw in Warsaw, is an installation performance about the final days of Dia Mute, a young man living in Berlin. So there are no actors in this work. On stage is a table, two chairs, a television and answering machine, a mobile phone, a computer open to a Facebook page. This is such, I love this work. It's such a fabulous work. And all these devices shape and vibrate and announce things about Ya Mute, who has apparently committed suicide. So this is someone's personal room. It's a table and all their digital devices, they're gone, but they live on in this vibrating digital reality. So overall, I think the work reveals some of the reverberations of post-Arab Spring. And the most clear utterance of this is when the host of an investigative show that's on the television in Ya Mute's room asks, starting with Bozizi and Tunis, who decided to emulate himself, is there connection with Ya Mute's actions? Is there a stand against whom? Close quote, that's from the work. And by implication going forward, should we all understand all suicides in the Arab world as acts against the state, the work act? So Rabia's work is profoundly political, profoundly strategic and is also an inquiry into theater itself, what it does, what it can't do, a critique of the very notion of documentary, a call to ask for very sophisticated relationships to information and to technology. So I think I personally would characterize Rabia's interpretive intentions as being much less about literal truth, proving what happened, actually not about that specifically at all, and more about the kind of self-conscious use of materials to question the conventions of representation, conventions of theater to make us rethink how we come to know and understand things in very profound ways.  And he did star in a film, this always kind of thrills me with Catherine Deneuve and the title of the film is I Want to See in which they go on a journey in the Lebanese landscape and the film like the rest of Rabia's work is a cross between documentary and it shows the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon War. So even though Rabia's passion and subject is Lebanon, there he takes that subject and kind of makes a, I don't know, a geodesic dome out of it and spins it and we all have to keep looking both out Lebanon and about how particularly events in Lebanon are refracted in the rest of the world. So Frank, I'll let you ask the first question. Yeah, let me thank you first for this. It's really so touching. Thank you so much, Carol and Frank also for inviting me to be with you. No, no, no, for first question. Where are you now and what time is it? Me? Yeah. I'm in Berlin now and it's six something. I don't know, we start with that six time, Berlin time. Six o'clock in Berlin, yeah, yeah, yeah. So really thank you for being here with us and the work on the trauma of the Middle East on war is so such an engaging dialogue, research of it.  You do your lectures, often you say it's not a performance, it's a lecture. Are you a storyteller in that tradition? Often people say there's no theater anywhere in the Arab world. Of course, it's such a complete misunderstanding. We at the Segal Center have published so many Arab plays. We're actually the largest publisher of Arab plays and Marvin Carlson often has pointed that out, you know, that this history goes back for thousands of years. So are you a Hakavati storyteller of the 21st century? This is, I don't know. Maybe yes and no at the same time. Just to say like a few words about the traditional Hakavati that we knew about since the late century and before is that there's a big difference actually. I'm just out tuning myself to this. Hakavati, let's say like theater is like almost relatively is a new medium in the Arab world. It started in the late 19th century, like relatively new accordingly to relatively to the Europe to other countries where like there is traditional theater like India or whatever. And we always struggling all the theorists and theater makers are struggling to find other forms of theatrical tendencies just before, before like in the ancient times to prove that we have theater, but in a different way. And Hakavati is one of these forms, one of these structures. It has like a sort of performativity and the theater, but let's say like theater is like the baby or like the born of the cities. And the Hakavati is not with the cities, the Hakavati, the traditional Hakavati. It's actually like all, most of the Hakavates are coming from a communitarian, familial, tribunal society. And usually they always talk about heroic stories, heroic people about victories and mainly also they attack the cities. The city is something that is danger for the family, for the gathering, for the community. So the city is like, it's where the viruses are coming, where the disease is coming against the community. So like in this sense, I'm for sure I'm not Hakavati in this sense, I'm the child of the city. I'm from the city, I born in the city and I believe in the individuals, in the civil rights. I'm not so much with the blood relations. So in this sense, like I am Hakavati, I tell stories, but actually to make my audience not one mass, not a community, actually to try to accentuate individualism, to make them individuals, to make each one of the audience, to think and have, has hair or his opinion and hair or his intervention. So it's not about uniting the community or like the society or the... So in this sense, no, I'm not Hakavati and at the same time I'm Hakavati because sometimes, yeah, it's the same format or yeah, it has the same format in a way, but in a different way, like the story is different. I talk about our failures, I talk about our doubts, about our defeats, I don't talk about victories. We don't have victories in our region. We all the time facing a wall, like facing something that is blocking our visions. So how come we talk about victories? It's like Hezbollah talks about victories, religious talks about victories, communities, tribals. Thank you. So how do you move from that notion of failure, of doubt, of defeat to making theater, which even when the subject matter is tragic, it is maybe, I'd have to think more about this, but inherently it's a positive enterprise. It says that, look, we can look at this, we can do this and we will have a positive outcome in doing that even when we're looking closely at something tragic. Yeah, actually, one of the things that we faced immediately, it was during and immediately after the Civil War ended, the fighting ended of the Civil War in 1990, is that we were like, we were like facing a lot of problematics, one of them, a lot of journalists, a lot of curators, theater directors, that they want us to tell them about the war, about what we experienced. So they wanted us actually to tell the horror of the wars, what our suffers was. And to be honest, there was like a bunch of artists that are like friends, we were meeting a lot together and others, we did not meet with them, but we were like conscious about this problem that actually we should not fell into this trap to tell what happens to us, because this actually calls sympathy, calls like people to be pity with us and we don't need this. What we need actually a reflection is to think about what we have passed to analyze, to auto criticize what we have done during these years. So all the artworks, what we have done was focused on thinking about the war, not telling the war. And this is actually shift the whole concept of what and how to do an artwork or a theater piece. When you say like, I want to think about the war, not to tell the war, it's completely different issue. And this is actually something that demand from the artist and from the theater maker capacity to provoke oneself, to attack and to criticize yourself, not the audience, not the others, and to demand from yourself a lot of things. So this was the main key of how to shift from drama or theater that tells the suffering and the horror into a theater which analyze and think and reflect upon sensitive topics like, for example, the one that you mentioned three posters about the martyrdom and martyrs from the communist party. Right, how did audiences respond initially to this? It's freezing. How did, oh, sorry. Sorry, it was freezing? A little bit. Now we're fine. Okay. Yeah. So how did audiences respond initially to this invitation to think, to analyze, to take responsibility? I think it was, with my experience, it was amazingly very good because like it put the people in a position to think of each one greatly and to have it in conversation dialogue. So it's not something that you say and you tell and then you need like an agreement or a disagreement. So it's not about this. It's not posing a questions that needs an answer of yes or no, it's not about this. It's about doubts, about, as you mentioned, it's about unfinished stories, a story that is full of gaps, a story that is non-linear, that you have to put it in your mind, representations that are done by words which makes each one of the audience responsible to create her or his image in his imagination or her imagination in your mind. So it gives like a lot of freedom to interpretate, a lot of freedom to put your input, to put in your intervention. This is actually what's successfully good in my experience in Lebanon and outside Lebanon, even outside Lebanon because the questions becomes like not necessarily specifically addressed to the local situation, even like if the foreign audience will miss nuances from our history, but even though they can make associations with their own histories and try with their own experience and try to reflect upon this from their point of view from their own experience. And this was really great.  No, no, it's not about solidarity. It's not about sympathy. It's not about pity. It's not about like gaining voices. I'm not, we are not making elections to gain more voices and voting. Like, you know what I mean? So it's something that I share with the audience, we share with the audience ideas, thoughts, doubts, uncertainties, questions that they have to think about with us. So we think all together and this is the important. Are you Frank? We cannot hear you, Frank. Oh, sorry. Just as a question, you use the internet, spits from it, you collect photos, you take photos. You take found materials. Why don't you write a play? Why do you think this is not working and apply why to choose to also have an installation or drawings as part of it? What is, why do you make these choices? I'm sorry, I wrote a lot of plays. I always write plays. It's my, no, no. It's like Carol mentioned a lot of them. They are based on events and true events, the difference actually between like, let's say like a play in the classical way of writing or like when I'm writing, which some people would love to name it, label it as semi-documentary or documentary theater or whatever. For me, I write theater. I play write and I write theater plays. And like the difference is like it's a genre. It's you choose the genre. Like there is a different genre in art or in theater or in movies. So documentary is one of the genres. But what I do all the time is that I reveal a lot of things. As Carol mentioned in her amazing introduction about my work is that I actually, I'm always mixing fiction and real together. So the facts and the fiction are intermingled together. And it's not about cheating the audience. It's just like to underline what is history? How we write history? And what is also fiction? What is fiction? Fiction also inside the fiction, whatever fiction, the science fictions, those like related to the space or whatever, they are based also on real experiences, on real stories, but they are hidden. Fiction take from real life and they hide them. They hide their material. Documentary, they reveal their materials, but they actually have a pretentious sometimes to say that we are based on a true facts and what we say is really true and we are objective. Fiction, they say no, we are fiction, et cetera, but they are hiding their sources in a way. What I do actually, I use both in a simple word. I have no, I don't prefer this on that like or rather this or that. I depends on the work and I do the work on this, but I always reveal my mechanisms. I reveal the ways you do things, you reveal it, you give hints to the audience that, okay, now I'm showing you videos from the Syrian Revolution, for example, but I'm going to be constructed and then I put myself. So be careful, this is something that I'm dealing with it in my experience. So it's mixed, huh? So in this sense, it's not about cheating the audience again to tell them that, oh, fiction, this is not fiction, this is real, this is real, oh, this is fiction, not real, no, it's to tell that history actually is constructed, is written out of subjectivity and objectivity, out of fiction and reality together. And we have actually to take it on ensemble. It's very dangerous when we try to distinguish what is true and what is untrue. What is fiction and what is non-fiction? It's really very dangerous. I think it's more relevant and more interesting to analyze a phenomena or like something like Trump as a reality by itself, not to say like he's saying lies or like he is a madman or whatever, whatever. No, to say like, why he is saying like this? What is behind this? I want to believe him, but why he is saying this and now? And then we can understand a lot of the discourse, the political discourse, his agenda, what is behind this? And he is very clever, I think he is using this as a strategy to gain also people because like it's also his ways to do politics. So instead of refusing and say like he's mad or like he's lying or like he's like this conspiracy theory playing in his mind, et cetera, instead of says, let's say like, okay, he's telling the truth. He is, but what is behind this? Why he is telling this? Let's analyze this, let's listen to him and see what he wants to tell us behind this. And then we will discover a lot of things. And this is my proposition. So first of all, I love the, I think I write theater is more accurate than I write plays because if I write plays, who notes a playwright in a room writing a text with then actors elsewhere have some kind of loyalty to that you are writing theater. And we've published some of those texts in TBR and you can read them and understand them as theater. But deep in the writing is or married to the writing is the theatricality of how they're going to be staged. So I love that phrase, going forward, I write theater. But this is so what you just described is what I was, what I've been thinking about for a long time that the difference between creating a work that says this is what really happened or creating a work that has all this indeterminacy in it. At the same time, if there is perhaps a danger in saying, well, no, we don't really know what's true. Because then, and we can't know what the truth is, then don't even become more vulnerable to dictators and people who are master manipulators of the media. We never can, if we're convinced that the truth is somehow not able to be located unknown, then don't become very vulnerable in our daily and political realities. Yeah, I agree with you about this matter. But I have to insist that art is not a place, it's not a platform for political agendas. This means that activism is not in the artwork. If I want to activate something, it's just like to activate people to think with me. And this is a big issue. It's not to convince my audience in my theater pieces about any political idea, about any even philosophical idea except of let's think and think and think and think. And that's it. Of course, like when I'm insisting on thinking, it doesn't mean that we don't feel at the same time. We cannot also separate feeling from thinking. It's like come also together. But what I mean that when I say like in my theater, I answer, I put questions. It means that it's a question that I don't have answers for them. Really, I don't have answers. Otherwise, they are not questioned. They are like subliminal messages or like the answer is under the table and I'm like manipulating the audience to answer the answer that I would love to hear. And this is actually the role of the politicians, of activists and I'm not against politics to be clear. I'm not against activism. I'm an activist in my life, but not in my theater work, not in my artworks. This is, I can separate them.  I have to provoke myself. I have to attack my beliefs to put myself into questions. And this is something not easy. I'm saying it, but it's not easy. And I don't say that I'm succeeding in doing this. I'm just, I say, this is my ambition. I want to betray myself in my theater pieces, to betray my beliefs. Even the artistic tendencies, I want to betray them. Like I don't want to have a methodology in my artwork or in my theater to follow. I want, each time I do a theater piece, I would love to betray it and to break it and to go to something else. And this is, to be honest, not easy, but I fight for this. And this is why also in my artworks, in my theater, I don't hide my political position. I say it clearly. I say like, I'm from this political side, but this is not the issue. It's not, I'm not here to convince you of this. I'm here because I have something else to share with you questions. And this is what is important for me. So I hope I answer this thing because I agree with you. It's like, we cannot be like in the world, like in this lost like, and we don't know what is true and what is not true. But I say like in art, it's the place where we have to discuss, where we have to put this trial, the perpetrator and the victims and put them like really in an equal level. And this is very hard, very harsh, unacceptable sometimes. And to give the voice for each of them. And this is what I try to do. And I don't know if I'll do it well or not, but I try to do it well. You do do it well. So after it was looking for the missing employee that you performed as part of Lola Arias' share your documents in the spring. And after that, you sent me this beautiful work in progress very, very short about a family appearing and disappearing. So I'm wondering, are you working on that now? What are you thinking about now? Where are you going with your ideas at this moment in time? Like there's a lot of ideas about today what we are going through. But to be honest, it's something that we are, we were already thinking about before the corona crisis, before we had it. We have this and we worked on it. We had, we have all the questions. It started with the social media, with the new technologies, the development of it, which was really very fast. And we were trying to catch what's going on with the technologies today.  And this is amazing. And these are questions that really started to come to me very, very long, long time ago. So what happened today in the corona time actually is that it was, it pushed us to the extreme, all the world. We were all pushed to the extreme and we were also in the corner now and we were obliged to think about it, but it was before. We were in a way, living in solitudes or loneliness before, before now. We were like all the time spending a lot of time with our little screens and the smartphones on the laptop, on the iPads, spending a lot of time of every day, like in daily basis. So like the corona pushed us to the extreme and put us into questioning this, especially performing arts and dance, theater, music and other things. So one of the questions that comes to us is that what about the body now? How we go out? Like now we go out without our bodies. Actually now, instead of preparing my body, instead of doing exercises to be like on the stage with a good form, now actually I prepare my image. And this is what I was doing now. I was preparing my image. So we go out with an image of our bodies, with an image. Now we prepare our image to go out. And when we go out, it's the image of part of our body. Also our body is fragmented. So it's like, it's a part of our body. So all these are questions to think about, like what that means. And this is a question that came to me long time before Corona, how we do theater with the absence of the body. So the body is not dead, it's absent. And there's a difference between when we talk about the absence of the body or the death of the body. It's not the death of the body. It's not the death of theater. It's the absence of theater. And the absence of theater, it means that it's invisible or it is here, but we cannot see it. And this is actually the whole concept of absence. The absent is someone invisible, but liable to come back. And the absent is someone who, or something that will allow us to imagine, to create and to put fictions and to imagine and to do a lot of things. But it's always liable to come back. It's the promise to come back. And this is very important. So now there is the absence of the body and how we can do theater with the absence of the body. One of the experiences that we have done is 33 RPM and a few seconds where like we did a theater piece and I'm sorry Carol, I insist that it's a theater piece, not installation performance. Instillation, okay. It's a theater piece proposing that we can do theater without actors or with the absence of actors. So the actor promising to come back. It's not that we should do theater without actors, but it's a possibility opens to us. And Corona pushes us now to think about all these issues today, like about these issues. Like to talk about also to think about our senses because now all what we've seen, all what we touch, what we hear, what we sense, everything, all the senses are artificial. Like I see you through a medium. I hear you through a medium. It's not your belly. The voice is not coming from your belly. It's coming through a speaker.  So everything is artificial. What does it mean? It's not a refusal. It's not to refuse. It's actually to think about what and how we can do theater today when this is finished. How we can benefit out of this. Not to come back, but how we can use this to do something else with theater on stage with real audience, with physical audience, not virtual. Right? Yeah, I think this is a fundamental question. The theater is about the physical representation of the body on stage.  And now, as you pointed out, you're so clearly, you know, where we all thought cyberspace is not real. Now it's the only kind of real thing in a way what we have, because what we do now, the moment the second is real. But as you said, it's representations of representations. So your voice is not your voice. It's a modified version of it. So the question is, yeah, what does that really mean? Is that fundamentally changing? This is a moment where something pivots change, revolves, revolution. Is this a moment that has a radical change that we understand better what you talked about and what will happen? I'm, as I said, like these questions were before in my mind and I was all the time trying to do representations through mediums, even in the theater. Like when we talk about 33 RPM or like three posters looking for a missing employee, who's afraid of representations, auto-joy, all these theater works, the actors were on stage, but they were addressing the audience who were also present in the theater addressing them through a mediator, which was the camera and the screen. And it was always questioning this idea, questioning what does it mean to do a live streaming? What does it mean? Like we go for a live streaming in our apartments. We want to see life. What does it mean that when we saw the Gulf War on live streaming on the TV? Where is the event? Is it there? Is it on the image in the TV? If I'm not on the TV, do I exist? Or I'm not, I don't exist. So it's all these questions that coming. So on stage, if I am both an image and physically there, who is the most strong, the stronger in the presence? Is it my image or me physically there? Where is the event is really happening? Is it where I'm standing physically or where I'm broadcasted live? It's the image. So these are questions and there's no really, there's no answers. It's such questions just to make us think and be aware of all what's happening today, what we are going through today.  But what I want to say is that when we do theater online, it is theater because one of the main, or it's a performance or it's music, whatever, like it is because one of the main essential things that makes theater or like live performances is that it is now and here. So what's happening is now and here. Now we are doing it, this talk is doing it now and here, but still the now is much more complex than before because the now is like, it's different timing between all of us. I'm in Berlin, you are in New York, someone in Beirut or whatever. And the here also, it's a complex. It's not also simple as it was before. The here is now is the virtual world, but it's here in my place where I'm doing this talk and it's here where you are sitting and where Carol's sitting and where some people are listening to us. So it is much more interesting to think about the here and about the now, but it's still here and now, but how we can define the here and now accordingly to this situation. And this is an interesting question to think about. You know, so in 33 RPM, there are no actors on stage, but you're right. Anticipation of the presence of someone and there's the physical options of his presence, but in the audience, we are together and that's fundamentally different than what we're experiencing now because the liveness of the fellow spectators becomes an important mediating reality in terms of how we receive this thing on stage, even without actors. So, you know, the felt presence of someone breathing, whether or not you know them, the movement through the theater environment to get to one seat, the warmth of the bodies next to one. So it could make me cry, all the things we miss, that this is such a deep and not yet fully analyzed part of the theatrical experience that I don't know, I don't know what we can do with the lonely spectator now or the alone spectator in relationship to the, you know, artistic inventions in this new medium. I think like the Zoom or like the online theater performances or performances emancipate the audience a lot.  So there are a lot of restrictions and rules that are forbidden in theater when we are all together as audience. Now we are like free to do them. And of course, like when you know that it's here and now and you are not able to see it online next day, it's completely different. And this is really, really, this is really good. Then you have to make a decision, you stay with the performance online or you leave it. It's like in theater also, you can also say like, I don't want to go on with this performance, I want to leave the theater, you leave, but you are not allowed to come back. In online, you can leave and come out whenever you want. Nobody can control you. There's no control on the audience. I get your point, but it kind of makes viewing theater than just like the rest of one's daily waking reality. It's definitely, you have more options as a spectator where you can leave or come back or eat a sandwich, but that's just like everything else. Then viewing theater becomes like looking at one's cell phone, becomes so close to all one's other daily waking activities. It doesn't that change our whole reception point of view? I mean, the restrictions in a theater function somehow. I mean, that we experienced the house, those of us together, which is different from the stage and there's some kind of aisle or divide between them. Granted, that's an older theatrical reality, but it still has something to offer us. Yeah, I think, yeah, we win something, we lose something. I think, you know, things go hand in hand, but of course we do miss the liveness and the bodies synchronizing their heartbeats and looking at something. Why I think Robbie's work is also so significant and so important is what he said, you know, that we really, for at least a short moment question, are we, there's an irritation or an uncomfortable, uncomfortable moment where we don't know what's he saying, what is real, what is not real, that, you know, why do we trust voices from a microphone or from a speaker more when we do events at our Seagal Center, when our participants speak over the mic, the body mic, it has more authority. We take it off, the sound is still there, the human talk, so yeah, that's so interesting too, but it sounds different. The same is, why is the camera of CNN that's anchored in concrete, you know, you believe it, but something's shaking and less quality, all the same thing, yeah, it's not so, who knows if that's true. You know, so what are we processing? How have we been conditioned? And I think your work makes clear that we also construct our reality, as you said earlier, was that Trump really, whatever, so that Richard Foreman once was at the Seagal and he said, isn't it strange that we normally don't see our heads?  We, through our complex system of eyes and brain cells, we see colors, we see structures, and we combine it super fast together, a human supercomputer, the most dense protein structures in the known universe, in our brains and the eyes especially, so we create something, but we think it's real, how we see it. The butterflies see colors already 15 times or a hundred times better than we do, so we cannot or a thousand. We don't, and I think what Ravi's work does and what this theater of the real does, I think is, it perhaps for a moment slows down our process of reception that we realize we are processing things in the way we process, of course, it has something to do with how we see reality and that there are different angles we always do say and I think it's something that works and that really opens up also this irritation and most probably in an audience setting when people sit together and can talk afterwards or meet the artist, perhaps it is even stronger, but there is also, I guess, I think it has a function to work like this on the screen, so that would be my question to Ravi, do you think that your work is as effective if you design it, if it comes on a Zoom performance? As if it is in a setting, as Carol says, even without actors, is that, oh, don't you need bodies watching? Is the effect, that Brechen effect of distancing, social distancing, the distancing, is that, do you need that or do you think it would work the same on screen? I don't have like a definitive answer about this, but I would say like with the experience with the Zoom, with the online thing, we had like audience more than in theater where we do, which is like really unbelievable, like, come on, what is this? And really it's really great in a way, but also you miss something but at the same time, as you said, like you gain something at the same time, but for me, it's like always, it's something conceptually in my thinking, in my work, in art and in theater, is that we should be very light in a way that we can adapt whatever situation, whatever case to do theater and art. And this is something that I learned to be honest by force or by a need because I started during, at the end of the Civil War in Lebanon, I started to produce my own work and till now anyway, like our government, our state, they don't have money for culture at all. Maybe they have money but they steal it or they don't put it for culture. Anyway, we have, if we want to do theater or art, it's like something volunteer, we are all volunteers, we are all amateur in this sense, we are not professionals because we cannot live out from our theater or our artwork in Lebanon. So we all, most of the theater makers, the actors, all of them, most of them, they have another work beside to earn their life, to continue their life. So this has actually learned me how to produce work in a very low budget all the time. And I was producing my own works really with nothing. And I was so happy with this because it gives me freedom with all my choices, freedoms from the market, from any authority. And I can do works wherever. I sometimes, I did theater in the living room in my apartment because I couldn't afford, or like some people, they want to see a theater piece and I cannot play it anymore. So I invite them and I do an adaptation and I do it there. So it's this lightness, this flexibility to do theater, to do art with no borders, to go on whatever is the case and whatever are the conditions. And this is, for me, is important. So now we do on Zoom online, okay, but this is not the end, it's like a period, we go through it, but then we will go back to some, or like we go to something new. And we do things. I carry myself and I go on and I see where. I don't know, it sounded very optimistic. I'm not a man optimistic. Go on to something new. I'm trying to think like, hmm, sounds good, but. Oh, so did you have anything you wanted to show us? You chatted a bit about your assembling some photographs of your work. Maybe I would like to show you something. How, wait a minute, where is the share screen? Okay, I'm not allowed to share the screen. The host is able to, so you have to, I cannot do it. Is Andy a, yeah? Can you? Yeah, Andy has to. Yeah, can you enable Rabie to share the screen? Of course. Okay, good. She's gonna enable you. Yes, so, no, not yet. So what I want to show you is just like to go through, I prepared something to go through very quickly, the scenography of my works, how it developed through the years. Yeah, just to share. Okay, now you see my, right? So you see my desktop, right? Yes. Yeah, it's all good. Okay, so this is the early works. You can see like it's not about, so it's like very classical way of thing, like the audience are here, and here are the theater, the stage, and here are the performers. This is how it was.  Actually, I put a wall here, sorry. I put a wall here, this is a wall, to block the perspective, the depth of the stage, because I wanted to do a flat theater, a 2D theater. And there was a camera here, as you see. The performers were sitting on chairs, and the image is going through the camera, through a monitor, and then we talk to the audience. Through the screen. And then in three posters, I was behind the wall, and the camera is behind the wall, and the audience cannot see me, as you see. Then I speak to them through the monitor. So this is how it was. And then here it becomes like this. So they cannot see me, and then we open the door, they see me behind, but. And then looking for a missing employee, I jumped, and I sit within the audience, and the camera with me, and then my image is transmitted here, broadcasted here, and people see me sitting here, but I'm also sitting with them. And then in 2008, I was supposed to go to Japan, but I could not make it. So we decided to do it through Skype, and they agreed. So I was in Beirut, sitting in Beirut, and it was screened on a screen here, projected on the screen, and audience are still in the theater watching me, all together, but I was in Beirut. And then in 2020, we did this, make me stop smoking. So the theater, as you see, it's empty now, all empty, and I'm at home in Berlin, and the audience all together alone, as you put it, Carol, alone together, everywhere. So just like this is to go through it very quickly with this. Yeah, it's quite stunning. So if you would like, maybe I would like to show one thing. It's just like a video, which I would love to show to you. It's a very old work. It's just about forgetting and remembering, and about telling. So just like, watch this one minute or something like this. Okay, thank you. So good, thank you so much. Yeah. The last film clip that you showed, what work is that from? The old house, it's from Make Me Stop Smoking, but it was also shown as a separate work, as one channel installation in exhibitions, which I like to show it to give an introduction or a key to the works that people will see afterward. Right, right, right. Thank you so much, Riviera. This has been truly amazing. And do you have any closing comments, Frank, or Riviera? I'm just kind of, like after I see your work, it's so provocative, and the brain space that it makes is really marvelous as part of the deep experience of work. Thank you. A question to Rami. What inspires you at the moment? What do you look at? What do you read? What do you listen to? Or what artists do you follow? Who do you feel has something to say? No specific things. Actually, I'm in a phase where I'm trying actually to capture what we are going on through now, to think about, I'm much more now to go into video works. Now, I think it's a medium that might be good for sharing with audience online, better than doing theater online. For now, for me, I don't know, to do videos, and that can be played whenever you want, wherever, at any time. But also, I'm still interested in this idea how to do things with a very low budget. It's something very essential for me to get out from this capitalist, from this also liberal system, and the market that are like, it's like, it's burden on us, even like if you want to apply for funds from the state or from wherever, like you have to go through a long process with administrations, et cetera, which take all your energy. So how can you skip all this and just go to the essence, to go to the core and do the work, and how we can do this? And this is a question. So I'm still insisting on, I'm struggling to go with this idea. And I don't believe that, oh, I don't have money now. So I don't, I cannot work. I cannot realize my ideas because I don't have the budget. I, we have to find a way, all of us to achieve our ideas, even if we don't have the budget that we dream of. This is an important, I think also closing statement. This is for young artists and students. I know many of them listen here, what he said about, he said, I'm an amateur in a way, but not because his work is not brilliant. It's because it's not paid for it. And then amateur, which came from the Latin of Amara, Amor. You do something out of love because you love to do it. Yes. And professional means, you know, you're paid to do it on Broadway.  And then people say, you're a professional actor. But who's, again, who's the real actor? Who's the real theater artist? When it comes to real love, we all want to think we are loved because out of love and not because it's professional, that you pay someone to make love to you or be in love. And actually we would be horrified, you know? And so I think this is an important statement. Yeah. No, just like a few men here, maybe like just to say like, and a very, very good example is you talks what you're doing is like a very good example, which I think like it's very, very, very low budget and you do a very amazing thing. Actually it's a zero budget or what? Yeah. I don't know. And we do something. And I think this is important to do your work and to do your art and not to wait. I think Susan Sontag says society kisses you on the forehead and institutions accept you and you are paid professionally and then you're an artist and now you say, I do work. And I think Morgan Jeunesse once said in the seat of talk, people ask me, but how do I become a director? And she says, you know, the only thing is you wake up one morning, you say I'm a director, you have to work hard. Exactly. And you have to be good. This is how you do art. And I think this is something what you show us in all the complexity of the work, it is some something that can be done and Corona now forces us. There is normally no space, no money in New York City, but now there is no money and we don't have the space, even if we had access to it, we can't get into it. But this is something to really think about why we do this and why we are motivated to find ways to adapt to a situation like an actor in a scene of a play adapts to the scene he or she is in, you know, in that moment. And now we are in a special moment and your work, it really is so brilliant and I hope one day you will come back to New York, we can see your work, have a drink, also have a seat or talk where you'll be with Carol and NYU. It is of real importance so really, really thank you for taking our talk so serious. That's important. Thank you so much. To hear from you and to listen to you. Carol, maybe say a bit about tomorrow with Nick. Well, we're meeting with him tomorrow afternoon and Nick is standing behind a lot of the verbatim theater in the UK which has historically had its own unique approach to understanding political events, especially in the UK and kind of reformulating them into theatrical terms. And Nick has also been an incredibly creative producer. So I, I, you know, this particular moment in time, I think, you know, one thing that Lola Arias did is seek out new models of production of producing work and that all the collaboration between the theaters in Germany to produce the work of producer series online becomes a very important model. I mean, I know that I understand it's important to create no matter what one faces. At the same time, I just want to add that, you know, we, we value the thought of philosophers. We value the thought novelists and part of the way at least in a capitalist society value is recognized for sustained. Let's take it out and that we sustain what we value is by enabling it to live and enabling it to live means in part giving it sustenance. So I'm not talking about surplus value. I'm talking about, you know, enabling artists and the thought that is so that they produce that's so important to our society to live and in the invention of new forms of producing hopefully going forward will take us to new places. Yeah, that's true. We need to support art and they need to be able to, to, to pay the life. So thank you so much again tomorrow. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. From the tricycle theater in London, next week we will focus on drama trilogy with Peter Ackersall, my colleague and also a drama tour was working on a new book on drama trilogy right now. He's going to tell us about writing these in the process of doing one and Katanio from Lincoln Center Theater just finished on his own. And, and then we will have Sebastian Kaiser who was Frank Astor of the drama talk at the Volksbühne Berlin. So we look at that part of theater but again, this was a brilliant conversation because of what you said, Robbie and thank you for taking your time sharing with us. Carol, really thank you. And thanks to Hallround and everybody stay safe stay tuned in and we hope to, to, to have you with us tomorrow and next week. So thank you to Berlin and hope you're going to have a good dinner tonight and really our gratitude to, to, for you to share your work. And now we know it's complicated. It's online, it's life, you know, as you say, so but I think it's something very special for everybody. It helps us to to understand better where we are in and this kind of shared suffering which we all have experience at the moment. So thank you and bye-bye. Bye-bye.


Snapshots from 1998. A season of greatness. On October 2nd, the Yankees did all their scoring in Game 3 of the ALDS during the fourth inning via home runs by Paul O'Neill and Shane Spencer. David Cone and a trio of relievers combined on a three-hit shutout as the Yankees won 4-0 finishing a sweep of the Rangers.