Captain Aiden Caruth and we'll have to wait let's have a look at QRC line up and you're going to see that Afan, King, Lamsi, Mohamed Nelson, Tuckett, Gray, James, Eve, Jaden, Dolly, Kenwin Jones the coach very interested and for missing is the Skipper, Caruth. Yeah, Mokaila, Nelson is in for him. That's a massive miss. He has national team experience, but they still have Taula Masi in there. He will be the anchor in the midfield. They would need the trickery of Nelson to open up the Mokorapo team. Well, let's have a quick look at the Mokorapo line up perdition. Alexander is in goal and there's Taylor, Lachman, Jarvis, Atiba, Henry, Mohamed, Edwards, Parks, McShine and Dale Sonders the coach. Yeah, I think I deal. But it's now picked up here by Nelson. Nelson working his way forward, plays the ball through. This could be a chance. Oh, this could be Wanderl. It is Wanderl. QRC has opened the score in here and really and truly it was a good move, East Mokorapo. They were left open at the back and they've paid the price. Yeah, bad giveaway. There's that high line once again. And if you don't get it right, there's always space in behind and these nippy QRC attackers this time took advantage of it. Good awareness as well. Good ball from Nelson. Got him behind there and I thought for a second he might be second best. But look at that. Just a tour around the keeper says, thank you very much. It's mine. And well, easy peasy, 11 squeezes. Trying to play through them. They're not playing with much width and it's a difficult surface to play on, to be fair. A few moments back there was a direct ball that caused QRC all sorts of problems. I'm not saying to kick the ball away, but maybe there could be a little more direct in their approach like this. Here's Taylor, plays it in field. This could be a chance here. It is a goal. So the ball has been put into the back of the net. It seems to be Jarvis. And as soon as we said that, East Mukrapo going up that right side squared it back in field and it looked to be. And if you was looking for a shot from that distance, but he's regained possession, goes wide to Taylor. Taylor playing it. This is another chance here. He's goes to the Fappos. Oh, my word. And all of a sudden they have turned it around here. And is that Jarvis with his second? I think it is. But all of a sudden now, 25 minutes have been gone. And it means that East Mukrapo, all of a sudden they have taken the lead. And I think Jarvis, he's taken the shoot off. He's going to get a yellow card. I'm almost certain. Yeah, almost a carbon copy of the first goal. They get it out wide and they get around, talk it with a 1-2. And it's just rolled across the 60. East Mukrapo, we've not seen maybe that shot from Jarvis in the second half that just went over the bar. But other than that, you actually have not really threatened Alexander very much. Very, very similar to the first half. There were just two shots, one shot for me, the team from outside the box. Other than that, it's just been fought in midfield, you know. A lot of unnecessary giveaways, scrappy play. Could you blame the pitch or probably the technique of some of the players? Or maybe a bit of both. But it's been generally scrappy. Well, here's the ball headed away, goes to Lamsi, and he sends it upfield, looking for Mohammed. He's going to give, he's got all heart. He doesn't stop running, does he? Oh, and he's got the better here. And he has the shot. He scored. Well, well, Mohammed has scored here in the 61st minute, just as when we were talking about QRC, haven't created anything. But what a mistake at the back. I think it was Henry at the back. He was fumbling with the ball. Mohammed, it looked to be a lost cause at one time. He never gave up. He ran for it. He challenged. He wanted a team at halftime, two-all, and then a real opportunist goal from Mohammed made it two-all. And at the end of it, a good game. You know, the conditions were very difficult for them. Yeah, fair enough scoreline in the end. I don't think both coaches would be happy. Either coach would be happy having both led, but they would be happy not to lose, that's for sure. Well, let's have a quick look at the stats. 10 shots for QRC, 9 as Ismucrapos. Both teams, six shots on target, nine fouls to three, two yellow cards for QRC, one for Ismucrapos, no red cards, seven off sides for QRC, as opposed to four, five corners to seven, four saves each. And the possession, 52% for Ismucrapos, 48% for QRC. So even the stats are very even. Yeah, yeah, pretty even. Our point is not going to do either team much good in the standings and the grand scheme of skins, the grand scheme of things. But they'll be pleased not to have lost this game. Okay, let's go down stairs to James. He's got the NGC man of the match with him. Oh, that's right. I'm here with the NGC man of the match, Javis, two goals today. How do you feel about your performance? I felt very great. I've been working very hard over preseason for big games like this. And I wasn't happy with the point we got, but good going forward. Your two goals, of course, are positioning your team to get a point today. You said you're not happy by it, but you're putting in the video performance. Yeah, I'm happy with my performance or low in the second half. I didn't perform as I wanted to, but going forward, I'll be learning these two goals I got today and try to bring them back to my school. Well, thank you very much, my friend. All right. So of course that was Javis, our man of the match. We say goodbye to all viewers on CCN TV6 as we bring in the losing coach today. And he's none other than Joe Barra. He gave Joe. We say that. Let's do over that. And in fact, I must correct myself, of course, my good friend and former teammate Dale Saunders, who Steve got a point today. Dale, this match is nail-biting for us as spectators. How was it for you as a coach today? I'm not bad. I'm young charges. I'm impressed with the effort and the attitude today. We came with a point. We leave with a point. Yeah. And what do you think went wrong or right for your team today? I think we scored two goals. That was that was a positive. And I think we gave away two goals. So that was the negative part of it. Where do you move forward from here? We take it one game at a time. We got two points in our last two games. So, you know, you'll go back on each other and feel and keep going. Thank you very much. Joe Saunders, of course, of our East Mirko Rapo secondary. His team are getting a point today as we bring another good friend of mine, Kenwin Jones here today. Now, Kenwin, you've got a point today. You went ahead. You went behind and then you equalized in the end. How does this game feel for you? Bittersweet. It was good to get a point, but of course, you know, in the end, we had so many chances that we could have scored the goal to go on top again and it didn't happen. Chances at the end of the match today feel as if you missed out somewhat from getting one three points. Well, of course, you can't get up into them positions, you know, three times on the bounds and not score. You know, it's a tale of misfire in frontman. And, you know, we have to take it on the chain. We gave away two early goals in the first half, two of the same goals, I think. And it was just poor defending. The lack of willingness to get back into proper positioning. And of course, see the danger over your shoulder. Yeah. And that, you know, final question, as I asked that deal as well, second half of the season, where does your team go from here? Oh, well, we have to keep fighting for every point possible to make sure that we stay in the division. You know, we had quite a few, a few, a few games where we lose games when we should not have. And of course, we're in this position now, but we have to continue fighting till the end. Well, thank you so much, Kenwin. And we wish you best of luck moving forward. Thank you.


When we say we are saved, the question is, what are we saved from? Being a Christian makes us wonder, well, since we're saved, what exactly are we saved from? What are the people in the Old Testament? What are they saved from? The people in the New Testament? What are they saved from? And then us, what do we save from? Why are we saved? What is actually happening here? Well, there are three things that we need to consider that we are saved from. Obviously, if we could sum up in one word, it would be sin. How so, Court? Well, we are first and foremost saved from the power of sin. The Bible says this, that therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal bodies, that you may obey its lust, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of righteousness, but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead and your members, and your members as instruments of righteousness. Here it is, verse 14, the Paul says in chapter 6 of Romans, for sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace. In other words, we don't have to be subject to sin. We don't have to let sin rule in our bodies. We don't have to let it have any sort of dominion, because as a believer, you have what? The Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit gives you the power to defeat it. As a matter of fact, the Bible tells us, and this is a daily prayer, in when the Lord has asked, how should we pray? Notice what he says and deliver us from the evil one. And so now, is that delivering us from evil? No, we'll deal with that in just a little bit. But we should pray daily, not to have us to lose, not to have our efforts thwarted, not to have our cause hindered by sin, or in this case, by the devil. So we don't have to sin. We will sin. That's just a fact. The Bible says that we will sin. However, we don't have to let it have dominion over us. Matter of fact, as we told, any sin that we're likely going to commit, we don't have to actually commit that sin. There's nowhere in the Bible that says that we have to sin. We will, but we don't have to. The good news is, though, that we have been delivered from the power of it. In other words, it does not dominate us anymore. It does not rule over us anymore. We can be victorious. Now, it may be a daily step, but that's fine. A daily step it is. We shall daily have dominion over our own bodies instead of sin having dominion over us. So in other words, that lustful eye or that lying tongue or that envious spirit or any of those things like that, the wrath or rage or anger that we might have, we don't have to let that be who we're known by. We don't have to let sin be what's controlling us. In other words, we can draw close to him and let the spirit fill us, and then we can fulfill the desires of God and walk in the spirit rather than fulfilling the lust of the flesh. Now, the second thing that we're delivered from is just as important as a matter of fact, even more importantly, is the penalty of sin, because we are saved. What do we save from? Well, we're saved from him. The Bible tells us, as a matter of fact, Jesus tells us, as he's speaking to Lazarus's sister, he says to her, Jesus says, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even if he dies. He will live even if he dies. What's his point? Well, verse 26, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? And the key point that he asked is, do you believe this? Well, what does it mean by we shall never die? He doesn't mean physically. Obviously, there's gonna come a point in time if he doesn't tarry in terms of if he doesn't take long and coming back. There's gonna come a point in time where we're gonna have a funeral.  But that's not what he's speaking of. He's speaking of the penalty of death, in other words, being forever separated from him, going to hell. The Old Testament saints know this. New Testament saints know this as well. We should know this, that we don't ever have to worry about being someone in hell. That's not our destiny. We have been saved from that. So those are the two things that we can say that we're saved from. We are saved from the power of sin. We are saved also from the penalty of sin, which is hell. But then also, at some point in time, now this hasn't happened yet, but we will be saved from the presence of sin. The Bible tells us this in 1 Corinthians 15-53, for this perishable must put on the imperishable and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable and this mortal will have put on immortality, then we'll come about the saying that is written, death is swallowed up in victory. O death, verse 53, verse 55, O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God who gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. There's going to come a point in time when we will not be surrounded by sin. The power is gone, the penalty is gone, and the presence of sin is gone. There's going to come a point in time when we will no longer have to worry about this fleshly body that causes, brings about sin. There won't be this warring in between our members. We will be in the presence of the Lord forever in a sinless state with glorified bodies, I might add. And so those are the three things that we are saved from. We are saved from the power of sin, we are saved from the penalty of sin, and then ultimately one day we will be saved from the presence of sin, all because he got on the cross and died for us. Amen.


space. I celebrate all of you coming back and seeing regular faces because our dream is that this is not a webinar-type thing, but it's much more of an ongoing conversation where everyone joins and everyone participates. And to that end, we are trying to get it to be much more participatory because the idea is to build a body of knowledge through this. That's one. I was spending just a website, which you can pop up onto the thing, but every single talk week by week is up there. So even if you miss one, you can still access it. I wish I could find a way to get it editable into a very nice podcast, but they're just worth putting in your yo-yo while you're chopping vegetables and stuff. Invite. Hi, Carol. I'm so happy you came back. Hi. I'm sorry. I cannot get on camera. That's okay. You're here. It's vanity, but I am very happy to be here. Very, very happy. Hi, Amy. Do you have Jay Han? New York is here. Yeah. All kinds of places are here, but without further ado, really, also, if you think that there are people you would like to hear, and if there are things, deep conversations you want to have, just reach out to any of us, Amy, Mugenie, Wenya, whoever you fancy, me. And notice how I said whoever you fancy, and then I said me. And, yeah, and just really keep the conversation alive and even going forward, because we're all on crisis here to figure out how we want to, what we're going to do with this great unrealized future. So I shall leave it now to my partner and I am Amy to take us off and go. Great. Thank you, Jay Han. So welcome to everybody and to my guests this evening, Asher Warren and James Brennan. Thank you for appearing with me tonight in this Hobart and Lawn System, Tasmania-centric session of unrehearsed futures. So this is number five of our second season and it's entitled Carcerality, Ritual and Spectatorship, Prisoners Coming Home. And so we're going to be looking in the first half hour, we're going to be looking at the work of James and Asher, James in particular on carcerality and theater in prisons and Asher on his work with audiences. And so I'd like to break with my tradition of reading out people's bios and ask my guests to introduce themselves, because I think that will be much more lively and interesting. So may I begin with you, James? Sure. Thank you. Hi everyone. Thanks, Amy, for the intro. So I hope I have something to offer this room. It feels like a really an amazing, I can't really tell yet because I've shrunk everyone's heads, but it feels like there's a lot of experience and enthusiasm, wisdom in the room. So hi. I'm in Tasmania in Australia and one thing we do here when we speak on country, which is what they call, you know, a word used here for the land here, is we acknowledge the traditional line. And so I'll do that even though we're everywhere because I'm on this land here and it's a practice that we try to honor at all times. So I'm paying my respect to the traditional and original owners of this land, Tasmania specifically, Hobart or La Truita, the Moinana people. And that means paying respect to those who've passed before and also acknowledge the current Tasmanian traditional owners who are still here. The land was never really seeded. So it's important to start with that. It's also a pretty strong intro to my obsession with justice because there's a lot of injustices happen on this country and continues to, but I'll get to that later. I'm going to try and talk about myself over there as dispassionately as possible for the next little while. So I guess the intro, the main thing to say is I'm an artist. I've always been working as an artist with an exception of a little break I had when I got bored and I became a parole officer for a number of years, but mostly I trained as an actor and I worked in the theater for the last 20 years. I did a bit of straight theater and I found it pretty uninspiring and I guess I started to make my own work early on as soon as I was training really. And that came out of, I guess, disinterest in the work that was around me in a more constructive way, an interest in making work that was more physical and experimental than what was in where I trained, which was in Melbourne. Australia doesn't, you know, talking about theater in Australia is an interesting, it's sort of an interesting thing to Asher might have something to say about that later as well. It's, you know, the tradition here is limited and you might say that we might not be suited to certain types of theater just because of our sort of national psyche and our history. Also there's a lot of elephants in the room, which seems like a good thing for theater, but in Australia sometimes it hasn't been the case. Anyway, elephants in the room is something that's compelled me in all sorts of directions for the last 20 years. I'm a musician also and I've always made and performed and composed music, but I decided early on that I would not study that afterwards because I wanted to keep it a bit sacred. Funnily enough, I did study theater and that's what I've been doing pretty much all the whole time. So I was interested in my physical theater early on. I made my own theater for a while, in probably 10, 12 years, off my own bat and did that sort of continuously and eventually got a bit jack of the culture. That means I wasn't, I was not sort of, I didn't have enough contemporaries around that were doing what I wanted to do. So I had a break and went to Berlin and made music for quite a while and when I came back I just, I actually just didn't want to make theater, so I became a parole officer. That was a pretty sort of odd, there's a story there which I won't go into, but it didn't, I didn't, I didn't hunt it down. It sort of happened to me. It was great. If anyone ever wants to try and become a parole officer, if you're getting bored of theater, I highly recommend it. You know, I guess, you know, I guess one thing that was missing for me in the theater was a sense of danger or rawness in the, in the work and I didn't know this at the time, but when I went into the, into the prison, well, you know, I mean, those two things immediately changed for me. Of course I made some pretty strict rules that I wasn't, I wasn't going in there to sort of harvest stories for my own theater. I was, I was having a break, but I loved it. You know, I was, a little bit of context is I was, when I worked in the community, I was, I was managing offenders in the community. That meant people who'd come out of prison or people who were on community orders and there's a whole range of sort of situations and people in, in quite a poor sort of crime, high crime neighborhoods where I was working in West of Sydney. I, you know, I interviewed, the main task you do is you interview people. You get to know them, get to know their backgrounds and the issues they have and their, you know, what's called in parole, offending behavior. You're supposed to understand that and anything that feeds into that. So it's, I mean, I found it quite incredibly privileged sort of role to be able to get all this information about individuals. I just thought it was so, it was just so unusual. I just, if anyone had handed me the files that I was reading years ago, I would have just been gobsmacked. There's so much information about people's lives, their personal stories and it's compelling, you know, it's compelling stuff. Of course, it's attached to a real person. So it's, it's obviously very difficult material with real, you know, real risks involved in their lives. I, I, I eventually moved to the prison where I worked for three years and that was a different story. Everyone was always on time. I didn't have to go out into the community finding people. They were all there and my task there was to assess them for release. And so I really had to get my head around where they were at and that really meant getting to know them quite well. You know, you got different sorts of parole offices. I think, you know, I, some of them probably thought I was a bit of a pushover because I was interested, so interested in their, you know, their reasons and where they got to where they'd got. The reason I'm telling this story is because it really has driven everything I've done for the last eight years. There was one interview in particular where a guy, a guy was involved in quite a serious series of crimes and we'd got to this point of trust and he broke down and confided in me some further crimes, which he hadn't been charged for. And I knew that I needed to report those crimes, those alleged crimes and I, of course, I was able to tell him that after, but the thing that struck me was the interpersonal relationship between us had got to this point where something transformative was potentially unfolding. Unfortunately, it was not in my remit to go down that path, you know, to get stuck into whatever was unfolding for this guy. It was, it was a breakthrough in my opinion. He was facing something really significant. And as I left that interview, I mean, I knew that I was, I was confident that it would not, this would not carry on in a way that I was interested in carrying on. That is, you know, getting people involved who understood the psychology of what was going on, etc., in order to sort of harness this transformative moment, well, potentially transformative moment. As it played out, I went back and reported to the police and, you know, the psychologist got involved and nothing much came of it for him, that individual. I found that terribly disappointing. The one sort of moment that should be capitalized and sort of just everyone sort of gather around and pay attention to this moment wasn't able to be handled in the system that I was working in. That really led me to make a work called the chat, which was a theater work, which was basically about inventing a utopian parol system. It was totally, it was meant to be ludicrous, you know. We went, we went all out playing with the idea of what would make a, what would make a utopian parol office, dancing, playing, games, sensuality, you know, all the things that you just, you couldn't dream of when you're working in a parol office. It just doesn't match. But I was with a bunch of people who were well suited to those sort of things. And anyway, what came out of it was very surprising. It was made with three, including myself, three experienced performers and four ex-offenders. And it's been, we did multiple iterations of it. And so I worked with training up these ex-offenders to be ready for performance with my colleagues. And they were on stage every night with us, semi-structured performance going into territory, which was very sort of difficult really for them at moments, but also very uplifting at other moments. I guess the model of that has taken me into a sort of area of interest, which I would say is thinking about what the boundaries of my artistic ambition are. I think that my assessment of socially engaged art to date, I've generally hated it. You would not have caught me having any ambition to be involved in socially engaged art 10 years ago. Art for Art's Sake was what I was totally about. Unashamed about not having to answer why to that question. I just did not feel the need to answer why I was making Art for Art's Sake. I thought it was enough. And I still would defend that position. But after making a few works with these people, my sense of purpose is completely different. And I don't think I can go back anymore. I can still make music which doesn't have socially engaged purpose, but in theatre because it is necessarily sort of collaborative, I can't really go back. So I found myself, I guess now in a very, you know, I had no, I didn't, I mean, I just started the ethics from the ground up. I just tried to reflect on what I thought. And it took me years to get there, to get to being ready to do it. I just could not work out how to ethically start making work with people who had been in prison. There's so much, it's so messy. I knew how messy it was going to be. And believe me, it's been even messier than I anticipated. You know, risk to myself and others involved is just a sort of daily reality. And the rewards, the unlike working in theatre that I had done before. And so where I'm at now, I guess is, I'm doing a PhD about it. So I'm applying some, apparently applying some rigor to those questions. I still feel, you know, probably as far away from understanding as I did when I started. But probably I'm under, I get to understand some other people's approach to some of the things that I care about inside it. And I'll continue to do it. I think I've, it's not a, I made a decision to keep doing this. I thought long and hard about whether this would be a flash in the pan a couple of years. And I decided, no, that I was going to keep doing this. So here I am. I'm just about, I'm just launching an organization. I'm moving away from my own artist, my own name as an artist, which I think my website is up there, which what's been for the last sort of while, to a company name. And the idea there is to put a bit of distance between James and the work because, and I'll finish, I'll finish on this idea, I think, because basically what's happened is by working with people in prison and who've been in prison and who are in and out of prison. The idea of trust and my my decision in the end to have real friendships with these people, not the professional boundaries that make sense in the work has been really integral part of my work, not one that I would put in funding application, mind you, or necessarily write about in my, well, maybe I will write about it in my PhD. But it has led to some really difficult situations recently in the last year, which I hadn't second guessed. And there's probably more of those. But each time so far, I've, when I stumbled and thought, geez, how can I move through this? I've taken enough time to decide that I want to and I will. And so I'm just starting this organization. The first things we're going to be doing is making, dedicating the first period to music making prison. Prisoners love music. All the stuff comes out. They get to learn a bit of, you know, songwriting, whatever. And it's a real joy, you know, music does something. The theater has a lot of trouble doing, you know, the immediate response is just great. So anyway, that's a bit of a ram. I think I should, I think I should shut up now. There's probably other stuff to talk about. I hope that's a useful intro. I sort of wanted to reveal some of my sort of, I guess, more personal reasons for doing this stuff. Yeah, that's wonderful. Thanks. Thank you. I think it's very helpful to know your background and your personal experience that connects you to the work. And I'm sure that already there's lots of you've provoked a lot of thoughts about things. Asher, can I ask you to also introduce yourself and your research? With pleasure. Can everybody hear me okay? Thumbs up? Oh, fantastic. Amy, I don't think that I have as a compelling story as James has. I might be a bit briefer. Is that okay? It's fine. Okay. So my name's Asher Warren. I teach theater and performance at the University of Tasmania, the same island state that James lives in. But we do not reside in the same city. I live in Launceston and teach in Launceston, which is in the north, but is also land which was stolen. The Palo Alto people were forcibly dispossessed here. And I want to acknowledge the traditional owners as well. I like to start with my name and these kind of things because my name gives a lot of way and hides a lot. My first name is Asher and a lot of people sometimes think that's back to front, but my given name is Asher and it is the Hebrew Asher from the Old Testament. But it is not, I'm not Jewish. My family is not Jewish. My family is actually hidden behind my surname, which is Warren, which was anglicized when my grandfather landed from Holland in Melbourne, Australia after the Second World War. It was changed to the closest thing in the phone book to Van Viren, which was the Dutch name. So this is to kind of situate myself as a second generation Australian with a heritage, which I have a distant relationship to, but still is a part of the identity that I have here. My work up until a couple of years ago was really focused on interactive and intermediate theatre making, participatory theatre, and people working, particularly Australian artists, working to make really innovative work, which was remarkably open in its structure. Participants actually got drawn into these works and had quite a lot of say in what happened. They could determine where that work went. Every time those works were staged, something different would happen. So I spent quite a lot of time watching those works, participating in those works, and looking at what this meant for theatre as a practice, performance as a practice, once it started becoming so much more dependent, so much more formally dependent on how participants engaged. And like actually James said, it really drew out the collaborative nature of performance practice in a much more kind of concrete way. So that's always been a strong interest of mine. What draws people to the theatre? What do they do in the theatre? Not necessarily just the artists, but audiences. In 2018, I got a job at the University of Tasmania, an island which I had never lived on, a new off and visited, and started working here and experienced essentially a form of culture shock, which was an entirely different culture of theatre making. I'd come from a large major city to a much more regional city and encountered a very, very different set of attachments to theatre making, expectations of theatre, and ways of valuing the work. And since then, this has really kind of like reoriented me to start asking the same kinds of questions about what are you doing at the theatre? Why are you making theatre? What are you doing when you go to the theatre of this set of regional audiences? So this has kind of been my recent turn. And it has been really interesting engaging with this regional theatre culture, because it is remarkably self-sufficient. It's so kind of powerfully self-contained. It doesn't need external validation. But what that has meant for me as a scholar and a critic is that I'm not necessarily always welcome. And it's been very difficult for me to become a part of this community and to engage with the community. I think I'll stop there, because I think you have some questions for us, Amy. Well, yeah, I mean, it's very interesting that you stop there, because I think I have an excessively ambitious list of questions. But when you speak of having difficulty feeling part of a community, that leads me to wonder what theatre is for. And I think that's something that you might have different answers for that question. And then it'll be interesting to find out what the room thinks about it. But when we talked about this before, Ashley, you talked about a kind of cruel optimism. And so I was wondering if you would segue into that reflection on what's, yeah. Certainly. So yes, this is to borrow Lauren Ballant's wonderful, wonderful phrase, cruel optimism. I first started thinking about our attachments to the theatre when I had been ruminating on a series of uncomfortable moments, watching work in Melbourne, actually. Some which were very awkward, one where an elderly audience member got up and walked out of a show during a performance. And the actor on stage turned to her and addressed her and said, thanks for coming. Great to see you. Mind your step on the way out. And I was torn because I felt, yeah, you shouldn't walk out. But, you know, just go on. You've taken us out of the moment of the show for actually like a pretty self-serving go, right? Like you're doing this for you. This is meant to be about us. And so I had this, I've called them in this paper that I wrote about this, I had a sneaky feeling. And it was this feeling that scratched at what was happening on stage and took me out of the suspended disbelief that I had given. And I couldn't stop thinking about it. I was in, but not in that moment. And so all of a sudden, as soon as I started thinking about these sneaky feelings where you're watching a show and all of a sudden you're not there because something has broken the effective machinery of the theatre, I realised it related a lot to the kind of attachment that we have and the willingness that we bring to the theatre to kind of get something. And we have this expectation. And I think the cool optimism sums it up nicely because we have such high hopes for theatre to deliver us moments of beauty, of insights, of pathos, of bathos. And so often, at least in my experience, they don't happen. I sit through a lot of bad theatre and this is perhaps because I sit through a lot of student theatre. But I continually return and sit with this kind of optimism that it will happen. That optimism is really different in Tasmania because it seems much easier to satisfy. And that bothers me. People don't have as higher hopes of the theatre. And so they are kind of, you know, more readily satisfied. Their optimism is direct. Yeah, no, I won't say that. I might give that to James now. I mean, I'll say one thing about that. I mean, I'm fascinated by those moments. And I think that they are compelling theatrically. And I think I probably have obsessed a little bit about capturing them and reworking them for my own theatrical purposes.  Because it is compelling. That moment is absolutely, you know, it's awkward, sure. But, you know, you're paying attention and there's a lot of tension. There's tension. There's uncertainty. There's surprise.  So I think when you described that, I was like, oh, that's interesting. I mean, do something with that, couldn't you? And I think that I, in the theatre I've made in the last years, I've been really playing with the inadequacies or the elephants in the room as content and as form, really. Because I know that they work in this context anyway. You know, I am absolutely obsessed with high art, beautifully performed impeccable theatre. I love it. I want to make it. I want to be in it. I want to, like, live it. But it's not happening in Tasmania right now. I'm just like, forget about it. And that's where I live. Now, what have you got then? Well, you've got that, what you've just described. And I don't think that's the answer to how we make good theatre here. But it's a little window into your question, Amy, of what's art for. I mean, I don't really know what art's for. I don't think I ever know. But I do. But I do. I did become obsessed with what art can do. And at the moment, I'm like, I have sort of social purpose in my work. And I know there's something that can do. And I've learned about it. It can make someone who's marginalised feel part of something. It can make money for someone who doesn't make money. It can, you know, there's all these sort of practical things. And then there's more ambitious things. So I guess when I reframe your question as can do, it really changes things for me. And I think that my ambition, which has changed in the last eight years, has landed on that. Because I never had any interest in working out what art was for, what it was. I was just like, I'm in it. It's cool. That's cool. I like it. But when I found purpose, then I'm like, well, actually, I've got some tasks now. And how can I do them using some of the some of the stuff I got? So I, it's interesting to go. I don't know if I want to go in deeper into Ash's moment or take it away. But it is, to me, fascinating stuff. The awkwardness that Asher was obsessed with, I would say. Is that fair to say? Those moments of awkwardness. Yeah, obsession. Yep. Yeah, positive. Obsessions are a good thing in my mind. I think that, you know, they're the clues to our little tiny, crappy palette, theatrical palette that we have in Australia.  I feel, I feel like there's something else that I want to add to that question that you've raised, James, which is theater is good at creating communities, performance events and the act of making theater is an amazing moment of bringing people together with a shared purpose. Because it takes so much energy. Like, how can you not be invested? But for me, the interesting thing about that is that the cohesiveness of that group that comes together in the groups that I'm seeing around me are exclusive and exclusionary. And they're based around so often a kind of we are separating ourselves in order to define ourselves more clearly as something. And that has been the real kind of trouble because I, you know, I see it when I see the students that I have auditioned for these shows and they're excluded because they're not in with those people. Or they've said something about a show that they didn't like or that there was, you know, they've raised a criticism and they're not allowed to, they're blacklisted. So they're kind of like, you know, the two sides of creating communities around an identity when those identities are, you know, complicated or, you know, clearly defined, they're also methods of exclusion. There's some very interesting questions already in the chat about the question being raised about social engineering in terms of the creating of community around theater. And then also a question about utopia or reflection on utopia and your parmoigna. The room is small enough that I just think it would be really wonderful if people would just unmute themselves and speak out the question. I don't think I'd need to curate from the chat. So I'd appreciate that if people would just sort of, you know, basically unmute to make their reflections. How does the hierarchy work? The most interesting question or the one at the top? I try to go from the top. So Jaehan, I think you were the first. I actually think maybe because, you know, I'll speak at some point, but maybe we can go with Clark because I haven't just opened it up to people non-curatorial. I don't know. Otherwise I can go, but up to you Amy, you decide. Okay. Well, I think then I would be asking Wenya if you wanted to talk a little bit about your question about utopia, whether it is a utopian quality in the projects that are being described. That is, you're pointing to... It's the other side. I'm pointing to Bongani, who is right here, I'm asking. Yeah, hi. Thank you both for those really kind of rich initial kind of opening thoughts. And I guess, Asha, what I was hearing as you're kind of thinking around this question around, I guess, and James picked it up, you know, what work does the theatre do? And perhaps it's connected to a question of ethics, right? Is we can engage in the art for arts sake, but we also seem to be recognizing that perhaps that's an insufficient grounding for an ethical practice of theatre making. It's the question I'm asking, right? But I immediately suddenly thought of Jill Dolan's, and I put the book in the comments, the utopian performance, Founding Hope at the Theatre, where she kind of engages with exactly what it means to approach the theatre with, I guess, you know, to use the termities and cruel optimism. And still somehow, even in the recognition that perhaps the performance event doesn't leave anything that's specifically tangible afterwards, that there is some kind of utopian impulse that allows us to generate something hopeful, something meaningful, just in the act of gathering together, and I think the words she uses are embodied, passionate and live in the same space. There's an interesting tension there, right? This desire for work to be larger than itself, but also recognizing that the fact of showing space in and of itself is perhaps beginning to crack open the efforts and politics of what we're doing when we're sitting in those spaces together, it also connects to, I've lost the train of thought, but yeah, so there's that kind of interesting tension between this kind of cruel optimism and the utopian impulse, nevertheless, that perhaps might emerge in spite of the cruelty of optimism. Yeah, or precisely because of. Is it Helen Evall, or there's a great phrase talking about one-on-one theatre that came out of some research, about the desire to give good audience when you attend the theatre? And I had a lovely conversation with a friend a little while ago who found it, he just couldn't explain why he was so disappointed in the show, and he puzzled and spent the time interrogating himself and interrogating what he saw to process his thinking. And it was like, I was at that show too, and it wasn't underdone work, it wasn't well, he kind of fleshed out and it really needed more time, but he felt bad in that moment to kind of like not have a good response to it. And I was struck by him feeling bad as that utopian impulse, right, like that's the manifestation of the utopian theatrical impulse that you've internalised this desire for it to be good, like so much so that you're kind of pained by it. I think the problem is not enough people, sorry, I feel like there's not enough people that feel bad about bad theatre. Can I add a thought there? I think that when you add social purpose, let's just say social purpose to a theatre work, you're right and almost responsibility to be that sort of crude, real audience who just like in old times, you look away or have a beer when it's boring and you clap when it's good. I think that the contract has changed, that there is a different requirement on audience now when there is social purpose inside the work, and that has to do with the ambitions of the work itself. You have in a way, and you know, and theatre, I look a lot of socially engaged theatre, I'd say including some of what I does, doesn't necessarily always do a good job of conveying every, all of the ambitions and all of the history of the work that would lead you as an audience to be responsible for that. However, it doesn't change the fact that when something is made and it has a purpose which is beyond, way beyond entertainment, then there, this is a question really, then possibly the contract is shifted. You know, what is now, if that's the case, if the work is aiming to create a precedent for reform, for example, and it was an experiment that is to be tested and applied in a, in a real context, a political context or a social context, then surely that would shift that contract in a way.  We, our, our right to entertainment has shifted. We can't, as audience, we can't respond. Surely the audience role has shifted. If we assume the artist role has shifted, and then we can no longer just make art for art's sake, then perhaps, then there's an implication for the audience too. I'm not saying, well, I'm not sure what I'm saying there, but it's really a question. And I, I, I imagine that there's been, there's a bit of mixing up with artists at the moment, and it's socially engaged art generally, about what is trying to be achieved. I've seen a lot of socially engaged art, which is thinking it's going to do something, and I'd say it doesn't do that.  So, sorry. And I think when I talk about you, you know, when I talk about utopia, I'm really talking about the, the attempt to jump past a problem because art can do that. You can launch yourself beyond the usual obstacles to the, to a possible answer. And you don't have to get involved in all of the obstacles. I mean, that's all we do. That's what I've been doing with some of the former prisoners is that we don't have to focus on their offending. We can just leave that all completely out and get them to focus on their positive traits. Now, you can't do that in prison, but that's utopian, right? But it does come up with some solutions. James, I'm going to direct the utopian reference to Clark's question in the chat. I'm having trouble reading the chat. Clark, do you want to unmute yourself? And thank you. Yes. I recall reading in the description for this workshop, something about returning rituals for ex-prisoners. And I think that was in reference to your work, James. Yeah. I was wondering if you could say something about that. I found that very interesting as a notion coming from a theater perspective. I'd be really interested to hear about that work. Well, thanks for the question, Clark. It's research really at the moment. Some of the work I've done to date, I would describe it as reintegration rituals for the people taking part. It wasn't intended to be that, but it sort of turned out that way. And what that really means is that the feedback and the sort of evaluation of the project revealed that the process and the outcomes of the art had the effect of integrating them both internally and externally. And what that means varies greatly, but there's an internal reintegration, I think, for them, which is just them going, sometimes it's just as simple as, I'm not a bad person. I'm not an all-bad person, and they sort of work something out internally. And externally, it can be as simple as working in a group. And what that does for a person who's not used to having a cohesive social experience. The research at the moment, which Asher is well aware of because he's involved, is seeing if I can sort of answer the question about whether or not performance and experimental performance in particular can serve as a reintegration ritual for former prisoners. And the idea there is that to build a ritual with a prisoner and work with them to develop and deliver it on release from prison. And what is a ritual? I don't quite know yet. I mean, I'm studying it, but I can't tell you. And I think it can be something as small as a handshake and something as big as the biggest parade you've seen in your life. I hope to try and make something that is really... At the end of the research, there's going to be an example that sort of tests out the findings, I guess. So I think that the research is just applying pressure to the concept. The reality is that I think that my work in some ways is doing it each time I'm doing it. And I need to learn more about what ritual can do and what it is in order to be more confident about speaking about this stuff. But that's sort of really here, I guess. Does that make any sense? Well, it certainly did make sense to me, James. And I'm really glad you're doing that work. And I'll be fascinated to read about your discoveries and to hear about them. Thank you for doing that work. I appreciate you saying that. Clark, someone who knows quite a bit about ritual and theater. That's basically specialty, isn't it, Clark? Well, I sort of cross applied theater and psychodrama. And so a lot of the heightened aspects of communal experience that are captured in that mode of working. Yeah, so that really intrigued me. But I think I'll leave it there just to say I'm really excited about hearing about your work there, James. Thank you. I think it's very interesting that we've gone from a discussion of utopia to hope to healing. There's a kind of, there we seem to be in that terrain. There's the idea that there is something called bad theater has sparked some thoughts here. Veronica, can you unmute yourself to talk about your problem with the notion of bad theater? Or do you want me to read out the channel? Sure. I think it's pretty much encapsulated in what I've written there. But it also strikes me that it is to do with the tension between process and product. And so the idea of creating rituals for re-entering society or creating rituals that have to do with perhaps psychodrama, or to be in a process where people are asked to be socially reintegrating or kind of learning about themselves, which is very much process driven, sometimes needs a product to fulfill a contract to themselves in the process. And that may be bad theater, but it's it's in the eye of the beholder. And so I really have a problem with the idea of bad. Sorry, Veronica, you've gone mute. Oh, sorry about that. And so I have a problem with this idea of bad or good theater because in a multicultural, multi-lingual, multi-everything society and across the world with the enormous numbers of aesthetic choices, the range of cultural forms of expression. When I hear bad theater as a term, and sorry, Asha, I'm not getting on your case. Or maybe I am, I don't know. But I start to think, okay, it bugs me because I always think it's to do with a Western benchmark with the Northern Hemisphere, Western dominance of aesthetic criteria. And it really annoys me because the global South or whoever are often judged and applied theater is often judged. And I use unapologetically use the word applied theater because you know, really life is complicated. Let's just accept that there's problems with the term. But when it's, you know, that it's bad theater, why is applied theater bad theater so often? Well, to whom is it bad? And how do we consider the context of what what process has been followed in order to make that piece of work? For whom is it most important? Is it for a fee paying audience, a ticket buying audience? And then why have they come to that? You know, if they've come as an act of solidarity, well, then who cares if it's bad? If they've come to be entertained, well, they shouldn't have come if they wanted mindless or aesthetic high art, all these terms really begin to frustrate me as a practitioner also with ex-prisoners here in Cape Tom. So that's my 10 cents worth. Thank you, Veronica. Do James, do you want to answer that? I mean, I just have one, I just have one thing to say about that really is that it reminds me when you go and see a show made by kids. No one hates it. I think just because they understand it. They understand it fully. They don't know what's going on. So I use that sometimes because when you go and see your nephew or just anyone's nephew or kids theater, your enthusiasm is flowing from goodwill and adoration and also an understanding of the context. I think you fully understand the context and the process. And so I think I only say that, Veronica, as an example of when there is full understanding, then sometimes there can be really high enthusiasm and goodwill from an audience. It doesn't have to always be goodwill. It can be an alternative. When you're not, when they're grown up, those same kids grown up, I think that the goodwill can be replaced with other things. But it can be, it can come, I think, yeah, going back to that other point, I think coming from understanding and maybe that's a, that's a role of the artist to spend more time working out how they can convey what they think needs to be known about that artwork, not just the artistic outcomes, for example, and finding interesting ways to enter into a dialogue with the audience, maybe beforehand, maybe as a, as a ramping into the work, maybe as a conversation after or whatever. I think just judging it on the work itself is always going to be troubling for someone. Jenny, I'd like to move on to your comment, but I just want to first ask Asher if you'd like to reply. Yeah, I think so. I think it's probably like, I really appreciate the distinction and I think it's great to call that out because I don't think I mean bad theater in a vague term. I think theater that bothers me the most is unthinking theater and theater that does not engage with its purpose. And so last week was the 25th anniversary of a pretty horrific event in Tasmanian history, which all of Australia saw, which was the Port Arthur massacre where 35 people were killed by a gunman. It led to the gun laws which Australia has now, which is something good that is an outcome, but a horrific event and a kind of, Australia's kind of most violent historical gun crime. And last night I went to the theater and I saw a local company stage the play Gloria and I'm not sure if anybody's familiar with Gloria at once awards in the States, but it is centered around a massacre in an office in a New York publishing house. And that show that show last night told the story of the play but did not acknowledge its context in Tasmanian. It made no reference in the program. It made no attempt to kind of bridge the gap to what relevance that has to us here, what it means to tell that story here and now, the week after we're commemorating this, you know, active violence. And for me that was unthinking. That was a chance to make a show that connected to a community and people here. And it didn't need like they didn't need to do good accents. They didn't need to stage it well. They just needed to think about who they're telling that story for and why that story should be told. And so, yeah, I agree there's like lots and lots of criteria we can measure from, but so to step back like that's what I, that's the shorthand that I am trying to sum up when I say bad theater there that doesn't think about what it's, what it's doing and where it's doing it. And this is, you know, I think that this is what applied to it. It doesn't very, very well. It's very clear about what it's doing and where it's doing it. That seems to segue really perfectly into what your comment is Jenny. Do you want to unmute yourself? Yeah, I think Asha came to me then that rather than bad theater we should think about lazy theater that it's lazy and that it's not making those connections. I just made a comment about the fact of we training a lot of us as educators in this space. We're training new young performers. We're training them in skills as actors or in theater makers and theater creators. But perhaps we also need to maybe be spending more time than we do at the moment in getting them to think critically about what they're seeing and to be demanding more of that as an audience. I'm certainly a little like what you said James about theater in Melbourne, which is where I am. I don't go to see the major theater companies because I don't want to spend a lot of money going to a play which has not been thought through properly as you just said Asha about that or directors got I've got a great idea let's set you know Shakespeare's play in this particular context but actually haven't thought about it at all and you've got lots of money in the person right next to you who's in a wonderful big job with lots of money sits down and goes to sleep and they've paid $90 for the ticket that's not what theater is about but I think audiences aren't critical enough in this country or pushing us enough to demand something that has a resonance from the work and I guess that's just me thinking through what's my job as an educator with young people that may not have seen a lot of theater don't go and go oh yeah that's great just because it cost me $150 and had lots of moving parts it's great theater not necessarily so just trying to get those cogs kind of working which is you know for me as well thanks for that yeah again do you want to oh so Frank mentioned that perhaps we should be using the terms uh unthinking or thoughtless uh theater instead of uh instead of bad that seems I think it was Asha's point I was agreeing with Asha oh yeah I had it thoughtless which is just a synonym yes yes indeed um um genny uh I like I like lazy as well I think that's that's good yeah I guess I was agreeing and I'm the same lad and trying to find that I was also kind of um riffing on and according back to I think a point that James made um about the frustration of not feeling like you're a part of that community um or not finding the points of access and I'm now sitting here wondering whether that maybe isn't the exact political function that this work could potentially serve is that I think our expectation of the contract between performing audiences usually founded in some kind of process of identifying with its proximity it's all these things and I wonder whether that that breaking of the aesthetic frame of this kind of theater whether we read that as um you know the implication of bad theater tactics or whatever it might be is to position us exactly in that place where we recognize that we are in a context we're engaged with people who ultimately um for various reasons of statehood and you know we can discuss those ad nauseam are actually within a classroom economy um that positions them radically differently to where we ourselves are sitting so I wonder if that constant breaking of the frame is because the work doesn't meet our tastes or it doesn't need you know the aesthetic markers of good theater of of I like this lazy theater term as well I think it's it's it's more precise analytically um is about that being the utopian gesture of this this theater that fakes right is that the failure is the work um it's that that refusal to allow us to slip into the fantasy that we might occupy the same subject positions of people and perhaps as a function of that begin ignoring the very real kind of national global economies of causality right that have produced this this this scenario in the very first place I mean no good someone's saying something James uh no I'm just I just uh no stay with it because I want to take it somewhere else I think but I mean I just feel like provoking myself and and you now in response to that I mean I think to what end oh everyone's gone can you see me still yeah yes to what end you know those those exercises of the imagination um in terms of utopia and theater making are you know the stuff that we're all I think familiar with as starting points and sometimes as endpoints of our work um and if you apply that I mean we're getting in these terms about bad theater and lazy lazy theater or um thought thoughtless theater you know maybe brave theater or whatever they're they are intentions right you know they they don't necessarily have embedded modes of of of gauging outcomes or um successes necessarily and um they they're aspirational and I think we don't necessarily all want aspirational theater in my case I you know I I accidentally in the last work I made which was very problematic I think but I I decided that we accidentally landed on a potentially a strategy that could be applied to parole in it definitely not in this current climate but we landed on this thing basically which was an interview technique which I decided I'm going to pursue that and see if I can put some structure and formality around it and write it down and get some academics on board and put it down for posterity and try and plug it that you know one day maybe this this is not applied but you know if you want to buy the book you can um maybe one day someone will go you know what we should try that weird theater thing out because our parole office is not working that well why don't we try that interview technique that those theater guys made up yeah now that sounds far-fetched I don't think it is I really don't think it is I've worked in a parole office and I know there are imaginative people in there I guess my point is when you have aspirations inside an artistic context I think it's it's um it's a fun idea and an important idea to see how you can peg that to the wall somehow and see where it sticks because the life of an artistic work we all know has limits um it's just comes and goes and it doesn't really necessarily mean that much socially in some ways but if you can crystallize something into something that's applicable then you can you can gauge what you're not able to gauge inside the art making process I've just never been it's impossible to know whether you've made anything that's worth anything when you're making art but if you if you sort of join a line from something you're making out into a measurable something that you care about in my case criminal justice then you've got this sort of parallel universe that you can um crystallize these this work this good work that you're making in the real world I mean I say the real world that can be the stage too but um I think that that's one of my ambitions anyway I'm trying to work out ways of doing that um and of course I'm not the first um Nikita sorry has had her hand up for a long time and I'm sorry did she just disappear Nikita did you want to unmute yourself right here yes yes I'm here um I actually wanted to speak right after Jenny because she brought up a really good point so I practice in India and um I've I've I have had conducted workshops in correction homes and specially worked with women um in correction centers and I think what I struggled with is that it is intentional theater I understand that in India I think it's different because the authorities themselves don't understand it so a lot of time there's a lot of um backlash from the authority saying why do you want to do this what's the point of corrective justice and um to actually add to that another point is that there aren't spaces that also train you for it so when I began I think seven years back the biggest problems I've faced was I did not also know how to I was facilitating but I also knew that I was filling myself with a lot of stories and there weren't avenues to go and take care of myself at times um also something I constantly worried about was what if I opened a can of worms that I wasn't even prepared to handle um I figured ways out in India there aren't many places that you can actually get trained for applied arts um so now whenever I work I make sure that I work with a psychologist or a counselor in the room so that if a can of worms is open there is someone to handle that but something I still do struggle with is when I'm filled up to the brim I really don't know where to take that and I worry that it might affect the work um and so I was just wondering if if there are any thoughts on that Nikita thank you so much that's such an interesting experience James you mentioned how messy it is when you get involved in these projects yeah um yeah hi Nikita I I'd say that I mean we've probably been doing it for the similar amount of time Nikita seven years is about this amount of time I've been making theater in prison I think I guess I came to it with some um having encountered a bunch of these stories before I did it so I was I wasn't desensitized but I I saw a lot and heard a lot working in prison that prepared me I guess but I think it's hard to you know in in parole there was the system for decompressing was to talk to colleagues because they know the territory and so you just find yourself recounting these horrific stories and that was part of the culture and that helped somehow so I would say that talking to someone about them who you trust is is a good start um and there's obviously you know you have to think about your own ethics about about that and what you can say and can't say and um but I think it's important for you if you want to keep doing the work that you have some way of um sharing it because it can be really hard can it yeah yeah that does that James thank you I think that's also what I'm just by instinct do that I talk to I make sure that I have a therapist who can take care of me so that I am also ready to then take care of the work that I'm doing I can share I can share a couple little tricks of mine which I'm happy to tell you which are just part of my practice and when I'm working with prison I'm going to work with prisoners I am I have a couple of rules and one is that they can tell the truth or lie at any time and that way I don't know if this horrific story is theirs or if it's really happened or it's just something they want to express so that gives also I mean also you've got to think about them gives them space to tell or not tell or tell in a particular way because I think when we go in as theatre makers they think that we want everything we want to know all the gory details and so I think you I've tried to make boundaries myself and tell them upfront you don't have to tell me a story you um you're working with me as an artist and we're going to work on making art together so sometimes that's helped that's a wonderful thank you so much for sharing that yeah that's great and Nikita you've seen um uh Veronica's uh reference to Sheila Preston yes I'm just looking okay so I think uh I think we are at our limit in terms of our time we don't have a hard stop in this um discussion we can have a a post post show discussion so no one no one needs to leave but I think it's a great for me too at this point thank very much my two guests uh James uh Brennan and Asher Warren thank you so much for joining so much so much for having us both I felt the real great pleasure to be in this room with all of you so everywhere thank you to the room for all of the wonderful remarks and participation it's just been a really nourishing evening and I wanted to mention that uh we have decided to make a bit of a shift at unrehearsed teachers and put a call out um to people in the room if they would like to co-facilitate with us especially if they have people in mind that they would like to invite onto the discussion um that we can actually start collaborating with you because it is not our intention to create a weekly webinar but rather to create an ongoing discussion um with people becoming more and more um having more and more echo you sort of echo effect of previous discussions and of deeper and deeper enriched field of conversation so I'm going to put um the email address of my organization info at embodypoetics.org into the chat um please if you have any ideas if you'd like to um co-facilitate with me or or one of my wonderful co-curators at any point we do get in touch and suggest yourself that would be a great pleasure to us to hear from you so um thank you so much to DSM and to Falguni for um the continuing support of this project and to my fellow curators Jehan and Gany and Wenya thank you for being here tonight there there's um Gany's email as well and um I think we will close with that and as I said uh I'm just going to stick around so if you'd like to you can too


So, let's start. First of all, who am I? I'm Alexander Kanyavsky. I'm working in Intel as a software architect. I was doing the Linux distributions for quite many years. It's practically, it will be 20 years in a few months. I did the Linux distributions for local markets, like with localization for desktop, for servers, when later on for Nokia, for mobile devices, tablets and phones, when lately in Intel for Tizen, and for a few more years with Yocto. So, I wanted to share some of experience how inside Intel we are using Yocto tools to build distributions for our internal products. The things what we're going to talk today is actually, what it actually means, the platforms, products, what is continuous integration, how to establish continuous delivery for your products, what tools and how to organize with source code. Many people are talking about the content, like what you are putting inside your distro, but few people are talking about actually how you do it. And I want to share that. So, the first thing, platforms and products. Just a quick quiz. So, how many of you are using Yocto and Pocky? Pretty much everyone. Great. So, platform for you it will be easy to understand. It's like Pocky.  Practically, it's a distribution what you are targeting for multiple devices with multiple functionality, so you develop features over here. In my example, I will be using our reference IoT distribution, which is public, you can look how it's implemented, the CI part of it is also public.  The product. This is something what you usually...  You have like one or two which you are targeting to. And in my example, again, it's our Intel reference IoT kit for Intel Jewel product. Again, have a look, see how it's implemented. Practices. Continuous integration, continuous delivery. Buzzwords, right? So, many people know those, think what they know about it. What it means in reality, like in plain words. Continuous integration. Old practice. You need to build everything, you need to test everything, you need to visualize status. You define what is broken state and here's the important thing. You define what is a broken state. And in case if you notice the broken state, it's your highest priority to actually go and fix it. And this is not something what people are actually doing. Obviously, these practices are evolved over the years. So, there is a new thing. It's called to stage continuous integration. Many people are practicing it, but again, without really realizing what it is. The thing is, it's a method or practices to prevent you to get into broken state. So, prevent you from making your code line in the state where development cannot happen. It's like, get your changes in your sandboxes. It can be called differently. Like patch sets or master next or pull request and GitHub doesn't really matter how you call it, but it's a sandbox where you test it and when you're satisfied, you merge it. Next thing, continuous delivery. So, in plain words, it's your process of what happens with your software between the time when developer changes it until you assume the time when you ship the product to the end customers. So, the world is changing nowadays. Our users are expecting what software is updated regularly on your devices. With small iterations, with new features, with small bug fixes, but often. You need to make sure what your releases are rolling. And all of those practices, everything, it all targeted one single motor. So, you need to maximize throughput of your good changes and minimize the breakages. Sorry. So, let's see how to do it. Let's start with source code management. You need to have a system where you actually allow your developers to collaborate. And by collaborate, I mean, like, you need to have sandboxes, you need to have reviews. And for that, you have nowadays a lot of choices. You can have GitHub, you can have Bitbucket, you can have something hosted by your own, like GitLab, Garrett. And to just predict the question, Gitalite patch works probably not the best tools for you at the moment. Why? Because the tools for what you're using for source code management, you need to have a few key features. People need to have easily to create sandboxes. You need to have a good integration with CI systems. So, it means like APIs. You need to have a good status tracking. So, you shouldn't get to the situation when a person sends a patch to a mailing list and waits for months trying to figure out what is the state of his patch. And then suddenly realize what, yeah, it was merged. For us, the choice was obvious. We used GitHub. It gives us whatever we need. It actually gave us a bit more things, like access controls and groups for our developers. So, let's see how it's implemented. Well, we have organized the source code for our platforms. You need to understand. Viopta is about integration. You have two activities, development and integration. Development is happening in layers. Layers, it's a set of reusable components. It's your recipes, it's your features. You might use it in more than one distribution. And you need to have a release repository. A release repository is actually something that you ship. It's one single thing what users should take, download, build, and this is what your release consists of. So, how you do it? A release repository is done by Combo Layer Tool. It's one of the oldest tool in the Yocto project and probably one of the least known tool in the Yocto project. What it is about. It knows about set of repositories, it takes comment out of it and push it to this release repository. You have a configuration file. And this configuration file describes what is inside of it. Like location files, where to put the files and the last track revision of it. How to update with file? Regularly in Pocky it's done by Richard or some other maintainers. We run it manually. In our case, we run it in CI system. So CI is actually controlling what and when we are moving the things between layers into our release repository. That allows us actually to do quality and schedule gate. So for example, you might want to have... Well, the quality gate is obvious. You merge only for things what works. So if BitBake introduces a change which breaks your build, you probably don't want to take it. The same thing. Like if you are trying to ship a product very soon, you probably don't want to accept the changes from OECore. You want to delay it for a while. So for layers, the service is what we want to implement. You have layer repository. You have developers who want to contribute. And the natural way of contributing is obviously it's pull request. So pull request, it's a sandbox of changes. It's built on the latest state of release repository. It tested on the real hardware. And when you provide feedback to the developers. So for example, if your branches changes, if maintainers merge with another change, and GitHub notifies what had changed, you do rebuilds and again, you provide the status to the developer what is going on. With the help of GitHub integration, the maintainers have the ability to use the magic comments and the pull requests which says, please retest that thing or not. This magic things, it actually helps with a few other things. Like if you operate in public, obviously not all the code what comes from unknown developers, you want to take... Oh, you want to build immediately. Because we all know, Yocto is not fully isolated from the host. So we provide also some security measures what maintainers can have a look at code which comes from a person who we don't know and then say like, yes, it's okay to test that thing. So the service for release repository. Again, obviously.  Here is one under water stone. So if your platform release actually produce package feeds, you need to have a version going forward for packages what you produce. So for release repository, you might want to limit what you have only one concurrent build for a branch. And another thing what again people not often realize is what you need to promote with builds. You build it once, you test it, you perform with slow test and again, exactly the same set of binary artifacts it's something what you need to publish to your customers. You don't need to rebuild it anymore. Like one single build idea, one set of binary artifacts. What happens with pull request to that repository? We created a thing which is called upstream monitor. What is upstream monitor is about? It monitors everything what is written on combo layer like every single repository. And once it detects the change in one of those repositories, it creates a pull request to update the existing one with new set of changes. So pretty much the maintainer of release repository he always have ability to see okay, what is the pending set of changes what we are coming from all the layers from which we are constructing our repository. This is an automatic part but maintainers have ability to do the things manually. So for example, maintainer can say I want to take this important bit bake fix or I want to take this BSP fix but I want to postpone the rest of the things. Usually we don't accept any pull request from other people. However, there are certain scenarios where those pull requests here might be considered as legitimate. What are those? One and the most important one is when people want to introduce a new layer. So developer just need to update the combo layer configuration file saying this is a new repository I want to include. For rest will be triggered by upstream monitor. So it will pull in the repository you will see how it builds. Another legitimate case is when you need to test big changes. Big changes means what you need to... You have scenarios when you need to synchronize like you need to change something in your BSP you need to change something in your configuration files like image files or in worst case scenario you need to try fix for upstream tools like BitBake or some of OECore classes.  Quite complex, right? So we need to have a good engine for it. And for engine we use Jenkins. Why? Few things. Obviously it's newcomer friendly so you have a web UI you can configure it there are tons of plugins for it but the most important thing it's scriptable and it develops friendly. It means what you can automate whatever you do there. Implementation of it. So classical set of jobs. You have orchestrator jobs so for every layer you have job which performs for build for a branch or pull request. So you can have unlimited amount of branches but for pull request it's usually one job which handles all of the jobs. So it figures out what is the destination branch and when users will correspond in release repository for it. So if you have like dozens of layers you have dozens of job or two dozens of job but the actual build is pretty much the same all the time. So you have, or at least we have we have a two set of targets which is used for all the layers and all the release repositories. So we have build job which is dependent on each machine so each machine is built on separate server and we have a test hardware. So test hardware it's interesting thing because you might have in your terms you have like three machines but some of the build for particular machine in your term can be tested on multiple different hardware so that's where it is distinguishing between machine and test hardware.  Big, complex, sometimes hard to replicate but it gives ability to produce a platform easily. What happens with products? We try to simplify things and we wanted to use sometimes new technologies sometimes a bit different technologies or different ways. So one of new technology what we wanted to use is Jenkins 2.0 feature, the pipeline and with pipeline it allows you to do one thing. Practically you have a GitHub repository but you can have a multi-branch and inside of this Git repository you have file which describes actually how to build that thing. It's like, you know, like the ground file, docker file, make file, the same thing here you have a Jenkins file and it describes what to do. It's easy scripting, it's easy to do a parallel execution it's easy to like to do a persistent tasks which is in classical Jenkins is not really possible. And how it looks, something like that. You define where the source code like checkout run the shell scripts. Your shell scripts is actually part of your repository so you don't need to maintain it in a separate place. The pipeline, the whole product is one single repository for you and the same thing with build targets. It's a game, it's part of your source code so developers can easily adjust what we built. So, few of our different technologies what we are using. One thing is reproducible environment. Again, Yocto is not fully isolated from the host and we've seen a lot of situations when result on one distribution is not the same result with different compiler on our distribution. We try to isolate that. We provide a docker container. So, user can easily download our product repository he needs to have a docker installed but afterwards he runs one script like local build and the scripts will handle creation of isolated clean environment specifically for the build with nothing more and nothing less what it's needed and perform a build. So, in reality, this actually allows us to do even the Yocto builds on the mark like with docker for mark integration. It's the same set of scripts, it's done transparently. Another thing which we also try to use is Gitsub models instead of combo layer. Again, for product you need to have a very simple thing. You want to take specific release of your platform. You want to override couple of configuration parameters. You might have a bit different set of images what you're trying to build. You might have couple of more additional layers but that's it, your product is often not very different from your platform. And submodels, to that extent, it's a bit easy to introduce. So, we're big difference to approaches. So, this combo layer is obvious. You have a self-hosted repository, all good, you control you see all the changes you can track where it comes from and so on. The bad thing, it clatters your Git history. You see, like, if an open MB that you have 200 commits you will see 200 commits in your Git log. It might be hard to review, but it depends on your people. With Gitsub models it's a bit easier. So, the combo layer approach doesn't prevent you to change some files in some subdirector. With submodels it's a bit more tricky because you are referring to some third-party repository. And this third-party repository unless you have commit rights where you cannot change your file. And this actually goes to Conspart. So, when you are using submodels you are dependent on some other hosting.  Second thing is actually also it's a bit harder to review the changes because when you do a pull request for submodel it's actually you see you are moving between one commit state to another commit state. You need to go to that repository and do a div between those if you want to see what is actually changing. Infrastructure. How it's done in the backend. We have two parts. One part is publicly-facing like it's obvious like website download site and when we have Jenkins in outside. Practically Jenkins master to outside is for two things. One is to provide UI for developers where we can look for the logs and second to have GitHub integration where you use the hooks for it. But then what is backend? Backend we have obviously set of builders. We have testing harness with a bunch of test of devices and by the way those two clusters can be in different places. In our setup it's funny. Builders are in United States, test devices are in Finland. Few things for builder clusters. You want to have a NAS. You need to have a local storage. Yocto produces a normal amount of data. And that's actually where few of underwater stones are happening. As state. You need to have a few maintenance jobs which taking care of that as state. You have something what is available for the builders but you also have something what you need to upload afterwards to the public site what our developers will be able to benefit. Another thing is coordination of few things. As I mentioned if you have a... If you have a package fit you need to use the service which is called PR server. And if you try to do the distributed builds between like multiple hosts you need to have a single place where you say PR server is over here go and fetch for revision what I need to use for that package. And if you do the same thing for multiple branches for multiple architectures or for pull requests you need to have multiple instances of that PR server. So we are using the host called coordinator for doing that. There are a couple of other maintenance jobs arriving on this coordinator host. Obviously it's hard to maintain all of those things.  So the initial provisioning. We are using uncivil. We'll define it with DevOps tool. And our set of playbooks how we provision Jenkins workers and all other hosts we are open, have a look and feel free to reuse, feel free to comment and provide suggestions to improve all of those. What happens with the jobs? We are using the thing which is called Jenkins job DSL. It's again, it's scriptable part which allows us to easily maintain those hundreds of jobs what we have for every branch, for every layer repository for every pull request and so on. And we have in this repository where we maintain the Jenkins configurations like two branches like one is production, one is staging. Obviously like we have two setups. We have public and we have staging in private so we can try a few of the changes before actually we go to a production level. In reality, the whole deployment of your scripts of your configuration has become just a git push. We did a couple of interesting tricks here. So one trick is actually the initial, Jenkins initial seed. You configure one thing, one single job which says here's the repository where we have all configurations and this is where script which says how to set up the rest of the things. In our case with initial setup it does few magic. This magic is actually it verifies what all the needed plugin sign installed in all the shape and afterwards it starts to create the jobs like all the maintenance jobs, all the seed jobs. And by seed jobs it's actually it's actually something what helps you to dynamically manage your configuration. So imagine like you have a combo layer configuration file and it describes this is the layers what I want to use. You know exactly which branch, which git repository what you are interested in. So your DSL script can read that configuration file and one create as many jobs as you need. So for us the maintenance become really, really easy. We're just saying here's where our repository the rest is where. We don't create jobs anymore by hand and you are not limited to one branch. You might have like we are mostly using the rolling release model. So for us the master is important. But if you have a maintenance branches you do the same thing for maintenance that it will create few dozens of our jobs for you automatically. So here are the tools. The automatic testing part. You've seen probably today or yesterday or maybe tomorrow it will be few hour presentation. A lot of about automatic testing. People are trying to use linear allow it's good system, big one, it's good community but we want something smaller. We want something what people can easily reproduce. So it's basic set of tools which provides automatic flashing. It provides networking to the test device. It controls power. In some cases it also controls keyboard emulation to select which reboot devices are. In our testing setup we can handle majority of PC like devices with UFI boot, big old bones and bunch of Intel devices to do. The project itself is done out of off-shelf components like normal hubs, normal power cutters what you can buy. You can use Arduino, fast keyboard emulator and pretty much that's it. All ownership or cost ownership is minimal. And we have actually prototype which uses big old bones as keyboard emulator and mass storage device. We even simplified the setup for that. But if you're interested how it is done this project is done by my colleague, Igor Stopor and he did a presentation last year in ELC in the United States for that. Few other things. Build history. When you're producing the distributions you want to understand what is actually in your build. Basic October or open embedded tools we are providing build history but the reason or the initial idea of build history it was primarily to support the package feeds. So you know how your package feeds are rolling. We need something in addition to that. We wanted to know exactly in each build what is part of it. So what files which revisions were used for every single recipe in the build. And we created a class which is called build history extra. Unfortunately it's not yet in OECore but I hope it will be merged anytime soon into it. And we have a set of scripts in our CI system which actually helps to track what is part of your build. So if you look at the OSTRO project build history you will see what every single build produced by our system we have a tag and inside tag if you start the kit you can compare the tags and you see what is actually changing between those builds. As state, for people who are using Yocto you know all the problems with it, right? We tried, we have massive set of jobs. We have massive set of builds what is happening all the time. So we end up in a scenario what each builder actually have its own local as state. And when after the builds is happening the builders are synchronizing as state to the central place to the coordinator to our NAS and when we are publishing that state. The reason for that is just purely performance or sometimes we are bugs and NFS servers. Another thing which again not always obvious is when you do the builds in sandboxes like for the pull requests you don't want to pollute your normal as state what you are using for release builds. So we are creating temporary as states for pull requests and that actually helped us to catch several bugs. So PR server I already mentioned you need to be careful when you are using it for multiple branches and parallel builds. Other thing like performance and disk operations. Here I wanted to say one thing Yocto is trying to help with local development so it tries to see what you have enough disk space you have download directory in a proper place but if you have scenarios when you download the source directories over NFS these nice features for developers actually killing your performance so your bit bake will be constantly trying to check if there is enough disk space and if you look at the NAS monitoring you will see like constant flow of requests from the NFS server it's probably not something what you want to use. So verify your settings what you are actually using and monitor your hardware like how it's happening. Last but not least we integrated to Yocto Core well to open and be that core with tool called BIMAP tools so if you are constantly making device images and you know the scenario it's raw image 4GB you flash it with DD not really efficient especially like if you have a real data on what image is about like 500 megabytes or like 20% of it so which one should we BIMAP tool? BIMAP tool is something what understand what how much of real information is present in the image and when you are flashing to the device you flash only those amount of valuable information have a look maybe it will simplify your life so I think that's it I'm open for questions links to all of the things what I showed it will be in my presentation like the next slide so when you download it have a look Questions? Yes, yes of course and one thing which I wanted also to say is if you have any questions after this feel free to send me mail I will try to answer it so question is we are testing on real hardware using EFT and is it possible to virtualize? let me answer it that way I'm working for hardware company so for us yes in early stages of development virtualization is usable but in the end of the day we want to ship a product which will be working on the real hardware so for us it's most important what it works like obviously you can have a built target switch which runs in QMO if you are just interested in some software features which is not related to hardware for us it's less important but if you look at what happened in public majority of we test what we run it's done in QMO you can use whatever we have yes, rsync, yeah it's more about how we organize it by the directories so like local builders we have local state between the builders it's shared in the builder cluster on the network storage so the builders can fetch the object if it's not present locally and when for the pull request we just put it into separate directories so it doesn't pollute so like different rsync target so how we validate a state what it's still valid because everything what we do is through pull request so practically for pull request you have a cleaner state of a state so you have built inside pull request which is taking the state of official build plus what changes what is part of a pull request when the change is merged it's done against the official state so we can verify what actually the result what we've seen in the pull request build it's not different from what after the merge, that's one thing second thing it's an overall even the official state might be broken we had some time ago so called like nightly build jobs which pretty much done one single thing it took the latest states of a branch wipe out the whole state disabled state mirrors and when do we clean build it's slow but at least once a day it shows us how we were performing luckily in like over one and a half year we've seen just few scenarios where it actually helped it to catch a couple of bucks another thing what we actually are actually using is OE self test for recipes so when the when the orchestration of a build is triggered for platform repository so we start to build for real targets but we have one more additional job which called self test with self test it goes through all the recipes and actually tries to verify what did I lost my mic it tries to verify what recipes or some environment parameters of a host system is not affecting the checksums of a state so if something will try to invalidate a state we will see it self test will be failing we are not trying to prevent it I'm serious it's let's say our image consumes a lot more space than our state so we can afford a few hundred gigabytes of data when probably you need to see what actually changes your checksums that often because what is in state means in reality like it checks what still it sounds a bit suspicious for that I would suggest try to grab with your developers and above I think Richard will be the best person to help with that so first question combo layer sub models and why not to use repo you can use it if it's good for your workflow you are free to use it in our case in our team with developers we are simply not happy about repo so I try to utilize what our teams are doing like combo layer what the other guys are doing second question is about how we maintain jobs there are two sides of that question so platform it's done and separate repository and yes we perform the same thing like it's pull requests we review what is happening where sometimes we try to do the same changes in the staging environment to see if it properly works and only afterwards merge to production system the CI system for product when Jenkins pipeline it's part of the repository and the scripts so it's again all the changes are done through pull requests and we have the same safety measures so if a pull request comes from one of our developers it builds automatically we are not trying to harm us but if it's coming from any random user on github it will not build unless the maintainer says try it, yes only for unknown people courtesy of plug-in what we are using to trigger our builds it's github pull request builder so we handle it in two ways one way is we perform a test request to release the repository where all the changes are combined because it's self-hosted repository regardless from which layer it comes and when we are ready this set of changes are working fine we actually split them by pieces and when they integrate to the layer at that point the maintainer can temporarily ignore the situation like the layer branch building has actually become broken but we know as soon as we merge it into the layers the upstream monitor will kick in combine all changes together and then produce it as a proper pull request again and then again it will bring it to a proper buildable state we ignore the broken state of the layer branch for a very short period of time to synchronize the changes again I mean like we split the test request to each layer and when it temporarily ignore the broken state yes it's manual, it's manual override historical, no it's just a historical reason so this project what I'm talking about with reference IOT Linux distro it happens for a while and pipeline is recent stuff so like six months or something I will probably use for a pipeline it's just a classical thing some people prefer one way some people already moved to another way and I wanted to show and demonstrate what even if you do it in a classical way means how to automate the thing so you don't need to manually maintain it, good question so again one of the reasons why I told promoting all of these things like continuous delivery is when you have ability to easily look like easily monitor the quality of changes what is coming on from upstream you can have in parallel like you can follow master, you can follow stable branches and you can always have multiple branches in your project to see how your stuff works on top of the upstreams so for you the upgrades between major versions it becomes predictable in our case with reference Linux for IOT we don't even bother with following the stable branches we are always on master we know what if something broken in master it will be code by our testing we simply will not merge well stuff until it get to a point or into a shape but it's usable for us and it allows us to actually to work very close to the upstream so if we introduce something which breaks us we immediately like in few hours we can say like guys you are doing something wrong here fix it gentlemen I think we are running out of time I will be happy to answer our questions in the corridor or just grab me and we will