Good morning class. Welcome to Game Dev Academy. I'm Professor Whittington and in this class we will be creating a low-poly treasure chest in Maya as well as doing a bit of UV mapping and some simple texturing. Make sure you sign the register by leaving a comment below the video and if you'd all like to take your seats we will begin. Dave. Dave that means you. Dave sit down. Yes Dave sit down we want to start. Okay now that Dave's ready off we go. Okay so let's make a start and I want to start with the treasure chest. I don't want to keep the polygon count for that. Round about 250 triangles in total so we'll see how we get on with that. So here we go. I'm going to start with a cube. Okay we'll just give that a name. Let's go to the channel box and we'll call it chest. Good thinking. Okay and then we will just kind of freestyle this a little bit so let's sort of get the general chest shape that we want. Yeah that's pretty nice and then we want to get kind of a boxy style curved top to this so I'm going to get the top face. I'll hit ctrl and e to extrude and I'm just going to pull that up not too high to about there I think so that gives us a good start and then into edge mode I'm going to select these two edges and to get a bit of a curve to the top I'm going to bevel them so let's click on this little chap up here. He's bevel. Oh very nice and let's have a look so I'm just going to mess with the fraction to see where I like it not there. Yeah that's pretty nice so I've gone for a fraction of about 0.7 that I'll do but this gives us a problem that needs to be solved so this face here now has more than four sides which 3D applications hate it's what's called an end-gone so we've got one two three four five six sides so we need to split this in some way to make sure it's only got four sided shapes and we'll do that with our multicut tool this little chap up here and I'll do that by just connecting this point here to this point there and when I'm done I'll press enter and that just fills it and you can see I've got an edge flow going around I'll just do the same on the other side pop and pop here we go beautiful so now you can see we've got a four sided here so that's a quad and we've got a quad underneath happy day so that's that bit done next up we need to get these like bands that come off the metal looking bands so in order to do that I'm going to use my mesh tools and I'm going to do the insert edge loop tool but I'm going to go to the tool settings to make sure that I'm on multiple edge loops and that I have it set to two and I'm doing that to make sure that I get the same distance on the edges you'll see what I mean so I'll put two edges in and you can see that they are an equal distance and whilst I've still got them selected I'm going to switch to my move tool and just pull them to the side like that to give me a nice sort of band around each side so that'll do it on this side I also want a band around the inside here and the way I will do that is I'll go into face mode select all the faces on one side and all the faces on another and then I will extrude those and I'm going to put an offset on there and I'm just going to bring it in so that it looks about the same thickness here and here so that matches and make sure that's happening on both sides which it is okay so far so good and at the moment I'm around about 92 triangles so not too much damage done and the last thing I want is a band that kind of goes around sort of where it would open and close so to do that I'm going to use my multicut tool hold control which will allow me to put in an edge loop like so and I want a similar sort of width on the band so I'm going to put it about there okay so now I'm set up ready to do some extrusion so I'm going to go into face mode and I need to select some faces so I'm going to need all of that the faces on that ring there I'll do the same on this side so what I'm doing to get this selection is I click on one face and then holding shift I double click on the one next to it and my will often just figure out what you want to do next and I shall try the same with this one click and click yep and click and click or double click so you can see now I've got all that selected I don't want the ones on the bottom because I want to keep that flat and I do want the ones that go around like this okay but as I'm looking at this I can see that I've got a problem I want these bands to be flat which is here but this edge here because of the way I've extruded to get this one here has got a little bit of a wobble to it which I don't want so before moving on with this selection I need to sort that out so I'm just going to discard that selection of faces I'm going to go into edge mode I'll double click on that edge loop and that'll get the whole thing and what I'll do is scale it on the y-axis which will just flatten it out much better okay so now I need to get that selection again so let's go into face mode so I need that one oh no that one there that one there that one there and that one there not on the bottom thank you and then we will add that one that one that one and that one okay so that's all the bands selected what I need to do now is give those a little depth so I'm going to hit ctrl and a to get an extrusion and I'm just going to bring the thickness up to get a little bit of definition on those and I like that yeah that's pretty good so now I've got the basic chest shape one thing I'm going to do so I don't know how well you'll be able to see this on the recording but as I'm zooming in now I'm getting like ugly edges here which I don't like now I'm just going to try and get rid of those a little bit by going to view select camera which will select the camera I've got I'm going to go into my attribute editor and then the near clip plane I'm just going to up that to a bigger number like five and then as I zoom in and out they kind of disappear those horrible black bits which is a nifty little trick okay so this is our chest that's good so far what I'll need next is a lock so I'm going to create that out of another cube so let's get a new cube and we will bring it this way let's scale it up so I can see what I'm working with and I'm going to rename it to lock and then I'm going to do some work with it so on this one to get the shape I want I'm going to need a center line on it so I'll do that first of all so subdivisions width I'm just going to change that to two to give me a center line and then I'm just going to bring the depth down a bit okay that'll do so far now what I want is to get a bit of definition around the bottom so we'll go into edge mode and click here and click here very nice and I'm going to bevel those let's just get the grid off for a minute it's in the way okay so let's bevel them and again I'll mess with the fraction until I get something I like yep that's pretty cool and I've created an end gun so I'm going to fix that into my multicut tool and let's start here and we'll go here press enter there we go no end guns there and we'll just fix around the back I'm probably going to delete the faces around the back but in case I don't I'll fix them now okay so that's pretty nice let's just hide that I don't need that right now okay so now I need to create a kind of a lock face here so we'll give that a go let's go into face mode one two three four I'm going to extrude those in and put an offset on it and hopefully these vertices here I'll have enough of them to create a basic sort of key shape so let's get hold of this vertex and this vertex and I'm going to first of all scale them in and then move them down and that's going to create the sort of top of my lock next up I'm going to select these three vertices I'm just going to use my scale tool to straighten them off and then I'm going to move up and in like that and that's hopefully going to create the bottom of the lock shape which looks pretty nice and then I'm going to move this one up here and just flare those vertices out and that's sort of where the key is going to go so now I'm going to select those faces and just sort of scale that up a little bit so it looks more of a key size okay so that'll do for that and then I'm going to extrude that in so control E and push it back push it back you know plenty far so there's got a nice bit of depth to it and at this point I am going to delete the faces off the back so one two three four get rid of those see you later okay so that's pretty much the the lockdown so what I want to do now is make that part of the the chest so I'm just going to move it into place really so let's do that the first thing I'll do is make it so that my pivot point is in line with the back of the lock so that'll make it easy to snap this to the chest so I'm going to hold D which will put me into a pivot point mode and then I'm going to hold V as well which will snap it to a vertex and then just on this axis so I move it back I'll click and I'll tell it to snap to that vertex there and that means that now if we go around the side you can see the pivot is just perfectly aligned with the back of that so now I know that I've got a vertex just there that will line this up perfectly with the edge of there so I'm going to hold V on my keyboard click on here and I'm just going to put my mouse on that vertex there and that's perfect that's exactly where I wanted it and now it's just a case of scaling it in a little bit making sure it looks right and then putting it in place which is going to be a little bit tricky so I'm just going to move my pivot point one more time so I'm going to D and V I'm going to move it to the top of the shape and now when I move it by holding V I can snap it to that vertex there which will perfectly line up with where I want it I do want the lock to stick out a little bit but I want it to be in line with that band so I think let's just turn on ambient occlusion so we can see what we're looking at so I think that looks pretty good all there is left to do now is add some textures to it so I aimed for 250 triangles I'm at 260 so I can live with that there might be one or two savings I can make I'm fairly sure I could do something here to get rid of these faces because they're not doing anything I could get rid of a couple but it's low enough that I can work with it so let's add some simple color to this in line with the rest of the assets that I'm creating for the Unreal Engine tutorial that's coming up so what I'm going to do is into the hyper shade first of all I'll bring that over here we are going to create a new Lambert I'm just going to call it colors underscore oh hang on that's not very good material underscore colors and yes I am doing the British spelling of colors okay we're going to link up a file and that file is going to be this color palette I've created here and that's just like a checkerboard of colors you'll see it in the uv editor in a minute and I'm going to apply that material to everything so apply material to selection and I'm done with the hyper shade for now so if you can't see your material just press six and that will show up see at the moment that just looks a bloody mess doesn't it but that's fine for now so so this doesn't get distracted I'm just going to press five to turn that that texture off for a sec and then we're going to face mode and I'm going to select all the faces on this part that I want to be brown so that's going to be these here I'll get the one underneath as well that one that one that one and that one that one and that one I think that's all of them yep that looks good and I've selected them in that order on purpose because these are easier to select than the bands that'll take me slightly longer so if I do these first that will only leave the bands and that makes them really easy to select in a second you'll see what I mean so let's go into my UV editing workspace ta-da you can see how that's working here are all the colors that I can choose so I'm going to go for this nice rich dark brown I think so in here I'm in the create section I'm just going to do an automatic map which is all I need for this I'm going to shrink those shells down and just plop them into the brown color so now if I press six over here you can see they've all nice gone that that nice deep brown beautiful and what that does is means that everything that is left so we're going to UV shell mode which is there and I think there's something there as well and something there so all the shells that are left must be the bands so what we'll do is select them in shell mode then we'll do an automatic mapping scale them down so they'll fit in one of my colors and I'm going to put it on this sort of mid gray that I've got there just make sure that fits okay let's go into object mode I can see that I've not been entirely successful with that so let's try again so we're going to go into over here we'll go into shell mode and then I can see that I've missed a shell there I'll select that I've missed a shell there I've missed a shell there this is not very good one there one there this is poor form let's just make sure I've got all of that selected and then we will do another automatic okay that looks like I'm going to be a bit more successful so let's get that into that dark gray or mid gray again and then we'll have a look did I get everything that I wanted this time yeah okay so far so good the last thing I need to do is just sort the lock out which again is pretty easy so I'm just going to grab the whole thing I'll do an automatic map I'm going to shrink it down and the color I want on this one is going to be the darker gray just get all that up a bit and then inside the lock I want to be black so I'm going to select one let's try again one two three those four faces and then I'm going to do a greater than selection I'm going to grow my selection by pressing shift and full stop and I'll just try and zoom in so you can see this happen so when I press shift and full stop it selects all the faces around the ones I had selected which again is just a faster way of selecting things and then I'll do an automatic projection on that and then those faces are going to sit in the black quadrant there we go object mode so that is pretty much complete that's ready now to be put into a game engine such as Unreal Engine 4 so I'll just do a couple of final preparatory stages and that'll be ready to export so I'm just going to go back into my classic view I'm going to turn my grid back on because I want to make sure this is positioned where I want it to be so what I'll do is I'm just going to combine both meshes for now so we'll do a mesh combine okay and I want the pivot to be at the bottom of the shape since if we put it into a game engine that's what we'll be lining up with the floor so we want our pivot that'll be the thing that will line up so I'm going to hold d and v and snap it to any bottom vertex there we go now sometimes depending on the object I'll snap the vertex to a bottom corner if it was like a wall that was going to snap to other walls that's definitely what I'd do but in this case I don't need to do that so I'll leave it where it is but one thing you must do if you're exporting to meal engine 4 is make sure that your pivot point is centered on the grid and at the moment mine's below the grid you can see that there so what I'll do is hold x on my keyboard and I'll move it up and just make sure that that's now sitting on the bottom of the grid which it is okay so there we go that's pretty much done just a couple more steps now to make sure it's ready we need to freeze transformations at the moment this thing stays been translated 50 on y we need to get rid of that so you can either go to modify freeze transformations or in my 2018 they've started putting this handy little icon on your shelf so we'll freeze transformations you can see that zeroes everything out we also need to get rid of all this history when you go into a game engine history can cause your big headaches so to do that you can go to edit delete by type history or again you can just click on the icon here so there's delete history all the history goes and that's pretty much now ready to go you could also do this one center pivot but the pivots where I want it to be so I won't be doing that and that's now ready to export brilliant thanks for coming to class hit that 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Morning Hello, Alan. Welcome to the open stack summit. Thank you. This is your first open stack. No first as of age I've been here before perfect so being French I happen to know a lot about OVH and That might not be the case of everyone in the audience So could you give us a quick introduction at what of each year? Sure? So VH is a company that was funded in 1999 by Octav Krabar. You may have heard the name of the of the man We've been going on it started as a web hosting company and then now we turn into a much broader cloud Infrastructure company we essentially do Bermett on which we're going to turn into Bermett all cloud very very soon By the way private cloud and public cloud is kind of the bulk of what we do We are deployed throughout the world really I was looking at some of the earlier numbers, you know 75 data centers with open clouds You know public cloud on open stack well 28 of them with OVH Maybe not quite because not all of them do run open stack public cloud But kind of give you an idea of the scale of the infrastructure. We have our own Network, which is you know huge 15 terabits of capacity and growing on an ongoing basis and essentially We have in those 28 data centers we have about 360,000 servers up and running serving customers today and again This is something that is growing in an order, you know in the thousands almost every week Last but not least about 1.4 million customers throughout the world. We're selling into 138 countries if I remember correctly So really a global operations that is headquarter in France But also have subsidiaries in in the US and North America and Asia pack So where is open stack used in all that pretty much everywhere, right? So we use open stack obviously to deliver public cloud services We have about a 260,000 instances up and running at any point in time 150 petabytes of storage. I mean that kind of give you an idea of the magnitude But effectively we're using open stack really as an abstraction layer for everything that runs underneath We had the of each summit Pretty much the same size as here a few weeks ago in Paris. You were with us on stage And basically we announced a few new products. I mean including a managed Kubernetes For example that runs on open stack infrastructure. We announced, you know data lakes Hadoop clusters managed on top of open stack infrastructure and so on and so forth So we're really using open stack as an abstraction layer and we're going to do that more and more so in the future So I've had the chance to visit the Noviage data center and it felt very different from other data centers I've had the chance to visit. So what makes of each different? Yeah, there are different indeed. I must admit that when I joined OVH that was one of my You know kind of Estonishment as well Something that make us very very different is that we do build our own servers We have two factories one in north of France one in Canada And with those factories we're building the servers and when I mean we build the servers we we goes from sheet metal all the way up to selling open stack services And and anything above that As you can see on the video we we building the in assembling the data set the servers But also the racking systems and that's one of the thing that differentiates us quite a bit because The reason why we do this is because we are cooling our servers with water And we've been doing that for over 15 years, which at the time was complete first And we do that at massive scale And this is allowing us to have a very very lean and cost-effective operations Every single CPU in OVH has a little water block on it and is cooled by water And by doing that we have 98% of the data center rooms or air cooling free Which make it quite different indeed as you can see on the video of this This is how the data center looks like OVH. Yeah, I can really see how The open infrastructure idea resonates really well with OVH hacker culture and Can you tell us a bit more about OVH view on open source and open infrastructure? Yeah, so So this is one octave club I saying about OVH, right? This is our motto is actually innovation for freedom and the thing that is very important in this is of course We want to innovate everybody wants to innovate. We want to differentiate ourselves Relying on open stack and open source infrastructure is enabling us to do that faster than anybody else Or at least faster than people are not relying on open source infrastructure That's one thing but the other thing that is very important to OVH is We we are very big on transparency and reversibility We don't want to make customers captive of our own services We build everything for customers to be able to Come in and come out if they want to do so right move data in move data out for example We don't charge on ingress or egress bandwidth at all right and because that's a big impediment for moving data in and out So for us open source is very much part of that reversibility mechanisms You want to take your workflows and your data from an open source environment in our cloud into your own cloud or into another cloud You are absolutely free to do so and this is enabling that Customer freedom and data movements and workflow movements So you gave a lot of big numbers earlier and but it's a bit abstract Could you give us a better idea of what's happening on a day-to-day business within? Yeah, so so we when you ask that question and say well How can I represent what we do on a day-to-day basis? So I said well, let's take a month right and give you an idea of what we've been doing over a month So that's the month of October right in the month of October. We basically prepared and deployed three new open stack regions in North America in Vintil and not sorry in On the west coast that the center that we have we did the same thing in Asia pack in Singapore and Sydney so we did that thanks to the You know deployment automation based on pop it We know able once the infrastructure is up and running right then you can the servers or provision and everything is ready It takes us four hours to activate a new region Right and by the way new regions at OVH something that people should know as well is that this is also our way of scaling So we have regions with 1500 each servers per region and once you we get to that capacity limit we basically Deploy new regions. So that's the reason why we have 24 worldwide I Said four hours, sorry. It's eight hours. What takes us four hours is what we did in the same month. We've actually updated 22 of our 24 regions from an old version of open stack We were running Juno until recently we moved everything to Newton So we are just two regions away from having the entire infrastructure upgraded to Newton that Upgrade was actually massive amount of work as you can imagine It took us a while to do all the R&D around it and automated But now we are able to do that in four hours and we have to to understand that some of these regions have over 50,000 instances and we do that with no downtime no customers impact not nothing We do that overnight. That's what we do while you sleep It takes four hours to upgrade the region from Juno to Newton The good news as well is that among those 22 that we've already upgraded to Newton We've already started migrating some to Queens. So this is now that we are on to these newer versions It's a lot easier to to do the ongoing upgrades, which We're trying to gonna be no more than three versions behind the upstream. That's the goal All right What did we do? Well, we actually produce a few new flavors and one of them is actually a GPU flavor So if you go on OVH open stack public cloud, you can actually now consume GPU flavors based on Tesla the last generation of NVIDIA with the NGC, which is the NVIDIA path for managing managing your data and your AI and Soon your machine learning as well and we decided to do that with the the PCI path through mechanisms so that customers can have access to the full Performance and capacity of the of the GPUs What else? We have one of our big customers actually the European Spatial Agency more specifically a project called Copernicus. I don't know if you heard of it But it's basically a Number of satellites around the earth that are monitoring the health of the earth taking photos you know and other things and Streaming 1.5 gigabits of bandwidth constantly Last month we've actually added two petabytes of data to our storage infrastructure just for that one project This means that every month we have to install a thousand three hundred discs Just for that one customer. Can I give you an idea of the magnitude of the of the project, right? That's also what happened over a month in October and last but not least That's the number of instances that was found in a month Which basically if you do the math we have 260,000 instances up and running at any point in time that means that every month you reset all of them every week That's the the the what's happening in the in the OVH public cloud in a month Yeah, that sounds like a busy month. Actually, you had your summit in the same month So what are your future plans? Is there any a new open stack component? I can see the slide is kind of Yeah, some of you may recognize the Icons deploy at scale. Yeah future So so a few things first of all it I first want to thank you all you guys for for what you've done because we wouldn't be Where we are today without the open stack community delivering all these projects with the quality of the code that we have one of the bigger contribution to the community is basically that we testing at Pretty big scale as you can see and and that I believe is is a good contribution back to the community Moving forward. There are a few things that we absolutely want to do the first one is I Did kind of spill the beans already? We are going to make our bare metal offering which is by for the largest business of OVH A bare metal cloud so we are going to enable ironic so that people can consume our bare metal servers through the open stack APIs and Moving forward. We also as I mentioned, you know open stack becoming really the de facto under cloud abstraction layer for us We are actually about to launch a number of data cloud databases services Love balancing HSN for storing your keys using barbicans, and there are a few more projects like this going on. So there are about 3035 OVH engineers you will recognize them because they have a fantastic red Woody and Talk to them, right? I'm sure they're gonna have a lot of feedback to provide you in terms of the technology and way provides and Again, I want to thanks everyone in this room for all the great work that you've been doing over the the last years Well, I was a all great insight. I feel like we're out of time unfortunately So is there anything else you wanted to add to? No, I think I I said it all Thanks again, and keep keep going with doubling down on the unopened stack as A public cloud and an abstraction layer, and we have every intention to continue to grow that way. Thank you Thank you, Alan You


to the free, the force of my star shine. Hello, hello, thank you so much for being here and welcome, welcome to this Saturday morning cartoon hour spectacular, co-hosted by the National Black Theater, Penumbra Theater, New Dramatists, and 53rd State Press. We're celebrating Daniel Alexander Jones's two new books published this month by 53rd State Press. Love Like Light, a collection of seven plays and performance texts along with an introduction by Dr. Omi Osum, Joni L. Jones, and Essays and Interviews by Vicky Boone, Jacques Coleyman, Issa Davis, Aaron Lansman, Deborah Paredes, A Price, Cord Arrington Tuttle, and Shea Youngblood. The second book is a stunning conversation between Daniel and feminist scholar and poet Alexis Pauline Gums. I'm Kate Kramer, playwright and editor of 53rd State Press. My pronouns are she-hers and I'd like to begin this party by voicing our land acknowledgement. Much of the work that we published was first developed and performed on the unceded lands of the Lenape and Canarsie communities. Our books are stored and shipped from the unceded lands of the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Shawnee, and Uchi communities. And the work that we do draws on natural resources that members of the indigenous diaspora have led the way in protecting and care-taking. We're grateful to these indigenous communities and we commit to supporting indigenous-led movements working to undo the harms of colonialization. As a press devoted to preserving the ephemeral experiments of the contemporary avant-garde, we also recognize with great reverence the work of radical BIPOC artists who's often uncompensated experiments have been subject to erasure, appropriation, marginalization, and theft. We commit to amplifying the revolutionary experiments of earlier generations of BIPOC theater makers and to publishing, promoting, celebrating, and compensating the BIPOC playwrights and performers revolutionizing the field today. I today would like to thank Gabriel Klein and Rava Robb who are our tech geniuses, Beth Golusson who's been working to coordinate the event and Vijay Mathew and the folks at HowlRound for supporting us in streaming and archiving this party. And lastly, I'd like to thank Erin Salvi at TCG for her tireless support of our work and Niska which supported the publication of both Love Like Light and Particle and Wave. It's now my delight to introduce our performers today. We're gonna start off this event with a couple of different readings from the book and it will be followed by a panel discussion a little bit later. And so our performers today are Rhonda Ross. Rhonda Ross is a singer, award-winning actress, public speaker and inspirational leader. Her current work, The Force Within is a bi-weekly offering of wisdom and inspiration. Viney Burroughs is a living legend in the American theater has given over 6,000 performances on and off Broadway, on television, radio and in films. She originated two roles in Daniel Alexander Jones' plays. Jason Phelps is a multi-disciplinary performer and teacher who has been involved in theater, dance, music, commercial acting, voiceovers and education for over 30 years. And Issa Davis is an award-winning actor, writer and singer-songwriter working on stage and screen. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama for her play Bullrusher and wrote and starred in Angela's Mixed Tape. Now I'm very, very thrilled to welcome Sharon Bridgeforth who will offer a brief invocation for all of us. I wonder if at this moment, everyone would be willing to turn your cameras on so that we can all be together here in the room for a moment. Welcome, we are here today to celebrate the release of Daniel's books into the world. And we know that these books are portals that they take us through the earth, the ocean, up to the sky and they swirl and twirl around us. They create new possibilities and they change us. I wanna invite us to offer gestures wherever you are, whenever you are watching this because energy shifts through time and space. So let us offer gestures of congratulations, of gratitude, of presence, of love to our Daniel and offer them whenever you want during our time together. And what I wanna say is we know that we're here because he invited us, because most of us know each other because of him, because of his generosity, because he's always thinking about connecting people and moving us forward and shining light on us. We're here because through him, we are better human beings and so we get to party together and dance in spirit and make light with our Daniel. We celebrate his artistry, we celebrate his brilliance, we celebrate his family and his communities that raised and shaped him. And we know that in these books, we get to receive the ones that loved him, those magic makers like Lori Carlos and Robbie McCauley and so many others that loved like lightning. They would hit you with that love. That love wasn't always sweet, but you would change and you would be better and you would be more graceful and you would be more considerate because of them. And that's what Daniel does. He gives that to us with every piece of his being. May we celebrate all that are with us right now in light. May we celebrate this moment and every being, every experience, everything that made it possible. May we receive, offer and be hit by the love that is lightning. May we shake and cry. May we dance and fall out. May we get up and be more generous in this moment and always as we celebrate and love our Daniel. Our Daniel. Our Daniel. So now y'all got me crying and snotting on the... Zoom. I'm so thrilled to be here and thank you. Thank you so much Sharon and thank you Kate. We are now going to hear some excerpts from two pieces that are published in Love Like Light. The first is from Blood Shock Boogie which was written between 1995 and 96 and it will feature my beloved friend Issa Davis reading the part of Nicky. And Jason Phelps who originated the role playing the part of Julia Child and I will offer a brief stage direction. Brick during the following text, Nicky demonstrates her skill at hopscotch. She speaks to the characters of light and Luna while keeping an eye on her street. All right, if you go and fight, you got to tell the difference between real and fake. Cause if you can't tell the difference, you ain't gonna know who to bother fighting. Now, most people are fake all the way through.  If you're real, you can see right through them and they can tell.   Everybody say you so nice. Well, you so nice, you will keep getting played till you played out. Hold on. Okay, now, real and fake, you need an example. All right, you can look right here on this block and look at Tasha. She fake for real. First, cause she thinks she better than everybody. She thinks she cute. Plus, cause Tasha always biting. Like, look at CCC how she always be saying fresh. Like, that's a fresh jacket, Sylvia.  That's fresh. Ooh, Teneita girl, you can sing, you fresh. And you know I was saying it first. Now she's saying so much, I can't hardly use it. I should slap her upside her head, but I feel sorry for her cause she can't think nothing up herself. Ooh, and you remember when she got extensions? Bite, cause Jamisa had them two weeks before in that exact same style too. Please, Tasha ain't my friend. She hang around, but it ain't deep. I will give her the papers at any time. See, that's another part of fighting. You got to remember you could always send anybody walking, real or fake, whenever you want. Just give them papers and move right on. I don't know though. You too nice.  Sound of a television being switched on. The buildings vanish, the window frame of Luna's room is articulated. The theme from the French chef plays. Julia Child speaks. There's marvelous confections are found throughout culinary history in almost every culture. With a bit of flourish and imagination, this staple confection undergoes metamorphosis becoming a universal symbol of ceremony and celebration. Once you know the basics of cake making, you may tailor them to your specific needs. Today, we will get to baking and make sure that our cakes rise to their fullest potential. Let's begin. With a flurry, Luna and light all become Nicky. Nicky's tail is a record-breaking 200 meter race. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let me tell it, let me tell it.  Yeah, because her friend had brought them from Japan. Your brother looked like he Japanese. Don't neither of y'all look black.  But anyway, remember she put them on the cake and then put all these candles on there.  And we had ate that when they go in there to get the cake. And we all started singing happy birthday. And then they walking in with the cake and your father went like this. And one of the candles knocked into that boat and that boat blew up and caught all them little Japanese people on fire. And they started melting.  And I was like, you better put that down.  I didn't eat none of that cake. Julia Child, Dennis Bessie. Dry ingredients. One cup cocksucker sifted. Two thirds cup candied hands held so. One box powdered cocoa flavored mama's boy milk. Pinch of salt. Grated rind of one milotto. Zest of hand on hip. Liquids. Three tablespoons boy spit.  Juice.  Half tenderized queer. Two teaspoons semen. Best frustrated and fresh. Mixed dry ingredients and liquids stir. Pour into pans lined with fresh morning sheets. Dreams stained. Note, you can test them for freshness by smelling. If you sense confidence, discard. Bake in a slow oven until it bounces back when you touch it or until a stick inserted into its center comes out clean. Bon appetit. Mess, a red moon waxes overhead, nighttime on the street. Nikki speaks. Now, who's messing with you? Jeremy? Big yes. Jeremy, no better than to mess with me because I will make him bleed. Like one time he called my mama a hoe.  And he didn't. And I was on him like, bam, uh, douche. I beat him so bad. His mama, his daddy, his whole generation felt it. Everybody think he all tough. He ain't nothing. Jeremy just know how to perpetrate. And you know, basically there ain't a whole lot of people it's worth for you to fight. But when it comes time, you got to go.   And people always gonna be trying to put you down, especially you because you too nice. And that ain't gonna work.  You could scratch at their eyes, hit at their privates, bite down hard on whatever you could get. But my thing is just kick their butt. My mama said, I don't ever want to hear about how you lost a fight. If you ever come in here having lost a fight, I will tear you up myself. So I don't lose ever. Thank you both so much. It was so amazing to hear those words out loud again. Thank you, Issa and thank you, Jason. We now welcome to the stage the legendary Miss Viney Burroughs and my dear friend, Rhonda Ross, both of whom originated the roles in this play. Miss Viney will be reading Mother Dixon and Rhonda Ross will be reading Eleanor in an assembly of scenes from Phoenix Fabric. Mr. Shadrach Ambrose Dixon. Mr. Shadrach Ambrose Dixon. Mr. and Mrs. Shadrach Ambrose Dixon. What color flower is gonna be at the wedding? Are you gonna have pink flowers at the wedding? Not gonna be pink flowers at my wedding. What color flower is gonna be at the wedding? You gonna wear red flowers at the wedding? Don't wanna see red flowers at my wedding. What color flower is gonna be at the wedding? Is it gonna be blue flowers at the wedding? What you mean blue flowers at the wedding? I'll tell you the color gonna be at the wedding. Just yellow flowers gonna be at the wedding. Sweet yellow flowers gonna be at my wedding. Yeah. Yes, ma'am. Watch this chair. Yes, yes. Who's that there? That there's Shadrach. He's a pretty old thing. He my husband. How's that so? Just as so. You just little. He's all grown. Still is so, someday soon. How you know? Gave me a flower, said that's for you. What color was the flower? Yellow, yellow. Oh, yellow mean friend. Yellow mean love. Red mean that. He my husband. No, he's not. He's sweet on salad. Old salad, Jones? What you doing? Taking care of that. Totin' that ax? Taking care. Acts bigger than you and just as Shaw. I'll teach her right. Gonna chop her down. If need be. Set that ax down. Chop her down. You mustn't do. Yes, ma'am, I know. Got a powerful love. Shining hard. At mighty groan. Have to do. Gal. Gal. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Watch this here. No, thank you. What's that there? You knocked three times old gal? Yes, ma'am. You come for healing? Not my own. Wash your hands in the water. Go on. Yes, ma'am. See you in the mind's eye. Seem to me I know you. Don't know. You been to this town? No. Well, I seen you with Henrietta Pastor. Yes, yes. That's my mama. She a mighty healer. She dead.  I've been to many a tent, working revival.  Walk through the avenue. Sweet salvation. Oh, we on our way. We on our way. Oh, the many mansions. Oh, it's a bomb in the upper room. Come on, children, come on. Don't I know it? Clap in kerosene and sweat. Blind Willie Moore standing the back, testify. Was a voice come to me? Hemp me to gambling. Hemp me to go with a wayward woman. Hemp me towards the drink. He moaning in the back, repenting.  And his voice dropped down low like a rumble. And he leaning. And my mama shout, Willie Morris, it's a demon gotta hold to you. My mama, Henrietta Pastor, call him up to the altar and I'd be done run up her head. Let him through, let him through.  And when he pull him down, his skin turn gray. And my mama, Henrietta Pastor commenced to casting out that old demon, speaking all his old names from the old book.   Oh, the people just gasping. Screaming. Hands in the air, blind Willie saying, oh thank you, thank you, thank you. And my mama, Henrietta Pastor saying, oh, oh bear witness, no demon holds sway over the light. Hands clap, coins drop in the basket. The next night, a new town, a new dress, come on children, come on.  So yes, ma'am, I know all about casting out demons. I don't come for all that. What I come for, real things, things you know. What you want from me, you know the huck and the shimmer, your eyes are old as dirt. Anything true about the light? Depends. Stand at the edge of the valley when the sun first tips on over, the way it pressed my eyes, licked my face, pulled me out my skin, all the flowers, all the trees, all the birds, all us leaning towards that sun. Seemed like then, all that talk about the light ain't so far fetched. The day the light come and folks be rising up out the dirt. Folks like Shaz, tell me ma'am, tell me, true or not? Oh girl, you know. Don't know. Remember back, you remember back, girl. I remember what they done.  That's you, true, true. Ella, did you bend to the wedding? Did you get any cake? How nice the taste? Ella, did you bend to the wedding? Did you get any wine? How nice to drink? Ella, did you see my turkey? Which side he gone? Will you help me catch him? Get ready, let's go. Shoo turkey, shoo, shoo turkey, shoo. That's you. Remember back, between me and that is what they done. What's done, we can't hold. What's done, we give over to the land. Choose to one way or another. Do you remember what's done? I see it every day. I see it, I can't close my eyes, but I see it, I see it in front of my eyes right now, every day. Now they got his bones, ma'am, the rising. True or not? Truth be told, what has been found, it can't be turned back, flesh on the soil, turned over and into the red clay of this sweet earth will cook it back into itself. Bring it down to salt and lime, cool by a river of ants and worms, birds come, pluck out the hairs to stuff the nest. And then the dead behind the tree, half way to fly, that's as close to the light as we come, truth be told. What you carry, you got to set out, give it over to the lamb. Shass, shass so pretty, all starry eyes, plum colored in the sweet. That's your husband. I can't lay this down. Lay it on the lamb. It won't leave my bones, it's a fire in the heart of my bones. What is foul is made pure again by sacrifice. What else am I supposed to give? What else I got? Even his bones belong to them. Nothing belongs to them, nothing.  Bring me my box. Ma'am. My box, bring it here. Everything they got, they stole rippers. They fly out together from between the trees, these, they hunt in packs, cover their faces, leave just their eyes, silver fish slick in the pitch of night, cowardly pack of dogs, but on the wing above the trees and I, sharp as a blade. It's another hunter. She hunts alone, circles and circles and circles. One will walk off by himself on his way to the field, to the barn, to the outhouse. Oh, on their own, they small as a mouse, as long as they're alive. They own, they small as a mouse, as low to the ground and soft. This hunter, she fixed them with her eye. She moved quick, quick, so quick. They don't feel the blade till too late.  They was on their way, but never come back. One at a time, down to the river, bleed them, gut them, render them, grind them. Down to ash, surrendered, clean unto the lamb. You doing that leave you no better than them. Tender thoughts where they leave you. You ask for the truth, here it is. Who the one tied the noose around our shaz with his own nimble hands. Old man Schumann, there's the truth. I told you the one way to do this be the other, that new gal of Schumann's. Yes ma'am, yes ma'am. His little pearl. He not even from here. Thief all of the same. Tonight she'll walk the river, but won't come home. Your tree of life, that's all that's yours by rights. I take what's mine by rights. I got my way, I make him back to me. My cornbread and honey, no more blood. Always more blood. If not theirs, be yours soon enough. Thank you both so much. Thank you both so much. What an honor to have you re-inhabit that work. Thank you. I am now going to read a brief excerpt from the beginning to Love Like Light, where I talk about the context for my work. I always say every act of imagination is simultaneously an act of remembrance. My work roots in the freedom dreams and deeds of generations of beings from a range of cultural and historical lines. My own mystical journeys and my evolving spiritual acumen have since early childhood led me toward an ontology of immanence. My embodied understanding of time was born of oft-revisited experiences beyond the veil. I was not second-sided from birth as were some folks I knew and many of the forebears I'd known about. Rather, I grew into it through unintentional rites of passage encoded in a series of life events that had the commensurate impact of initiations, trainings, and transmutations. Consequently, I see multiply, the many in the one, the concomitant truths all in motion. My inquiries and imaginings are what I term ancient future. My longings are unabashedly mystical. Afromysticism is an experiential and embodied aesthetic. It is born from and it produces practices containing African diasporic philosophies. I apply the term Afromystical broadly to work I've encountered in the black American cultural continuum that activates interdimensional portals, evokes the numinous, communicates on multiple levels of perception simultaneously, and continuously re-oriented perceptions of time and space. Afromysticism emphasizes the centrality of those re-orienting perspectives, perceptions to the lived experience of freedom. And furthermore, posits freedom as an ever unfolding process, a process of being indivisible from universal expansion. Afromysticisms felt states of becoming contain discernible forms that occur both inside and outside the present moment and inside and outside of the self and community. Afromysticism reveals concurrency. Afromysticism recognizes states of play as sites for co-creative consciousness. And Afromysticism is indivisible from the ancestors. And I wanna just take a moment now to call all of those ancestors who are threaded through all of this work into the room with particular love for our beloved mentor, Robbie Macaulay who we lost this year. I wanna pay honor to her and say thank you for all that she taught all of us. And yeah, now Kate, let's come back and we're gonna do something fun, I think, right? Not that this isn't fun, but yeah. Thank you all for those beautiful, beautiful readings. To hear the words in the voice after having read them on the page for so long is an amazing, amazing gift. That was really beautiful. And thank you, Daniel, for that reading from your introduction. So now we get to do a little interlude where I'll show off some of these books that Daniel has made and I'll explain how we're going to do our trivia game. So first things first, here are the books. There, as you can see, they're sort of sisters here in terms of their look. And so this is Love Like Light, the collection of plays. Some are printed on black paper and some on white paper. It's got a beautifully textured cover. It's truly, truly, truly beautiful. Even the printer was impressed. So. And then it could be used as a self-defense tool. Absolutely. Like, it's got some patterns on it here. And then this is the conversation between Daniel and Alexis Pauline Gums. And I'm just truly delighted by this volume. It's a tremendous, it's so slim. And yet there's such wisdom here and a really tremendous introduction to, it just, it feels like it constellates outward. And so it can be a really beautiful friend kind of guiding you into new realms of thinking and of love. Just also shout out Dr. Alexis Pauline Gums and say what an honor it was to be in conversation with her and to note that she represents, to me, the flower of so much of this work over so many decades that we're in tradition with. She, Alexis Pauline Gums embodies freedom wholly and it is really a delight to be able to share a volume with her. So get with that one too. Yeah. And so then I wanted to explain. So you have the viewers, our audience has the opportunity to win a couple of different prizes by competing in a trivia challenge. And so the way the trivia challenge will work is that I will read here in this moment a few trivia questions and I will also post them on 53rd State Press' Twitter page right after the event. So if you need to return to the text and if you think that you can answer any one of these trivia questions you can respond to us on Twitter or you can email me at Kate at 53rdStatePress.org. And correct respondents will then have the opportunity to be entered, they'll be entered into a drawing and you'll have the opportunity to win any one of three different prizes. One prize is your very own copy of Love Like Light. And another prize is a copy of two different 53rd State Press titles Suicide Forest and by Haruna Lee and Severed by Ignacio Lopez. And then the third prize is a collection of CDs featuring Joe Mama Jones. Is it the full, is it the complete? It's the first five CDs. So we, and then Aten is coming out in vinyl a little bit later. So if we get it before the end of the year maybe that will be added to the prize.  Okay, so this is your moment to like really pay attention and look deep into yourself as you attempt to answer these trivia questions. The first trivia question, what is the first piece of live theater that Sharon Bridgeforth saw? Two, what Tony season featured all new dramatists, writers, alum and resident for best play? You just have to give the year, but for a bonus you can tell me what all of the plays were. Three, what was Ms. Beiney Burroughs first Broadway show? Four, name three artists working in the theatrical jazz tradition or artists who have worked in the theatrical jazz tradition. And five, name two Austin based organizations that fostered or fostered the connection between art and activism. All right, so hopefully there's a little bit of something for everyone. Sharon, you have to pick one besides your own, besides the question of what did you first see? And again, your options for responding are you can respond to us on Twitter or you can email me at Kate at 53rdstatepress.org. And then we will contact you if you are one of the lucky several. Beautiful. Now I think we're going to segue into the next portion of our party, which is a panel discussion. I'm so, so delighted to introduce our panelists who are Daniel Alexander Jones, Jonathan McCrory of the National Black Theater, Valerie Curtis Newton and Dr. Omi Osunjoni L. Jones. Jonathan McCrory is an OB award winning and a Delco nominated Harlem based artist who has served as artistic director at Dr. Barbara Anne Tears National Black Theater since 2012. He's worked as a director, producer and actor and he was a founding member of the movement theater company as well as a co-founder of the producer collective Harlem Nine. Valerie Curtis Newton is head of directing at the University of Washington School of Drama and serves as the founding artistic director for the Hansbury Project, a professional African-American theater lab. She has worked with professional theaters across the country, including the Guthrie, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Seattle Rep, Playmakers Theater Repertory Company, Actors Theater of Louisville, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Intamond Theater, Seattle Children's, the Mark Taper Forum, New York Theater Workshop and Southern Repertory Theater. Dr. Omi Osunjoni L. Jones brings Black feminist practice and theatrical jazz principles to her art making, pedagogy and facilitation. Her dramaturgical work includes August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean and Shea Youngblood's Shaken the Mess Adam Misery, both under the direction of Daniel Alexander-Jones as well as Sharon Bridgeforth's Conflama under the direction of Lori Carlos. Her most recent book is the theatrical jazz performance, Assay and the Power for the Present Moment. She's Professor Emerita from the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at UT Austin. And now to start off our panel discussion, I'm gonna invite Dr. Jones to read from her glorious introduction to Love Like Light. Thank you. I have chosen a five minute excerpt to share with you from that introduction. Joy. Daniel calls us with love like light to follow his persistent dance to joy. Joy as divine pulse. Joy, not as the absence of pain, but as a declaration of aliveness. Daniel is forging paths to freedom and joy is the train that will take us there. But as your mama reminds us, not everyone will make it. Not everyone is ready for the work that freedom requires. Some will resist this joy as naive or apolitical, while in fact, it is the heart of political truth. These truths are so profound, so necessary that Daniel can gracefully navigate a willingness to be not understood. This volume is our opportunity to do our own dance through Daniel's inspiration. And in so doing, we not only imagine the physical productions of his work, but we also have the opportunity to experience the literariness of his work. In Daniel's writing, there's a compelling precision that looks like nonchalance. Each word and image sharp, crisp, no excess or dross. What Sharon Ridgeforth calls, quote, a beauty that looks soft, but really cuts, end quote. His deafness with language demonstrates a command of sound that is understood as music when your mama sings. But the people in his worlds are always singing, even as they chat. So this volume allows us to save our language to underline passages that make us gasp, to map the structural landscape to read and reread and reread into the pleasure of text, thereby giving us the saturation reading affords. Love, light, light is our sacred grove where Daniel has gathered several of his long time interlocutors. This gathering is a potent black feminist move, creating a collective, bringing people together for a convening, a ceremony of celebration. An enactment of joy through honoring each contributing voice. Black. Daniel insists on black that is deeply inclusive and resistant to the rigidity of singular definitions. He asks us to live inside unfixateness, for black is the space of the unknown yet to be known rather than an empty cavernous void. Black is the fertile soil of invention. Here, we can see more, not less, as our pupils expand so we can see in the dark. Black is what if, while light is, is. Black is where light is born and a black light as a tool causes a glow that can authenticate currency and art and identify medical disorders. Our black light then detects that which is not visible to the naked eye. In this way, Daniel's work is our black light, pushing us past the world as we know it into what the world could so beautifully be. Light. Light and its many refractions is a central force and theme in Daniel's productions. The titles of his works, the character's names and the stagings all reveal the importance of illumination in his work. Daniel acknowledges Mike Wongan, the master lighting designer with bringing forth what Daniel calls the soul of the piece. Light moves us into the stratosphere for whence we all came as particles of stardust. Love. We can't get to freedom with the strategies that have maimed us to imagine and be beyond what we know. Daniel tells us, quote, we often look to external systems to be agents of our collective transformation and it really must begin within. There's something that happens when you let go of the old and you allow yourself to be undone completely, end quote. Love like light invites this undoing with the sonic inventions throughout that often defy genre classifications and the insistence to be courageous. Parts are righteously suspicious, are rusted with rage and grimy with fear and still. Daniel cares enough about humanity that he challenges us to do the hardest thing to reinvent ourselves through love. Each work in this volume is a primer for those of us willing to open, willing to yield. By the time anyone reads this volume, we will know if humans were brave enough to follow the call to joy profit throughout the work. Can we join this particular brand of life affirming, love commanding and urgency, will love be the light? The choice is in our hands. So beautiful, so beautiful, thank you. And at this point, I'd love to invite the rest of our panelists back onto the screen. And with that beautiful introduction, I'd love to begin our discussion with a question that I think is maybe useful in thinking about all of your careers and the ways in which you've straddled many different traditions. I'd like to know about aesthetic breadth and black theater, that I think we have a kind of myth or a tendency to associate black theater with realism coming out of the black arts movement with August Wilson. And so I'm wondering what does it mean to be coming out of or working in an experimental tradition? And I'm also curious about how you've moved among those spaces for those of you who have been moving back and forth. It's really interesting, Kate. I think about the duality that you speak of goes way before the black arts movement. You go all the way back to some writers like Maria Bonner, right? She was writing in what we would now call an avant-garde tradition in the 1800s. In 1900s. So there's always been a seed for imagination and for escaping our reality to a place where our souls could live and breathe. So our tradition of work has always included that. I think that the emphasis on realism and black theater is that we also had to write about our trauma. And our trauma existed in a sort of daily, every day experience, and that's the way that it came out, right? So when you look at an August Wilson play, for example, and we have to start again way before August Wilson. Yeah, so there is a way in which many plays wanna talk about the pain and trauma of our being subjected to racism and slavery in this country, and it escapes or cuts off the connection to the rituals of joy that came over with us from Africa. So there's a lot to unpack into where this divergence happens between realism and imagination. Our theatrical tradition is laden with dualities, right? Elaine Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois had this ongoing battle about whether or not we could uplift the people who were not model citizens, whether that, those were black stories. There's always been this conversation about whether pageants are theater, whether rituals are theater. So we've just always, we've always had it. And I think part of what Daniel's work does is it calls us, and there are many artists working in this way, it calls us actually to accept that all of it belongs to us. All of it belongs to us. And just to uplift this notion of Valerie was so beautifully expository and in the question around breath, it actually makes me think about this, the saying that Pastor Kendra at First Corinthians Baptist Church said, which was that your breath is your first therapist.  And when I think about how black bodies have been utilizing breath to understand what's happening inside of their system, there's a duality, there's a complexity, there's a nuance inside of that, there's a healing elixir that's wanting to happen and that duality goes into mythic spaces, that duality goes into realistic spaces, that duality is trying to figure out what liberation looks like when it's been codified and been looking at a mirror called Western civilization, when it looks at freedom from a space that's been taught to commodify, to limit, to undermine sometimes the very nature of its freedom and how we as black people and black folk have been actually etching away and actually been asked to trained and conditioned to etch away from our indigenous authentic self. And it becomes opportunities to breathe in into the imaginative self, opportunities to break through their realistic models, opportunities to live inside of the Afrofuturism that our wisdom actually lies, lives inside of it. You think about Egypt in itself as a microcosm, you think about South Africa and you think about Lucy and the land of like, you think about these generative hubs of imagination that sometimes you can't even fathom, we don't even still know how the pyramids were made. We can't, from the ingenuity, we can't imagine that. So just thinking about how that breath was liberating itself into a future that imagined how our bodies could generate new ways of being, new ways of construction, new ways of civilization that we now with the kind of civic and kind of architectural and kind of astute learning that we have, we still can't fathom, right? And that breath, that breath that allows for that therapy to happen, that connectivity to source to happen, that download to happen, I mean, that's a universal, that's a universal elixir. And I think when we think about the pinning that Daniel's talking about and the pinning that artists in this realm and in this anthology are actually talking about, we're actually talking about a quest, because I think it's important what Valerie talked about, joy as the elixir, or talking about a quest of actually centering that breath to codify the manifestation of joy through the elixir of black indigenous thought. And I think that is powerful and that is necessary, especially when we start talking about, I know Daniel made a joke about how it's like a weapon, but like we need weapons of joy that allow for us to really gird and root ourselves to begin to imagine what healing looks like. We've been through a trauma collectively as a civilization coming off and in the heels of the shutdown, not the pandemic, because we're still in the midst of it. But in the midst of the shutdown, when lights turn back on and they're asking us to like return back to civilization as if it never had happened, there is a trauma that is being asked to be asked, act like it never happened. And so then how does breath, that joy elixir, those kind of medicines become a part of our ability and our necessity to be able not to return back to this because this is actually a mirroring of a psychosis. And it's just the universe saying, if you do not heal now, we are going to take it even one step further. And can we take the lesson now? Because even the planet, I mean, my friend Keith said this and I will be quiet because I feel like I've rambled a lot, but my friend Keith said, said this very beautiful, cute Joseph Atkins said, this very beautiful thing. The planet is teaching us we have to live in chaos. We do not understand how to live in the midst of chaos. The way that the hurricanes are moving, the way that the highway one fell, the way that we don't know the globe, the climate change that's happening, the planet is in the midst of chaos. And then why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't we as individuals who live as a fabric of Mother Earth's majestic wisdom, why wouldn't we then live in the center of chaos as well? Why wouldn't we learn how to harmonize with that chaos instead of trying to control it from our Western and some capitalistic views that are not connected to indigenous practices that allow for us to then change with the prevailing winds? Like joy is the center of the thing. And it's the reason that white supremacy came for that first. Ashay. That's it. I mean, if you think about, so I've been looking at ring shots, right? And looking at ring shots as if you think about that and thinking about how it had to become for first, right? And there's no notion of how ring shots were something that actually translated from the transonic slave trade to the soils of America during the antebellum South as an elixir joy mechanism, as an elixir to remind the body, even though it was enslaved, that is liberated and free. And how in so many ways we have walked away from those kinds of indigenous practices and are trying to neuter ourselves to live inside of the notion of whiteness and reflection of whiteness. And what does it mean for us to re-center those indigenous practices? What does it mean for us to work in against the grain? And what does it mean for us to catalog those things in a way in which that allows for it to be transmutable? There's this beautiful thing that Ronda Ross said before, before we all started the panel. We had a pre-panel for the panel. It was a really light, lovely, it was a love fest. She said, there's a beautiful testimony latent inside of this book that allows for the world to now have history recorded as black brown folks, our history is usually oral, which allows for it to not sometimes die at the vine of the wisdom keeper. And what does it mean? And I think we're at a place where, and this is why it's so great that you utilize this time to create that repository, Daniel, because without it, we start to lose the wisdom keepers. I always, I am a bit of a broken record around this because it goes back to Egypt. And it goes back as a point of material flourishing as you're talking about, of the imagination. And we know from all of his, like I'm gonna talk about historical research that is not racist that that wisdom itself spreads down to the sun people in South Africa and it moved along the Nile for centuries. And the Nile flows from the central Southern Africa up to the Mediterranean, not the Nile around. And so in that spread of knowledge, there was a deep understanding that we have the capacity in every moment that we are conscious to shape our expression at every moment that we are conscious. And what this, what Western settler colonialism did to every culture on the planet, including indigenous European culture, which was focal, which was ritual based, which her, you know, again, before Europeans were white, right? Yes, yes, yes. That there is an understanding that we can remember what we have not ourselves lived. I say it carries across. And so that myth from Egypt is the myth of Isosthenes Cyrus. And the idea that the jealous brother set murders Osiris who is the vegetative God of life, right? And spreads him, chops him up and spreads him across the land. And Isis, his wife and sister in her morning goes and gathers those pieces by hand. And she takes the spell from Toth. And she, through her own pleasure, her own eros, her own life force reanimates Osiris, brings him back to life, remembers him. And in that act of remembering conceives Horus, who is the Falcon headed God, child who is the Avenger of Osiris, who is the reason that the sun rises every morning, right? As a result of the victory of Horus. And so I always go back to that to say that when we look at our history and our trauma, we are a culturated, I would say in this contemporary moment to stay with the trauma as the end result. Remember Isis, remember our capacity to gather those pieces. Remember our capacity to spell the magic word. Remember our capacity to remember and therefore resurrect and therefore birth new life. And it is in that listening process. That's why I love these, so many of my plays are really excuses for people to tell their stories, right? And sometimes those stories get told in language. Sometimes it's gesture. Sometimes it's about the movement of those bodies together, but all of those stories allow us to say, if I tell my story and I hear your story and we hold one another's stories, we are in an act of remembering. All of this, all of this, all of this, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And for me, what binds what everybody is saying is bringing spirit consciously into the work. So that spirit and spirit then it's gonna go or it's gonna go and it cannot be commodified. And that's part of the, one of the things that I think happened with black art making is that it was clear certain kinds of forms were going to be commercially successful. And the push there, spirit got quieter and quieter and in many ways. And what I find in Daniel's work and the work of many others for hundreds of years is that spirit gets to be right there. And Daniel, as you said, spirit may make itself present as a movement or spirit makes itself present as a song or it makes itself present as something that may be understood as gibberish, but that's where the electricity and transformation is. So I just wanted to throw that into the mix that spirit gets to be foregrounded, needs to be foregrounded as a force in the work. Because you also, okay. Just wanted to add one quick thing, which is also to honor, I wanna honor the three of you in particular and say like, I look at you all and I see these carriers of the magic, the carriers of the tradition, the carriers of this knowledge, right?  There have always been those folks who've taken that responsibility to say, I'm gonna pick this knowledge up and I'm gonna hold it and I'm gonna carry it and I'm gonna move it forward. And I know that that's a very difficult thing to walk with because it means that you then become someone who is talking about spirit and hyper-materialist, industrial capitalist, you know. And I wanna say this because I think it's real. My whole career I've been looked at as suspect because why are you up in here talking about love? Why are you up in here talking about spirit? Why are you up in here talking about memory? Who are you?  We missed a whole layer of all the things that I've been told about why I shouldn't be doing this or why we shouldn't be doing this. But what I know is it is here because so many carried it and passed it. They carried it and passed it.  I'm gonna call the number to Lou Bellamy and Sarah Bellamy and all of those folks who made a space where that kind of experimentation could happen center stage. I'm gonna call Hansberry project.  And then only with your incredible work with the Performing Blackness series and all of the innovations you did as an educator and a leader. And so we are a small number of many who are out here doing this work and who have kept it alive. And the lie is that we don't have a fluency in this way of working. We do, we know. And for sure, it became of interest to all the European modernists because it undergirds all the forms of modernism, I would say. So there we have it. There's a, in talking about aesthetics for black theater, I think that the idea, this question of a monolith, whatever, wherever on the spectrum, the monolith notion definition sets itself. I think that that's again, part of the attempt to limit our imaginations as to the possibility of our existence. If joy is our central weapon, choice is the tool by which we activate it. If we can be convinced that we have no choice, to choose joy, then this is like the 21st century Willie Lynch speech. We will hold ourselves in bondage because we refuse to choose the thing that will heal us. And we accept and kind of take in over and over the poison that is killing our spirits. And I think the other thing for me is that we have our own control. Yeah. We get to decide, that's what Dr. Tear did, right? She just decided, she had control. She made a choice.  So we get to choose and then we get to force people to deal with who we are. And when we forget that, then we lapse into depression. Then we lapse into backbiting and eating our own young and crabs in a bucket mentality, as opposed to a sense of abundance and choice and joy and love and community and how all of those things work together.  When you fall down, I lift you up. Jonathan, you were talking about pastoral language, right? And for me, I've been working on this idea more and more clearly that, you know, heaven is ours to have right here on earth because we can strive to be our fullest, whole, healthy self right here. If I'm trying to make the conditions for that for you and you all are trying to make the conditions for that for me, we're in communion and in community, we're lifting up the whole self. And there's a way in which our work is such spiritual work that, and that's the part that gets forgotten. And that's why we have these kinds of like either or dichotomies. And then there also becomes the question of this, like there's now, there's now a school because it's, I feel, it's like skin folk and always skin folk. There's now, I think a kind of ingrained sensibility of these dichotomies of like people who have fully indoctrinated themselves into the capitalist system and fully indoctrinated themselves inside of that commodification and that divorcing of really, and really looking at success from a wealth pathology versus I think something that Dr. Tears said that love is the only currency that you can take to the bank. So what does it mean to actually build your wealth based off love instead of building your wealth based off of the blood and the toro and the sacrifice and all the other things that you can possibly think of? And it just makes me think, how do we return the dominant structure back to being embraced by the sun? How do we allow for this cycle of like building family, building community, building each other up? How do we radiate it out? These are things that I think about. How do we radiate out this notion of home, autonomy, joy, love? So that every black artist who has a knowing that that is a successful way of being, that it doesn't mean, like it doesn't mean, and defining sex, not sex, but divining, that's gonna be a part of it, that's gonna be a part of it, but defining success based off your own terms instead of the terms of the counterparts that are around you. When I first started working at MBT, that was a very necessary thing I had to define for myself because to Daniel's point, there was a sacrifice that had to come to bear when I chose to go a spiritual walk of holding up an anchor for my community. And that sacrifice has yielded a lot of beautiful love in my life, a lot of beautiful joy in my life, a lot of beautiful wealth and ways in which that I would never have imagined it from the acquisition of crystals, to the acquisition of my spiritual health, to the acquisition of joy as a wealth idea, the acquisition of just the people around me, right? And me loving myself as an acquisition of wealth, right? But that's me having a conversation with a different relationship to success, to being present, that I think we are, again, conditioned to kind of like gird ourselves with. So I think that's a very important conversation to have. We started thinking about these works in this anthology, how it's conjuring up a necessity for us to have a conversation with our blood memory and blood trauma and allowing that blood memory and blood trauma to rise to the surface and allowing our shadowy self to have a conversation with who we are as what we visibly show people out into the world. I think that's why this conversation and this book are so important. I think that there are many young art makers who do not really know about these lineages, about these possibilities, about how to make a choice that defies everything that they're being taught or told about the world. So I'm so excited that the book, because a book can get passed around and so on, you know, our performances are vital and nothing can replace that live experience. And it is going to impact immediately those people who are able to be there. The book can go around, around, around, around. And so the story of how to live lives that are not wedded to commodification and commercialism and capitalism, people need those stories so that they recognize they got a posse, even if they've not met them, you know? And that that posse will support them because some of us are moving into sites where we get to decide on grants and we get to do other kinds of things that can support young artists. So I think this is really important, this gathering we're having right now, because it gives people a way to see how you can live, enjoy outside of the paradigms that have most often been given to us. And I think that Jonathan's point about your own definitions of success is incredibly important. You know, and it goes all the way back to the African Grove. I say. William Henry Brown was trying to do what white folks did.  I say. Stuff was getting burned down. They were getting beaten up because they wanted to do what? Shakespeare. They thought, oh, if this is what the art is and this is what intelligence is, I can do that. Let me do that.  And William Henry Brown eventually said to himself, if I keep trying to be what they are, that's not feeding my spirit or feeding my people. So what if I define success for myself, define my story as central? Then he started writing. So then we get King shot away. That's right. And it goes from there, but it was a moment of turning from, yes, I can speak Shakespeare, I can understand Shakespeare, but I have my own story. Yes. And success for me is sharing my own story. Yes. And so that's again, that thing about not having to choose. That's it. I love, Valerie, you said this thing of the moment of turning. And I'd love to hold that for a second and say that, it's been one of the things, Kate, the invitation that Kate gave to bring this volume together. And I wanna note too, that 53rd state is an example of this as well. An independent press that is determined, like choosing a way of valorizing work on the part of artists around the nation who are not doing it necessarily in that same mainstream or commercial way. So there's evidence, evidence, evidence. But that moment of turning, the turning away from, and turning towards something. And I think about, there's an image in my introduction where I talk about my late mom, I had a memory of her showing me how sunflowers follow the light. And I can still feel her, I was like seven years old or something. And she guided my head up and showed me, like the relationship between the head of that sunflower and where the sun was. And she told me of, as it moved, the flower moves. And I think about this in terms of Exodus from the way of doing things. I think about this in terms of, the idea of the Maroon society as an image, what would mean for us to leave and gather in the sun. And that to me is an invitation. And this is partly where I stand in a bit of controversial territory. I wanna invite everybody to follow blackness and light toward this redemptive feeling because I think the trick bag catches everybody. And a lot of these identity markers, and I say this oftentimes are born from the auction block and chattel slavery and ideas about whiteness and ideas about blackness and ideas about otherness and racial categories. And what would happen if we invite ourselves even a little bit to remember that there were ways that people were on the planet for tens of thousands of years prior to the advent of these systems. Yes. Tens of thousands of years. Can we remember another way to be with each other? Can we hold the space to tell our stories of the traumas that we've been through without repression, without consequence, but as an omitment to say, these are the things we all inherited. And here's what we choose to do. I think that that controversial point of telling our stories, making our productions for a wider community, there is something that our people get from hearing our stories. Yes. And there's also stuff that other people get from hearing our stories. They can get the truth. That's right. For one thing, they can get the truth. So, Daniel, I understand that sort of controversy that happens. I say in public all the time, I love black people. I love us so much. I want everyone else to love us too. That's right. And that's why I make my work so that everybody can love black people. That's right. And the honest truth is that once you start to love black people, you start to love yourself. Regardless, it is this kind of, one of the original senses, many on this continent, but one of them is the construction of capitalism based off of black woman's body.  Until that gets reconciled, there is a shadow of unwholeness and an illness and a sickness that is running through the veins of our society. That is running through the very core of our society. And what's really beautiful and powerful about eight conversations like this and works in anthologies like this is asking us to reconcile and reckon with that very unfavorable truth that we run away from. The thing that society doesn't necessarily want us to talk about. And it begins to start to activate what I used to, I have this beautiful love with butterflies and talking about, hey, let's have the butterfly effect. Let's activate everyone's butterfly and get them flapping. And also that like the pandemic could have been for folks an opportunity to cocoon themselves, to break bones, build new muscles, build new possibilities that they never thought they could have. So when they come out of the shutdown, come out of this moment, they're able to flap in a different kind of way and do a different kind of service to the planet. Well, there's an actor that D Watts, I was at a show for, in Guzzy show, I'm at the Atlantic theater and there was this beautiful moment where I professed this moment and said this out loud. And he was like, well, what's also really beautiful about a caterpillar is that in his DNA is the butterfly waiting to emerge. And the question that I say is that works like this, doing ritualistic theater, doing works that return us back to the indiginality of self-reading texts like this, having conversations like this is potentially awakening the DNA that's laid inside of folks. And to your point, Omi, what you were talking about, it allows people to say, I'm not a stranger to this world. I have common folk that speak my language that there is a universe of a cosmology that loves me, that knows me, that is already lighting a candle for me, doesn't have to see my face, know me exactly, but the spirit of me is what they're holding. And I think that that's what's really important. Really important is that you knowing that there is this destination called home. There's a destination that you can call home and call into being and you can strive to. One of the reasons why my commitment to MBT is so strong National Black Theater is because I feel like Black Theater deserves to have an Ailey in New York City. Black Theater deserves to have a destination where a Black artist can imagine.  Doesn't mean every Black dancer is going to be on Ailey, but the idea that an Ailey exists as well, resource as it is, as nationally, internationally and global that it is, allows for a Black dancer, no matter where they are in the world, to imagine differently on the soil. And we need that also with inside of a Black Theater context. And I think that that's why a conversation like this is equally important because it allows to radio out concepts and ideas that allow for a future Black leader in the arts or future artists in general in the arts to start to lean into the curiosity of the imagined self versus the constructed self. I think, Jonathan, that I appreciate the idea of wanting to have that kind of beacon. But you know, I'm out here in the hinterlands of as far away from New York as you can get. So for my thing, I do think about young artists, but for me, it's how can I be that where I am? How can I open them up to the possibility that they could take into their own hands the story making from where they are? And so, again, I think it's all of that. I think it's every artist in every town in Hamlet as well, all trying to be beacon stokers, right? We're all trying to light the fires where we are so that there are fires in every city, in every state, so that young people don't wither in the cold and in the dark, that there will be light and heat because we are here. That's the thing that I'm trying really hard to help folks know. And I think that one of the things that touched me so much about Daniel's book is his sense of his place in the line, right? This question of lineage. His place in the line is so strong and he has gone back to really investigate who influenced him, how they influenced him. What's the thing he's supposed to pass forward? What's the thing he's supposed to let wither? Because even in those relationships, there are things that need to die, right? There were things for the moment, they were for that season for a reason. But now you're not there in that season anymore. And so deciding what goes forward, deciding what you got and that doesn't need to go forward, deciding how to build on that notion that Omi writes so beautifully about theatrical jazz. What is it to have repetition and then change? What's in that moment? For each of us, we repeat our mentors and then we own it and then we change what our mentors taught us. And it becomes a new thing that includes us. And I think that that's one of the really beautiful things about your journey as an artist and how you record it and how you call out and give voice to your place in the line. And also what it means to go from being that young artist who was mentored by those powerhouse women in particular and now to be moving into the place of elder wisdom and having a different role. This book is a huge, huge contribution to what it is to offer wisdom to those coming behind. And again, Omi is so on point about the fact that the literary anchor of it means that there are generations and generations who will step into line behind Daniel Alexander Jones. You and Omi have me wanting to write a book. I don't know what I'm gonna write it about. But you all have me wanting to write a book. We need that book Valerie. I wanna speak to the thing of lineage and thank you some of that. That means so much to hear this and thank you so much. And I'm very much overwhelmed right now with love for this room of people and trying to take that in. Cause I know that that is one of the things I think in the lineage that didn't happen is my mentors didn't take in what they did. They were so committed to keeping the work going. And as we know, there's so much trauma and struggle in that process. But being able to stop and say, and I hope that this book, and I know it does, communicates to their spirit, you did good. And that is why I will always call their names. Nothing I do is original. So if we value in the West, the meaning is originality, then don't value what I do. What I value is this thing of continuance and innovation, like what you're talking about, Valerie, that we keep the river unblocked. We keep it flowing. And I'm proud of the things I made, but I also know that Miss Viny Burles is in my work. Yeah. Robbie McCauley taught me how to stand up and say the hard thing that Laurie Carlos taught me that my body knows more than my mouth does. I see.   It will change the atoms in the air. And Dr. Constance Berkeley taught me that freedom is elusive and that we must continue to tend it like we would tend a garden. And so I call their names and other names and Jessica Hagelder and I can go on with the names. And I do go on with the names because it's so important to call them in the room. And two, there's this sense of like, I love that thing of like, Jonathan, you talked about coming home and Valerie talked about like everywhere they're being a beacon. And one of the memories I have, and I don't know if you remember Ms. Viney and Rhonda, but when we were working on Phoenix Fabrika, Pillsbury House Theater, then under the direction of Noah Raymond and Fay Price and Pillsbury House is a settlement model. So the theater is in a building that also contains youth services and a free health clinic. And there's a church that meets there on Sunday and there's a AA. So it's like the theater is in the space where everybody comes to deal with the things that happen in their lives. And there was an open door policy for rehearsal. So anybody could come up in there when you're working, which it should be, right? And so there were these three little sisters who were like in the youth group thing, they had to be like nine, 10, 11 years old or something like that. And they would come in and file in the back and watch our rehearsals. And, you know, we said hello, but they didn't, they weren't trying to talk with us. They were watching the work.  And I said, you know, Ms. Viney, would you do this, Rhonda? And I hear, uh-uh, mm-mm. That was, I turned back to the little girls and they were like, she wouldn't do that. I said, excuse me. She said, no, no, no. And then the other one said, yeah, because in that part where she said that, and then the way she looked and she said, mm-mm, not that. You shouldn't do that. That's gonna make the play bad. And I was like, I have my dramaturgs in those little girls who felt that that was theirs. And it was theirs. And I trusted their wisdom because they were in that room and they got it. And then all the adults were telling me, no one will understand this abstract play and why do you have it? And I was like, these little girls came in here and ruled the play, right? So it's, to me, that thing too. It's also about making the work accessible and this abusing us of this idea that we don't understand abstraction. Yeah. Mm-mm. Come through. Mm-mm. Yeah. Mm-mm. Come through. Mm-mm. When I directed the mojo and the say so, and we were trying to solve the end of that play that the transformation of the preacher to his essence, when I would tell people at the end that the preacher who's a vulture is a snake, slithers off the stage, and they're looking at me like, what? I'm like, you have to see it. You have to see it, the conjuring that happens and the way that he is stripped of the layers to reveal his true self. That's a ritual that you can't actually describe. You have to experience. And so in the work, I can imagine Ayesha having conversations about whether or not it was good structure, whether or not it was solid storytelling, and she just knew that it was the story she needed to tell and it needed to be told this way. And that's one of the great things about those women is that they knew what they knew and you could not move them from their knowledge. No, he's gonna be skinned and reveal his true nature. And Daniel, you and I have talked about working with Lori and it's like, no, it must be a red coat. It must be a particular kind of red coat because on so and so had that kind of red coat and I'm writing my family's history. So we have to go for that color red coat. They were like very, very powerful guardians for their vision and also very generous in terms of sharing practice. They wanted you to know how to make it for yourself but they also wanted you to be fierce in your defense of a vision. That is so. And fierce for their healing. I mean, when you uplift that kind of specificity and that kind of clarity that both of you and Daniel have been talking about that is a clear destination of saying, this is not about, this is not just a work for me. This is a offering. This is about a healing and that healing and offering are very specific. Like, if you know of what an offering is and some spiritual and religious sex, like if you're above, you can't give a certain kind of orange. Can't just give any or you get a certain kind of apple. It can't just be any old kind of apple. Like the honey, the core has to be taken out in a certain kind of way. The honey has to be poured in to the red delicious apple and then it has to be placed on this kind of like, there's specificity in creating conditions for healing. And all of us have that inside of us, that intuitive voice that helps to name it. And when you just uplifted that kind of specificity, Valerie and Daniel, it reminded me how works of the black tradition of the works that lean into indigenous practices are really a deep manifestation of one seeking healing, one seeking exorcism, one seeking a release and inviting and giving the privilege of others to go on that journey who might have a similar scratch, a similar need, a similar scar that needs a salve, that these works are salves, that the idea of manifesting it becomes a salve and logic is not always baked in into healing, but specificity I think is. Daniel, I have one question for you as we're running out our time. When you got the commission to write the book, when you got the charge to write the book, after the excitement, what came up for you? What was the thing that was both most frightening and most exhilarating to overcome? Thank you for that question. I think the thing that was most exhilarating was feeling the force of joy that moved through all of these works. And you brought up Ayesha. And Ayesha was one of my great teachers and also of Ronda Ross. We both took class with Ayesha. And I remember, I've told only this story so often, I remember Ayesha being in a class with us and she would, we would be giving oral presentations, like getting up there to give our little distillation. And she had just come back from Mardi Gras and she had a Harlequin mask and she would sit in the back of the room while you're up there giving a formal presentation, you know, on, on like Sonia Sanchez, the Bronx's next and the violence or whatever.  And what I loved is that she was always understanding the need to have a leg butt in the room, the trickster in the room, to keep us from being too stuck in our certainty, to be able to play and to see the magic that would emerge. So that kind of thing and just remembering the food that was cooked and the gatherings and the mess and the crazy stories. And so that this was a testament of life. And the hard thing is just, you know, I think that the challenge was, was a sadness because I also feel how hard it is to do the work. And, you know, I won't lie and say that it's been easy to do this for 30 years in this way because there are so many times where I don't feel the impact of what I'm doing because what I'm, the impact is not in invisible sight, right? It's like, it's gonna unfold maybe and someone who was part of the worker and witness to it. And so there was also this sense of, wow, you know, the work of my foremothers, not a lot of people know it. So I felt that responsibility because I was like, you know, it's deep. It's deep to always be kind of left off of the conversation when you know that what you're doing is actually in service of the bones, hopefully, of the bones. So that's my response. Thank you for that question. Are there final thoughts or words that we should bring forward during that panel was, you were all stunning. I am totally blown away. I'm so, so grateful for all of you thinking here in the moment. Maybe is there anything, any, you know, that I know that Jason and Viney and Rhonda are here. Is there anything, and Sharon, is there anything you wanted to maybe add? I would love for anyone, yeah, everyone else to come back. That I have no major plan for these final moments of our gathering together. I just thought that we could, that it might be a moment for Daniel to say a few words for anyone who's still with us at our party, to say a few words. Absolutely. I wanna say thank you. I wanna say thank you. Thank you for doing the labor. Thank you for the spiritual guidance that is within that. Thank you for being courageous, for fighting for your very life to get to this moment and in all the ways that you carried us with you and all the ways that we get to stand with spirit, with the architects of our work, with the ancestors that dreamt this moment and thank you for always reaching back, looking forward and pulling us ahead. I love you. I would just also just say thank you. And one of the things I hope, and I don't actually have the physical book, maybe Kate, if you don't mind, if you could just kind of show the gratitude cages, right? Like there is like, I just hope that people will read those pages and there are many pages of gratitude of the people to just again say this is a we thing. This is a we thing. And I hope everyone who is, was ever a part of making any of these works feels themselves valorized in these pages. I think we should call that, that should be your book named Valerie Valorize. Valerie Valorize. My students say, Val does not validate. That's right though. It's beautiful. Daniel, do you have any parting words for us or should we? Just thank you, thank you, thank you. And you know, please buy this book. Buy Love Like Light and please buy Particle and Wave also. And then buy all the books and I would love to just say people like, you know, do if you, I would love people to do this work. I don't know what it would look like or be like, just do it, play with it, have fun with it, like read it out loud. And then also go and look at that list of my mentors that I name. Go and look at the list of the people's names I call in that gratitude list and go find out what they make, go find out what they're doing because I'm certainly not alone. I'm like, I'm part of a large constellation of artists who've been working in this way for years who will continue to work this way. But I'm very grateful that this is a place where people can come and get a jumpstart. And I just want to again, you know, thank Ayesha, I neglected to call her name Adrienne Kennedy. Like so many incredible folks who's work, you know, broke this ground and who didn't live to see a book of their own work necessarily.  So, and thank you, Kate. Thank you everybody who came. I should say to our listeners who are still there, two discount codes, Love Wave, L-O-V-E-W-A-V-E for $7 off of both of these books or Illuminate I-L-L-U-M-I-N-A-T-E for $5 off of Love Like Life. And so those are the codes. We'll tweet them out. And thank you all so, so much for being here today. It was a pleasure, my honor. Bye. Pusheo. Pusheo. Pusheo. Thank you so much everyone.