Our first caller is Danielle from New Hampshire. Danielle, how's it going? How can we help you? It's going great. Thanks. Guys, I just want to let you know how grateful I am for you and all that you do. Earlier this year, I lost my dad to COVID. So it got me to start thinking about my own health and my own mobility. About June of this year, I started working with an FRC coach. And she basically has me unwinding everything that I've learned. So I've always been active. I was a member of the Y. I like to swim. I like to hike. I like to ski. But I started to think about, there's things I can't do. We're in Kinstretch and we're learning about, we're going to flex our toes and we're going to roll our ankles around. And so I'm learning, I'm getting new mobility, but I'm still struggling. And then I came across this article and I'm just wondering, so basically I'm 5'9". I'm about 185 pounds and I'm like a tall pair. I guess you could describe me. And just wondering, how does your body shape fit into some of the exercises that you may be able to do or not to? So for instance, a squat. I can get really low when I have no weight, but as soon as I put weight on the bar, I'm back to being parallel. I know what the answer I want you to say is, but I'm just curious to get a little bit of feedback, I guess. Yeah, no, that's a good question. So the answer is actually in what you just said. You could do a full squat with no weight, but when you add weight, then your form obviously goes in the wrong direction. That's a strength issue. How big of a role does your body shape play in a lot of these exercises? Somewhat of a role, small role for most people, because a lot of these movements are kind of foundational, fundamental pieces of human movement. So it's like walking, right? So there's a person's body shape play a role and their ability to walk to some degree, but really small, right? Because we all evolve to be able to walk. Well, you also evolve to be able to squat and press and row and rotate to some degree and do some split stance exercises. Now, when you get into very technical movements that require very specific types of mobility, then maybe it plays a larger role. But when you're talking about, you know, most of the exercises you're going to do in the gym, a lot of it has to do with strength, mobility and connection. And much less of it has to do with just our body shape or the length of our limbs or how our joints look. And I know there's like this movement in the fitness space to talk about, you know, hip joint and the socket and the length of the femur. And, you know, and yes, there's definitely cases where that plays a role, but it's a lot smaller than people think. For the most part, all of us have the capability to be able to do most of these movements. And what gets in the way is just, you know, tightness, weakness and lack of stability. Danielle, first of all, I think the fact that you're doing FRC and you've hired a coach is incredible. I think everything that they're teaching over there is phenomenal. It's life changing. Absolutely. It really is. Yeah. No, I love, I love hearing when people actually sign up and start going through that process. It was life changing for me. So I think that's great. Are you doing any, are you following a maps program or anything in conjunction with it, or are you doing that by itself? Just by itself. And then I work with her, the trainer, three days a week doing heavy lifting and stuff like that. So I am the kind of person that needs that constant correction and that for right now where I'm at, I just need someone standing over me and correcting form. And like I said, I have done push-ups wrong. I didn't realize this. I was doing push-ups around my whole life. So it's a little bit eye-opening, but I just need someone right now where I'm at to, to guide me through the phases and the exercise and using proper form. Are they, are they coming with you in person or are you doing this virtually? How are you doing it right now? No, I'm going to their studio. Oh, nice. Well, I mean, and you know, I tell you what, like if you didn't, if you weren't following something, I would have recommended something like maps performance, I think would complement what you're doing with FRC. But even our programs, I think we've said this many times on the show, nothing beats a really good coach in person, somebody who can call an audible while they're coaching you and explain to you why this feels this way or what's going on with your body. Hey, let's move over here and now do these movements. And if that coach is doing that stuff with you, I think that it's at this point, it's more just about being patient, be patient, stay consistent. You're doing the right things. I think you're on the right track by having someone like an FRC coach help you out. I think you're in great hands. Yeah.  It's every single time I've gone through it and we've, you know, the more educated I got with techniques like FRC and, you know, other types of, you know, ways to address connectivity issues and stability issues. It really highlights, you know, just the amount of times you've just patterned this certain process forever to where you've, you've self-regulated and sort of limited that a lot of times just based off of like the, the type of habits and routines like you've done over the years. And there is a way to get, go in there. And like you said, kind of unwind and unpack and, and, you know, dive into that process and see like, unlocks a whole new potential movement-wise. And that's what I love about, you know, those types of modalities is it really like highlights the abilities are there, but you have to do maybe sometimes more work to, to get back to the root of the actual cost. And Danielle, it says in your written question that you started in June of this year. Yeah. Oh yeah.  You're just, you're just, I know, but it's really hard when, when someone says you don't have the prerequisite to do that. Do it, you know. Well, you know what, don't, don't, don't, I saw too that, I mean, you admit that it's kind of a shot to the ego for somebody who's been working out and doing fitness. You know what, it was, it was challenging for me too. I remember the first time that I hung out with Dr. Brink and he broke me down. Here I am a personal trainer. I've been training other people my whole life. And then basically to tell me the same exact thing, hey, you don't have the prerequisites to be squatting that much weight on your back. You should be doing X, Y, and Z. And, and I'm also somebody who falls under that like, you know, morphology is not ideal for squatting really deep. I'm six foot three. I do have a long, a long femur. I have poor ankle mobility. So it was extremely challenging for me to get to where I'm at. That's why, that's why to today I'm more proud about my squat depth than I am any PR I've ever hit in my life as far as, oh, I've, you know, I've squatted 420 pounds. I've benched X. Like, I don't really care about that. I'm more proud about the change in movement that I made in the depth. You have totally different metrics now that you're applying towards these exercises. And yeah, and you just have to look at it completely differently, like of how much you're accomplishing, but in a completely different path than you were before. You're on the right track, Danielle. You're doing the right stuff. So just hang in there and you're going to continue to improve for a while. I appreciate that. Thank you. No problem. Thanks for calling in. Yeah. A lot of people don't realize that, by the way, forget mobility, forget what this person's talking about. If any, if someone hires me as a beginner, it's, it takes six months at least humbling before they released. I'm able to really start pushing them with their work out literally for the, this is the average part takes at least six months before that happens. She's an athlete, dude. This is, I can totally connect with this feeling.  That's a shot to the guy. Yeah. And there, there's these things. It can be a shot. And then it is, I think, you know, mobility progress is seems to be a little more daunting than seeing just more weights. I feel like it's easier to get strong in my opinion. It's easier to add three to five pounds to the bar on almost any exercise you're doing than to see yourself get an extra inch or two of depth. Well, it's more, I guess, ego rewarding. It's counterintuitive. Yeah. It's just more ego rewarding.  Exactly.   Well, I mean, well, for me, this is what I'm concerned about. So that plays a role. Yeah. And back to what I said, it's, it takes a while. It doesn't mean you're not, you don't have a certain level of fitness or stamina or strength for what you were doing. It's just you're relearning movements and it takes, it takes a while. She's probably already made tremendous improvements in that short period of time, but wanting it to happen faster it does just take time. But once you get there and you start to get there fast, you start to get there faster and faster. It's a snowball effect. Well, and a lot of this is just reframing the way you look at, you know, kind of exercise and to Justin's point, I had my nephew just call me recently. He just, he's just transitioned out of maps in a block. He's going into maps performance and he's kind of like overviewing the workouts for the first phase. And he's like, you know, this seems too easy for me. Should I add, he was calling to ask if he should add sets or do some of that. I said, listen, I need you. And I know him really well obviously, so I can, I have a little more insight. I'm like, I need you to look at this program completely different than the way you looked at maps anabolic. When you went into maps, anabolic was about building your metabolism, about getting stronger. Now that we're moving into performance, I really don't care if the workout looks like it could be easier, it could be harder, it could be more, your get away from the, I want to be strong. And that's where you're heading. Just even though that's your, maybe your longterm goal, the goal of this program is to perfect your movement, is to increase mobility. So when you go into a workout, let's say you're doing like the reverse lunge to press with the landmine, which is a unique exercise. A lot of people may have not done that before. I care less if you called me and said, Hey, Adam, last week I was doing that with 50 pounds and now I'm doing it with 80 pounds. I would rather you say, I started out with 50 pounds and I actually had to back off to 40, but man, I, the movement feels so smooth. It looks so good. You know, I can, I can slow it. Yes. So, and that, that's the idea is you, but it's hard if you are, you know, like my nephew who wants to be, he's a, you know, ex football player, strong guy, like that's all he cares about is getting buff and strong or losing body fat. It's all centered around that and just getting him to wrap his brain around. When we are now working on movement and mobility, it's a different mindset going into it. So she needs to do the same thing as, is stop worrying about how fast you ran or swam before, forget about how much weight you squatted or bench-spressed before. And now it becomes, you know, what did the movement look like last year and what does the movement look like this year with the work that I've been putting in and, and start, start being proud of yourself for the gains that you've made in that direction versus the weight going up or down the bar. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here and be sure to subscribe.


The Cube presents UiPath Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. Okay, the party has started here at Forward 5 UiPath's big customer event, you watch The Cube. We're wrapping up day one with the co-CEO segment. Daniel Dines is here, he's the founder and co-CEO of UiPath, and Rob Enslin is the co-CEO. Gents, great to see you. Thanks for spending some time with us. I know you're super busy. Thanks, Dave. So I've been looking forward to this. Daniel, you know, I've followed the company for a long time. The really interesting path you took to get to where you are today.  Well, let me start. I was looking for a partner. Actually, in our work, do your stand here. We are talking about how you feel in this job. You feel so alone. Because you are at the center of all pressure points. And having a partner, having someone that has your back, it's kind of awesome. So I was looking for a partner, and our common friend, Karl Aschenbach, introduced us to each other, and we instantly clicked. And this is the type of job where it's either work well or it doesn't. It cannot be anything in the middle. Right, Karl, we know Karl well. Awesome operator, knows the business super well. So Rob, what attracted you to UiPath? You had a great situation at Google. You guys were growing like crazy. Why did you decide to come here? What did you see that attracted you? Yeah, you know, when I went to Google, I went to Google because I really believed that data and AI was necessary for companies. And businesses to be competitive in the future. And we did some great stuff at Google Cloud in the three years. But I knew UiPath from a couple of years ago when they were mainly in RPA space. And I just felt that there was a place in time where automation was gonna expand. And as I sat down with Karl a couple of times, spoke to Karl, and then I sat down with Daniel, I knew that there was something special with UiPath, there could be a generational opportunity not only for myself, but for the company in the future. And then I got to know Daniel. And at this stage of my career, I was like, I'm pretty fussy about what I want to do and what I want to go. First of all, I wanted to go to a company that had a great product, had a great culture, and I wanted to work with somebody that we could shape the future together. Daniel and I just hit it off from the very first time we met. He got to meet my family, my dogs, and we did the whole courting thing before we actually decided this was gonna be a good thing for both of us. That's good, you gotta meet the family. We just had, John Furrier and I just had Mohit Aran and Sanjay Phoonan into our studio. Because Mohit, former Google, long time, and they decided to kind of split duties. Mohit's going into product, he didn't keep the CEO title, you are. How are you guys splitting your time? What are each of you kind of responsible for? It's kind of similar. On a day-by-day operation, I rely heavily on Rob. We do together strategic decisions about the company destiny. I'm doing mostly the product these days, which is a big relief for me. And I think we also split a bit the customer's visits. Which is great, I still enjoy meeting customers. I need customers and food for my thoughts. And you're an awesome product visionary. You've been there since day one. Now Rob, you said in the keynote today that you've seen around 100 customers, you've traversed the world. What did you learn from them that informed you, that gave you confidence that the move to the enterprise platform, even though you had already started that, but you're really doubling down on that from a standpoint. You know Dave, when you think about it, I was so impressed that Daniel had the vision to create a platform three years ago. Yeah. Right? And as we went around the world, as I went around the world, it was one of the very first things I said, I've got to understand, have customers see UiPath on their vantage point. What are they looking for from us? Why is this company, why do customers like this company so much? And as I went around the world and I went to Asia, Australia, Singapore, Japan, I was in Europe twice, we did a trip together, we went to visit customers. And it was very much the same thing, help us expand automation faster. And we are so surprised at the breadth of your platform. We never knew that. And so it kind of just had, for me it was conviction, it's like this was the right decision you made, there's so much opportunity here. And that's kind of what I've learned in the last four or five months. Now as you know, Daniel, I've written a lot about your company. One of the things I said is that startups, if I could call you that back pre-IPO, typically don't have as much international exposure as UiPath had. I mean you sort of started as an international company and became more US centric. You said in the keynote today, you're talking to Ray Wong about, people maybe don't understand the challenges of FX. Point being, when you convert international dollars into US dollars, there are less of them because the dollar's stronger. But still, I've always felt like that international footprint is an advantage. Rob, you came from SAP. Again, European based company. Do you regret that now? I mean, I know it's more tactile, I'm sure you don't. But talk about that sort of international exposure why that's a long term benefit. Well, first of all, we expand faster. I think we expanded faster than our competition because our global footprint was larger. And we had the courage to go in Japan, for instance. Everybody told me it's impossible to make for such a small startup, it's impossible to make a business in Japan. But we didn't believe it. We were just crazy and we went there and we built a very sizable business in Japan. 55% of our revenue, even today, it's outside US. Now, of course, that has the downside when the local currencies are losing the value compared to the dollar, we are impacted as we call to investors until now. So we are seeing like an 80 million headwind in terms of ARR, it's huge. Only because of FX and losing the business in Russia. But it's still, it's the strength of our company. Things will come back. And then the growth engine will reaccelerate again. Yeah, when the dollar weakens, that'll get you in your favor. Rob, I want to pick up on something you said today in your keynote. You went back and started the cycles of ERP and internet, et cetera. I kind of have a love hate with ERP. I have to be honest, but if I will go back to the late 80s, 90s, you wouldn't have been able to pick SAP as the winner and then SAP emerged very clearly. But the more interesting thing is that the customers who were implementing ERP well, the practitioners did better than their peers.  Different world, obviously, but do you see the same thing happening with RPA and automation? What gives you confidence that that's the case? I absolutely do see the same thing happening with automation and RPA being a part of that. The reason I believe that is speed is so critical and if you think about how hard it is for a CIO or a C-level executive to consume the technology coming at them, plus all the changes in the world being thrown at them, it's compiling and compiling and compiling. We have an incredible solution that can help companies in these constrained times deliver outcomes to their business like no one else can. And when I see that, I view that as just like the beginning of what's gonna happen in the future. So in many ways, and I've said this to many of my friends, it feels like 1992, 93 to me. And it's interesting because nobody really understood that why SAP would be great in 1992 and 93. And they got a couple of things right. They got the ecosystem right, the new partners were important, and they knew they needed to drive business outcomes for companies in which they did. And so I feel like we are in a very similar place, very different technology obviously, and the speed of change now is so dramatic compared to what it was. And there's very few technologies that can provide that level of speed and accommodation to their customers. All right, let's talk about priorities. You guys got a lot of work to do and you've laid it out to the financial community. You gotta have profitable growth because FX, in part, you've lowered your forecast. But I think there's some conservatism in there as well. But you got to do that balance. You've given some guidance on gross margins, cloud maybe brings that down a little bit. R&D, I saw a wide range, 13 to 17%. I hope you keep spending on R&D. Big fan of that. Stock buybacks, R&D, if you're in your position are going to be better. And the product priorities continue to build that out. My question, let's start with the product. So you've got an on-prem stack and you've got a cloud stack that's emerging. How do you balance those out? How do you do the integration? You've done a great job with the integration. Are you concerned about your ability to continue to work at that speed with two code bases? I wonder if you could address that. We've become a cloud-first company. We deliver all of our products first in the cloud. We deliver on a two-week cadence in the cloud. So that helped us iterate quite fast. I think we made a very good business decision to build our cloud team in Seattle, in Bellevue to be specific. And we have access to great talent that knows how to build serious cloud service, which is a hard-to-find talent. And also, we benefit... One of our early benefits was we have a really good architecture. We have an architecture that works easily on-prem and on-the-cloud. And even today, our workflow foundation, our local no-code designers, were easy to modernize. So right now we are launching StudioWeb. But behind the scenes is the same workflow engine. Our customers don't have to rewrite anything. It just works. And it was the same easy to take our on-prem product and run it in a multi-tenant cloud. So there is no friction at all. Actually, cloud is just helping us accelerate. But we benefit again of a really solid architectural foundation. Architecture matters. We've seen that in this industry. We got the B-52s rocking out in the background. I love it. But I got so many questions for you guys. I want to talk about the go-to market. Yeah. Because Rob, it's obviously a strength of yours. You've come in, you've communicated to the street that you're reshaping your sales force. I think lowering the ratio of sales, people, the customers at the high-end, mid-range, as well, using digital. I mean, I think the numbers are 1 to 10 now at the top. 1 to maybe 50 at the mid-range. Where are you in terms of that journey? You've got to find people, you've got to train them. How do you get the productivity out of those guys? Take us through your thinking there. Yeah, first of all, I think we have enough resources. I think resources are not an issue. We have an incredible vehicle to acquire customers inside the company. Our digital sales motion is probably the best I've seen. And so we have the ability to acquire customers really fast. And we get the first workload in really fast. The challenge is we need to be able to drive a propensity model where we graduate customers when we acquire them into the direct sales force. And that direct sales force, we're not going to go 1 to 30. We're talking 1 to 10 for the direct sales force. And even higher up in the pyramid, we want to have even a denser model on that. And the whole purpose is to drive the time to consumption much quicker, much faster. So we know exactly if we acquire a customer, will they spend? Do they have a propensity spend? And on what levers do they have a propensity to spend? And therefore, when we capture them, we can immediately surround them and put the right resources so we can grow faster. We think this will have a significant impact on the organization. We'll start to implement certain pieces in the next quarter. Things like packaging solutions, putting that in enabling the sales organization. And by the beginning of next year, we'll be ready to actually go full ball globally. We already put some pieces in place when I joined. Chris Webber, my chief business officer, did a great job doing some of those pieces. So we're on the journey already.  And I think you broke out just yesterday, the NRR for overseas versus US, I think it was 140 plus percent, very, very strong, a little less overseas, but the churn is still very low. Okay, so that's super positive. Customer affinity, I always, when I go to these events, I listen to the keynotes very carefully and then I interview customers on the Cube and I try to identify, is there alignment there? And I've seen very strong alignment, I have to say, and strong customer affinity. So that's in your favor. I had, Daniel, I got another question for you on product. What is semantic automation? What the heck is that? Can you explain that? I don't understand. Dave, have you seen the demo in my keynote? You know, I had to leave and do interviews, so I missed it. I think that demo answered completely your question. So in the scene, you know, there is a saying that great, you cannot distinguish great technology by magic. I think technology should be simple. And we showed today one of the simplest demo that you can imagine, but it's such a complex technology behind the scene that you also cannot imagine. So what was the demo? We show how one business user, without any technical skills, can go to any type of document, can be a passport, can be an invoice, can be a legal contract. And just show, I wanna copy data from here, and I wanna paste data there. Can be a spreadsheet, can be another application, and like a human user, without understanding, without having prior knowledge about data, document layout, about screens, screens layout, nothing. We analyze real time document. We discover the meaning of the information. We analyze the screen. We understand the screen, but we understand the meaning of the screen. And we understand how information in one side relate to the other side. And we just connect the dots, and we copy the information, and we paste it. A job that you would do as a human user, maybe three minutes, it's done in 10 seconds. This is powerful. Yeah, that is powerful. Thank you for that.  Last question, I'll let you guys go. Rob, you got traders, and you got long-term investors. Traders are gonna be defensive today. I get that. Make the case for UiPath for long-term investors. I think we're gonna be a multi-billion dollar company, and we're gonna be a generational company of our time. We will define enterprise automation, and it's gonna be a long-term game, and we feel like really strong that we'll be the lead in that game. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great show. Always fun at UiPath Forward. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks Dave, appreciate it as well. Okay, wrapping up day one. We're here tomorrow. First thing, Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching. Forward Five, UiPath's big customer event. We'll see you tomorrow.


Why manifesting something seems so much harder than others? It's quite simple and honestly, this happens to me too. You see, when we don't really care if we receive a manifestation or not, that is when it's easy. Coffee, a parking spot, winning a game, something very minuscule, right? It's because we're not attached to the outcome. We literally do not care if we get that thing or not. So there are no blocks and there are no resistance to receiving that manifestation, so it comes right in. But when we assign a bigger meaning to something, that means we are attached to it. We build blocks around it. We have this resistance towards it because we think it's so big, right? And then we believe, and that's the key word here, we believe that it's more difficult to obtain. And that in itself is what's making it difficult to manifest. So all you need to do pretend that every manifestation you are working towards doesn't matter, it's not a big deal. You do not care if you receive it or not.


Hi, my name is Dr. Douglas Miller. I'm the head of our radiation oncology department at Hackensack Meridian Health, Jersey Shore University Medical Center's cancer program. When a patient's diagnosed with any type of cancer or malignancy, one of the strengths of the Hackensack Meridian Cancer Program has to do with the team that's behind us and the team that helps support the patient going through the entirety of their cancer journey. Each radiation treatment, typically speaking, is only about five minutes. I tell all patients it'll take you longer, unfortunately, to park than actually to get those treatments. Each radiation treatment is painless and invisible. Everyone asks these three questions. You will not glow at night. You are not radioactive and you're not a danger to anybody while you're getting radiation treatment. Our radiation oncology department continues to lead the field in terms of offering the latest clinical trials as well as clinical techniques to be able to treat a variety of malignancies. You are constantly evaluating the next step in cancer care and making sure that we achieve better and better outcomes, giving all patients the hope that they need that they're going to be successful along in their cancer journey. When we establish such great patient bonds as a department and as a cancer program, that patients come back and see us to help us ensure that there's no evidence of a cancer recurrence, to make sure that we've supported them with any side effects related to treatments, whether it's after radiation or chemotherapy treatments. So our team with our cancer program survivorship is really what's the best element of our cancer program here at Hackensack Meridian Cancer Care. The bonds that we form with patients and their families to be able to guide them through a scary diagnosis like a cancer diagnosis really is what drives me to come to work every day to make sure that we are delivering the best care to residents where I grew up here in the Jersey Shore.


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nced, but involved. Milton Katsilis, the director, exploits what the staging gives him. His players enact a tortured set of movements on a platform hovering just above a bottomless well of darkness, and they vainly struggle to evade or to wrestle with invincible emanations from the darkness beneath their feet. I've been unable to get this young man a job on one of the major Washington papers, but I applaud his description at this gathering. Not intimacy, involvement, not being part of the action, but being a witness to it. Not eavesdropping, but attending the event and really looking at it. Not gawking, but watching. Aroused, alert, emotionally involved, but watching, and learning. For truth is specific, and truth is sculptural, and truth is mobile, ever shifting, ever changing, ever presenting different faces of itself. And further, the first law of relationship is self-containment. In the arena, the audience and the player are separated, but one surrounds the other, envelops the other, and when the art happens, the impact and connection that can be achieved between one and the other is simply not achievable in any other form. Thank you. A huge round of applause for all the speakers of the panel on the open stage, and now we invite Paul to lead us in a little discussion about that speech, thank you. Well, do you think she loved this space? I think what's extraordinary about this speech is that she gave this speech six years after the theater had opened, and she was marveling at this arena concept and this sort of in the round. And I think that she makes reference to the arenas that she had studied prior to that in Nine of Ants in Houston and Margo Jones in Dallas. And I think, thinking back to Howard's, the speech that Howard led just previously with the sort of emphasis on the actor, and that was always Zelda's thing, the emphasis on the actor. And I think for her, nothing did that more than sort of this kind of arena concept where it's not about the scenery. It's not, you know, this sort of says don't put a lot of scenery here, and it's really about the interchange between actors and the audience. And I think that was, and something she said in this speech was she talked about truth. And I think for her, that was critical. So others thoughts on this speech about a space that I think she clearly loved. I'll say something. Well, I feel my feet being held to the fire right now because I'm about to direct in the proscenium space. And I'm thinking about that statement she said about when I sit on the sides, I don't see a different play. I see the sides of the play. And so just really thinking about that. And I know we have a number of directors who are here in the room right now. And I guess I'm sort of curious about how that struck you or how you've faced that challenge when you are not in a space like the arena stage, when you are in a proscenium or a platform and to ensure that it's not the sides that you are showing. I'm looking at joy. I don't know if you'd like to comment. It's a subject that I am passionately interested in. The degree to which the form of the stage affects the work. I myself have built three thrust stages in my life at the Studio Theater and one completely flexible space. But I am a tremendous admirer of that arena. Tremendous admirer. And I love every thing that she says. The issue of course is finding actors and directors that know how to work in that form, which is not easy. Because for example, just to be brief, the center is the strongest place, as she alluded to in the thrust and certainly on a proscenium. But the center is the weakest place in the round because your back is to the most number of people.  So this notion about being on the side, almost everything, for example, two characters looking at each other, which one would normally identify, hello Helen, with intimacy or violence or more dramatic relations to each other, produce something which is totally closed. Two characters in an arena looking at each other, no one can see either one of them. So you have counter-intuitive staging requirements. It takes a lot of experience. I was just telling my dear friend here that I gave a lecture last week about directing in the arena and there is this notion that almost anything is wonderful if it doesn't last too long. So I'm at note. But just to say, I probably love that speech more than anyone else in this room. Thank you. Anyone else? Yeah, towards the end of this speech, the importance that this space places on the audience and audiences engagement with the work, that you're not absorbing it but you're engaged. There's a real active quality to that and it's what you feel very alive in this space. And I'm just hearing that. I connected it to a phrase that has been like a bell in her other speeches I've had a chance to hear today which is, what is to be done? And there's just some connection for me between that question that she seemed to be asking her whole life. What is to be done? How can we come together and make this space? How can we come together? How can we understand theater as that? There's some direct connection between that question that she asked and this space. And I think it's really pretty profound. All right, yeah. Thank you. Anyone else? The other thing that just I'll say briefly in that, she doesn't touch on it directly in this speech but clearly she was aware of it is that the other thing that's amazing in this space is not only do you have a direct contact with the actors but you really interact with all the other audience members. I know everyone in the room has sat in this theater and thought you look at the actors but you're also looking at what the other interactions and reactions of the audience are. And I think that's something for her that probably also emphasized that truth. That we're all watching each other to make sure we're all staying honest. So I think it's something else she probably was very aware of. I was actually just thinking the same thing and I was thinking not in an arena space but one of the most potent theatrical experiences I had was actually at Shakespeare Theater Company seeing black watch in which the audience was seated across from each other and I wept profusely. And I remember seeing other people doing the same thing and a colleague of mine was actually across the way and we worked in the same space but not closely. And I remember him coming to me afterwards and having a very interesting conversation with someone I'd never had a deep conversation with before about our shared experience of this piece and what we felt about this piece because we had that interaction and we were able to have that shared experience from it. So it's such an excellent point not to detract from the work that's going on on the stage certainly but sharing that is, yeah. That's the involvement that she talked about. Well I guess I just, yes I was going to say too there's nothing like the shared experience of a play which you do feel anywhere but you are aware of it here at the arena and also as an actor, my first show here was in 1990 and it was such an amazing experience. It does make you truthful. You are very aware that that person might not see you but they're all around you and you are. There's no way to hide. Well, there's no way to hide, there's no way to do your tricks. There is, there is, it, for me it helped me, it was a great lesson for me than to incorporate in everything but it doesn't matter, proceeding or anything. It's about your whole body but it's about you have to be truthful. No messing around. That's what the arena did for me, I think. Maybe it's the being so close but I was watching a show in arena and there were a group of ladies in the very first row and one of them was eating a tuna sandwich as the show went on and as soon as intermission came, excuse me ma'am, you realize there's no eating here. She goes, oh, but I was eating it very small and I said, no, no, no. All of the actors on stage could see you eating that.  There you go. Yes, exactly. Well, thank you all very much for being with us. A huge round of applause, thank you, everybody. Yeah, yeah. So now we'll do a little organizing again. Our next speech is Casting for a Different Truth which will be kicked off by Joyce Inamon and I am still recruiting speakers so I see some of you who have not yet spoken today and or those who have before, I invite you to come over here with me. We need a total of 10 speakers in total, including Joy and let's sort of organize folks. All right, I see the mass of humanity coming my way. Thanks. Sarah Hope, let's see what the speech number five, so let's see two of them. Hi, welcome back everyone. We are now about to do speech number five, Casting for a Different Truth. For those of you who are just joining us, as you know, we're celebrating the words and ideas of Zelda Fitch Handler, who was a pioneering founder of Arena Stage and we are live streaming on HowlRound and following the reading, we'll have a discussion of the ideas of this speech. So it's a great honor for me to introduce our kickoff speaker for this speech, Joyce Inamon, thank you. Things can fall about you. I want to introduce this speech by pointing out the date in which it was written. May 1988, it's an article by Zelda Fitch Handler, which was published in American Theater Magazine. Just think about where we were then and where we are now. Where belongs to the world of the imagination? It is no one place. It is every place and any place. An empty space to be filled in any way we wish. We have always have had it. It's as old as our curiosities, our fears, our hungers, our need to understand and control our lives. It is a game we organize quite deliberately and play out with the proper sense of seriousness and ceremony to discover what our dreams are telling us. Why we have done what we have done, where our feelings could take us, and how we can overcome our enemies from within and without. It's a universal game. Everybody believes it in one form or another and grown-ups believe it the same way children do. You be daddy, I'll be mommy, we'll have dinner, then you get mad, and I, that is we believe in it even though we know it's all make-believe. We believe in it because we want to, because we need to, at the very center of the theater event is the will to imagine, both for the actor and the audience. Think when we talk of horses that you see them, Shakespeare's prologue to Henry V tells us, suppose within the girdles of these walls, suppose. Suppose that there were a fine acting company made up of white actors and black actors and Hispanic actors and Asian American actors, women and men, young actors, older and old, deaf actors and the hearing, actors with other special characteristics, and suppose that one assigned roles freely, without prediction from history or from one's old habits of thought. What if one took non-traditional casting as far as one could? Suppose the premise of this theater company, its founding principle was that the human spirit could be embodied in unpredictable and newly imagined ways, astonishing the spectator, and revealing meanings never before anticipated, sloughing off old ways of looking at things and opening up to their very heart. Suppose in some universal space, the actors could strip private identities to the core, lose the accidental shells of personality, date of birth, gender and national origin, and become purely human. Thought answering thought, feeling responding to feeling, action following directly upon intention. Anthropologists tell us that we sense our belonging first to our species, second to our gender, and last to our race, and that we would give up these attributes if we were forced to in reverse order. We are all more simply human than otherwise, and isn't it that which speaks out in the end in the theater? In every culture there is a resemblance between the face of anguish and the face of ecstasy. In the theater we recognize, relearn, re-remember, re-know our common past and joined fate. I can imagine such a company, and it excites me. I can imagine it, though I wouldn't yet know how to make it real. Surely it is not an abstract possibility. A thrilling aspect of Peter Brooks, the Mahabharata, is that actors come from 18 countries, and speak English in their various individual accents. Here is a beginning model for the kind of company one could envision as an ultimate form of non-traditional theatrical expression. Every play is an archeological dig that tells or suggests how people live their lives, what their mode of thought was, what gods they believed in, how they made their money, what books they read, what they ate, sat on, and wore. Plays are temporal and age-rooted, and for that reason go in and out of focus for the culture that looks back upon them. They are now dated, now relevant, showing themselves this way and that, like phases of the moon. Casting is a role given a specific living and breathing persona to the imagined figure who exists in a specific social, political, and philosophic imagined world. The tapestry of events and relationships is created out of the actor characters of this world. Once you've cast this play, you have more or less predicted the outcome of the event, or you have a bestowed life upon the characters. Before choosing the play itself, the single most important creative act of the producer and director is to quote, fill the roles. For once those two have removed themselves, the actor and the audience will be left to share the implications of each other's presence within the tale and acted between them. The actor and the audience then share a highly political act of communication and empathy. They speak to each other through and under the lines of the play of their daily lives and of what they want to come of them for themselves and for their children. Non-traditional casting in the end becomes a matter not of employment, but of politics and of art. John Connie is appearing now as a fellow in Johannesburg's Market Theater, South Africa's first professional production of a fellow with a black actor in the title role. An example of non-traditional casting with a twist. He plays to an almost all white audience of 520 a night and it comes as no surprise that in a country prohibited, that in a country prohibited, that prohibited interracial marriage until two years ago, a fellow in Desdemona's first passionate stage embrace briefly but palpably startles theatergoers. Not very long ago, the spectacle of Connie kissing blonde and fair-skinned actress Joanna Weinberg full on the mouth would have triggered a national debate and probably violent demonstrations by white supremacist groups. Indeed, Connie recalled when he appeared in Strinberg's Miss Julie at the Market just two years ago, half the audience walked out as he put his hand on the thigh of the white actress playing the lead role. The next night, Connie needed the protection of security officers to leave the theater safely and subsequently, the government curtailed the run of the play. While one can doubt that two years ago have changed fundamental attitude so radically and Shakespeare's perceptions from 1604 can be used as a smoke screen for acceptance, still production photos of a fellow's racial intimacy now appear on the review pages of South African newspapers without a murmur of indignation. Howard Sackler's master play, The Great White Hope caused a similar, though much milder kind of ripple when it opened at arena stage 20 years ago. Basing the play on the career of Jack Johnson who in 1908 became the world's first black heavyweight champion and on the subsequent search for a white hope to topple him and redeem the Caucasian race. Sackler tossed upon the stage a microcosm of American attitudes on race. With James Earl Jones as Jefferson, a figure both heroic and personal and Jane Alexander as his white love Ellie, a woman of heartbreak strength. The play rocked audiences in Washington and later in a shorter and more melodramatic version in New York. Jefferson is picked up on a man act violation in the midst of one of the most romantic, most tender love scenes I have ever watched on stage. I remember that the audience audibly reacted when the lights came up on Jack and Ellie in bed and several of the actors felt the need to have their phone numbers unlisted to eliminate harassing calls. The social climate changes. Every reaction is special to its time and place. There is an identifiable feel and even sound for what passes between the actor and audience as the world that lives in the play meets the world that the audience brings in from the outside. The issue of non-traditional casting derives its electricity and, yes, its complexity from the contemporaneity of the act of theater. It is certainly right that the ideas behind it are being put up for examination and discussion. For in many instances or theater casting policies have not kept up with American life, much less led the way. 20 years ago, I wrote in a grant application that the creative casting of black and white actors in a repertory selected with that end in mind should make it possible for us to explode the theater event to a dimension we have rarely experienced and to connect our work on stage with the reality outside. New images should pop out at us. New understandings jump to mind. We are given new eyes with which to see old plays and old plays find fresh facets to touch the present day. One wonders what arena's experiment in the late 60s with a totally integrated acting company would yield today. For a variety of reasons, this experiment was not successful, despite goodwill on all sides and a number of productions that were, as I remember them, both the theatrically vivid and revealing human. I recall with pride and warmth Frank Silvera's Lear and Mary Alice's vulnerable Cordelia with Ned Beatty as the fool and Olivia Cole's tempestuous stepdaughter in six characters in search of an author. The second family was cast with black actors. Opposite Richard Bencher as the father, alternating as the leading man in a rotating repertory schedule with Robert Prosky. The accompanying third production, Brackton Vile's Three Penny Opera, missed somehow, but the idea of an integrated society for this work has always seemed just right to me. The idea for the company began to pale with Marat Saad and Indians. Actors and audience drifted away, the center would not hold. Was the idea ahead of its time? What variants would make it work today?  Should the aesthetic have been based on blind casting, casting without regard to color rather than on the casting of black and white actors when a conscious man are meant to be creative? Is a traditional western repertoire of any more interest to a black audience today than it was 20 years ago, even if the company is totally integrated?  Opportunities in film and TV, revisiting live theater now and then for a role that is particularly compelling. Are we training young black actors for our theaters and the plays they produce? Do young black would-be actors see a future for themselves in the American theater that weren't spending the time and the money to train for it? What about the repertoire of an integrated company? Is our earlier concept now out of date? At the time of that company, James Earl Jones said in an interview, if I walk on stage in a part where race is not supposed to be an issue and the play is not broad enough in scope to support me, it doesn't work. I did Lenny and of Mice and Men and it worked perfectly. He's a classic loner. Only plays that are large in scope can be appropriately integrated. Is this still true? Today, would we believe James Earl Jones as Willie Lohman or Big Daddy? Have times changed? In the same interview, Jones suggested that white actors should at some time play black roles so that they can find out what it feels like to be black. I like that idea. In the graduate acting program at New York University last year, Fayeta Lampley, a highly talented black woman, was cast as Amanda Wingfield, the mother in the Glass Menagerie. We presented the play as a companion piece to the crucible, especially for the four students who needed major roles and a large growth of experience. It was at first very difficult for Feta to empathize with this white Southern woman to personalize her needs and her past. But then there was a breakthrough, a rehearsal where the identification occurred. The performances were luminous. Fayeta grew both as an actress and a human being and I can't help but believe that the two aspects are intertwined. Would the same kind of personal transformation occur for a white actress if she were to play Lena Younger, the mother in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun? Or would this casting be creative only for the individual actress and blur the racial issues central to the theme? There are many questions still to ask and many ways to look at the answers and many conditions still to suppose. Another interesting question. Should actors be cast on the basis of talent only? And I think the answer to that one is yes. Quickly adding, not necessarily on the basis of evolved and mature talent, of talent that is already ripe and visible, but on the basis of talent that can be perceived to be there if the person seeing has penetrating and sensitive eyes. That thought holds true as well for the training of very young talent. The responsibility of a training program is first to be able to recognize the talent in the bud and then to organize a curriculum and faculty and environment that will bring it forth. It is a crowded and difficult profession. Only the gifted should enter there. At the same time, producers and directors, especially of companies, are responsible for the evolution, the development and growth of artists and must provide experiences, roles as well as continued training that will ask for and can cause growth. This is ultimately for the benefit of the audience and the art itself, but it is the individual going to the edges of his or her own ability that causes forward leaps of creativity in the group as a whole. No latent gift should go untapped. Leaders in the arts are responsible for unleashing the power of the talent that lies crouched within the person and may still be locked up there. And especially for providing training opportunities for young minority actors who might otherwise never find their place in the American theater. What about women and men's roles? When women occupy such roles in society? A female willy-loman, the brochure asks. One is seeing the exquisite performances of men as women in the Japanese no dramas. Roles that are inherited from their fathers and studied for years and every minute gesture in nuance. And one knows of the successful all-male production of As You Like It in London a few years back, even as Shakespeare wrote it to be played. Several women have played Hamlet, Dame Judith Anderson and Sarah Bernhardt among them. As chair of the graduate acting program at New York University, I recently cast a number of young women as Cassius, Brutus, Mark Anthony and other conspirators in Julius Caesar. Not for reasons of non-traditional casting because we needed juicy roles for these women and this play was enticing for them to explore. I was astonished at both the expressisivity and the validity of the experience and at what was opened up about the nature of women that traditional casting would have repressed. But non-traditional casting poses a different question. Can Willy Loman become Wilhelmina or Wanda Loman without destroying the fabric of the play? How large are our imaginations? Death of a Salesman is a play about children and parents and the parents of those parents. It's a family play and it contains profound information about primal relationships. Mother and son, father and son, mother and father, sibling rivalry, as do all family plays, Oedipus or King Lear or Raising in the Sun. It is also very specific. It centers on a family in a particular culture and the roles that different members of the family play. In its furthest extension, Salesman speaks about the American value system about selling and about selling oneself, about America as a nation of consumers who are losing touch with the land and about lying to other people in order to make money and to oneself in order to go on pleasing mother and father and the rest of the world. Salesman's point of view and primary images are male for its roots are in American business created by American men. Willie grew up at a time of the robber baron when America was turning from an agrarian country to a country whose business was business. The clash of Willie's failed dream of being a salesman and Biff's dream of being himself. I'm a buck an hour Willie. I tried seven states and couldn't raise it. I'm not a leader of men Willie and neither are you is the substance of this work played out in its specifics between a father and a son and in its furthest resonance by a family who internalize the American myth. I've directed Salesman and I'm very close to that play. If I could accept a Wanda as Willie, perhaps I would have achieved the furthest reaches of my humanity and created and concurred that gender is a secondary characteristic of being human. I would also have been able to tear myself from my aesthetic viewpoint that plays contain complex information about the life that gave birth to them and consist of dense psychological moments upon which all this information is brought to bear. I would be lying if I said I had yet arrived at either of these two points and yet they are both worth deep and considerable thought. Thank you. Thank you to all the readers of Casting for a Different Truth and now I invite Joyce Inamon to lead us in a discussion of those great ideas in this speech. Thank you. Whoa. These questions and issues remain with us today. None of them have been answered or solved in the slightest way. Frankly, some of this speech would not stand the test of time nor a politically correct sense of time. Certainly we've had James Earl Jones play Cat in the Hot Tin Roof. Surely we can all agree with the thoughts in the speech on training, but almost 30 years on we have had and continue to have social upheavals, integration, immigration, producing changing demographics, huge influx of Asian and South Asians, much larger Hispanic population. We are in a post-August Wilson era, which is tremendously important to remember, including his own theories and speeches, the ground on which I stand. So in some ways, to me at least, this speech seems almost quaint. At the same time, it is remarkable the degree to which almost 30 years on, it brings up the questions that remain for us today. It's impossible to suggest discussion topics. Because I'm both interested in her issues about species, gender and race, the anthropologist's suggestion that first we identify a species, then is gender and then is race. Zelda's anthropologist, circa 1988, suggests that gender is a firmer identification than race. But now perhaps we see gender also as more mutable, less fixed. So how do you feel about gender-based casting? You can go to the Only Theatre in Cicero Marshall, be brilliant playing Lithuanian Jewish rabbi, she made me cry. But I think one place to start is that Zelda's first thoughts on casting assume a universal game. She posits imagining a human spirit in new and unpredictable ways. Extremely noble kind of way of looking at the theater. But what about plays that are not universal? She seems to pull back when discussing Death of a Salesman. And so the question then, and the question even more now, is are there some plays that cannot be non-traditionally cast? I think nowadays almost everybody agrees that the classics have no limitation. But what do we feel about family plays, about race-based plays, for example? Well, I know as an actress when I was getting cast, I was told, well, if it's not a familial relationship, if it's not brother, sister or stuff, you're cool. I think James L. Jones was sort of talking about that. If it doesn't create dissonance, there, and there's something to be said for Raisin' in the Sun is about black people. Now, I'm not saying that a white person couldn't play the part, but how would the audience see it? And what that person might bring might be very interesting, but would it fit into what you were trying to say in the big picture? I think you could do it, but it would be fun. Well, there are the problems right there. What about the play that's unquote about white people? Is it about black people? Is it about white people? Exactly. So the idea that if it's a play about race, then you've got to stick to the races when you cast it. That's sort of what you're saying, right? It depends. And family. I have an African-American grandson.  And actually, I wonder if it's about our own evolution of what is universal, right? So she was writing from that particular time point. And actually, I really appreciated that she said, she called it out as her own limitation of her own imagination of where she is right now. So it makes me wonder that, you know, what we define as universal today, 20, 30 years from now, well, we have also hopefully evolved. You know, I just directed a production of The Fantastics at Pasadena Playhouse and deliberately cast the parents and the children in different races quite deliberately so. And it worked, you know, I think it worked. The audience seemed to think it worked. But, you know, that question did come up for a few people, like why would you do that? And what was great was rather than us answering, we let the audience answer each other. And they talked about why wouldn't you? It's so universal. It's a play that deals in metaphor and allegory. So maybe it's about our own limitation of what is universal. And that is exactly why the diversity of perspectives and the diversity of artists participating in our art form and in our audiences is so essential so that the multiplicity of voices helps us expand our own, expand our definitions. Widen, what does it mean to be American? And she does wisely suggest that casting could be conscious or blind. So she does very much present a more nuanced look at that very interesting question. I'm struck listening to the speech about how much I miss what she would say right now because this is of its time, this piece, and anticipates some things and it didn't anticipate other things. But to your point, Seema, one of the things that I feel is very loud in this speech that I think she would have a different thing to say now or something to say now is about traditions. You're talking about broadening universality, allowing something to actually be universal. She's talking about traditional notions of casting and roles. And I think we've come to the point where we're questioning whose tradition we're talking about. Precisely. And Zelda would have asked that question because the speech is threaded with the tradition of the Western theater. And yet it's constantly looking toward Peter Brooke and his global company and the market theater and no theater. She's trying to get out past the confines of that tradition. And yet she's still arguing it from inside a trap, a mind trap. I think that's what she's talking about, the limits of her imagination. She's still inside this accepting thing that the traditional theater is Western theater and that the traditions will resolve to, it will resolve to whiteness. And so all of the questions we're asking are about, can others play whiteness? And can whiteness transcend to otherness? And I think we're moving past that now and need visions. Half move, half happen. And we need visionaries for where it takes us. And she's gone. So the other thing I just want to speak into the room that she's talking about, Oni Faida-Lampley in there. And Oni, a tremendous performer, has also passed. And there was much we were learning from her. So yeah, time passes and the learning goes on. A little addendum to what David was saying. Oni wrote a play that was performed here in Washington called Mixed Babies. And it was speaking of mixed. And it was performed by adult women but it was a girl slumber party. And they were all different, all kinds of different degrees and where they were coming from. And so you had a little bit of non-traditional with adults but she had intended that. And you just wonder what she could be playing with now as far as writing. Azelda also suggests that black actors were perhaps more preoccupied with new black plays and burgeoning theater companies. That's an interesting quote. I would say yes, new black plays but where are the burgeoning theater companies if we look 30 years on and what has happened in that regard? I wanted to briefly chime in about this idea of universality and we all identify as a species and I can empathize with you because you're human and that's what species I am. I really struggle with this as an actor because my empathy bank is really big so I do empathize with people based on my species regardless of their race or national origin. So when I perform logically I'm looking at roles that do cross national origin or race because that's how I see universality but I think in the audience I'm not sure if their eyes see that the same way obviously and what they would perceive as me telling a story that's not of my national origin or not of my race and I think maybe universality's in the eye of the beholder and as an actor I'm restricted to what the audience would see in me and I have to take that into account I guess when I'm trying to put something together for an audience. The thing that you mentioned Joy about black theater I moved from the Midwest and I go I'm going to D.C.  I think one notable thing about time again there Joy your question so this is 30 something years ago this speech right 28 I think 28 years and 20 years ago is the ground on which I stand and in the eight years in between was that burgeoning and in that burgeoning we started then to see the co-opting of these voices and these performers into the big institutions the white institutions and so that flowering never really happened and even the organizations that still exist are struggling they're still marginalized organizations that speak authentically first voice African-American organizations of that age so I think it is she was asking a question just ahead a thing happened he spoke to it and that thing was co-opted too fast and the question is whether or not now there was any change whether or not people like Tana Hisi Coates for example and Terrell McRaney and even the ideas of black lives matter whether it's time for a new look theoretically. Yeah and in my experience that looking now is at the owning and being equity power access all of those things in the existing institutions of power rather than trying to create an alternative network an alternative field there is now this sense of no actually we'll just we will take a seat at the table that exists and that's a long time trying to make space at that table and claim space at that table but the original impulse was to create in what Wilson was talking about was to create our own and now I think the impulse is no actually these things exist the infrastructure belongs to us as well and we would like our space in it that's how I'm experience. Got a comment back here. Yeah I appreciate the artistic perspective that people have advanced and move forward but I challenge us to look at the general public to see if they have and I also want to just make a comment with regards to Zelda's perspective from the artistic perspective of it but also she asked that of her administrative staff she asked that of her audience to the theater was opened to everybody when it was opened there were audio description and sign interpretive performances here before anybody imagined the American with Disabilities Act so what she brought to us as a perceived way of being human is artistic and everything else. Anyone else? Well clearly it's an extraordinary speech to take a look at and I'm honored to have the chance to do so. A huge round of applause please for Joy and for all of you for participating in a robust if brief conversation. So we have had such a wonderful marathon of our day and we are on the brink of our very last speech which is let me grab it here. Artists set the stage which will be kicked off by Michael Kahn artistic director of Shakespeare Theater. We probably are gathering more readers and so let's all meet up here those who are still here and we'll assign some reading spaces and this is also probably a good time for a little five minute break if you do need to run to the restroom. Thanks. Good evening and welcome back everyone. As you know we are today celebrating the words and ideas of Zelda Fitchhandler who was the pioneering founder of Arena Stage. Our next and final speech is titled Artists Set the Stage. It's a speech she gave in 1974. We have about five of us readers lined up to read it and of course following the reading of it please join us for a discussion of the ideas of this speech. And for now please allow me to introduce our kickoff speaker Michael Kahn who is the artistic director of Shakespeare Theater. Thank you. I have to say that Zelda not only was a brilliant director and a brilliant writer and a brilliant thinker but she was also a brilliant speaker. So it's so actually say any of Zelda's words is a little inhibiting because I have listened to Zelda speak for over 30 years in my life and so I'm very glad to do this. Okay Arena Stage had a love affair with the Soviet Union last fall. That there was a love affair in both Moscow and Leningrad is simply no denying that it could not be a love affair pure and simple is also a truth. Indeed the truth is rarely pure and never simple. For me the experience was highly charged and deeply important and not easy to sift through or sort out in a short time. The experiential sense, the taste and feel of it was a kind of love and appreciation that we had never before received in our 23 year history and surely that I never have received as a creative worker. I was not in any way prepared for the waves of it for the continuum of it much less for the documentation of it in press from theater people from the audience. It was almost more than one could take this daily bombardment of love. One lady in Moscow saw every performance wrote us impressionistic poetry in her minimal English brought flowers to the curtain calls and one night wrote a garland of large gold coins covering chocolate discs which she put around my neck. The station Vladimir studying to be a drama critic at the theater institute in Moscow saw us off the train from Moscow to Leningrad met the train on its return and came to wave goodbye at the Moscow airport. Each time he brought flowers and records and notes of admiration and affection. Your technicians have taught us how to sweat blood. He said. A young woman from radio Moscow who interviewed me said she had stood in line every day for a month trying to get tickets but the box office opened for unannounced hours and closed by whim. A toothless babushka made an appointment to give me a book of prints of old Russian icons and to say everywhere I look on the stage I see the actors living. I see life in every corner. She pinched my cheeks and said she was glad that I was married and had children as well as a professional life. Three young directing students engaged me in conversation for nearly an hour after the open dress rehearsal we held to accommodate some of the theater people who couldn't get tickets. They asked me how I had made the crowds and inherit the wind so individualized and so alive and inviting me to come and lecture to their directing class at Moscow University. The audience is stumped and clapped rhythmically and shouted bravos at the curtain call standing up in all five tiers of the theater calling the actors back again and again. The press bestowed the mantle of Chekhov and Stanislavsky upon us. A higher compliment they did not have to give. Pravda acknowledged our serious and humane art. Izvestia noted our broad and diverse artistic methods and the actor's capacity for transformation from one character to another as shown in the two contrasting productions. The press was astonished in general to find out that a theatrical company of this kind even existed in America. They had thought of American theater as musical comedy and slick commercial plays put on on a hit and run basis for profit. But here was a company who spoke to them about the universality of man's fate and about as Pravda summarized inherit the wind, the triumph of reason over folly. And then there was the radio and taped scenes and interviews for television and besides all this, the endless autographs on the streets and the flowers and gifts and the embraces and hand kissing and the thanks and misty eyes of the fervent pleas to come back. After a few days, we hardly knew ourselves. At the same time, of course, in the back of our minds, it was not possible to forget that we were part of a larger phenomenon called detente. Further, detente itself was not primarily about love but about bread and about the fact that war by some awesome developments in technology was ruling itself out as a viable instrument of policy. In the midst of the love affair, the Yom Kippur War started. I first learned about it from a member of our company who had heard about it from a Jew who had been in contact with, who had heard it from the voice of America. On the outset of the attack, the Soviet media from all I could tell did not report it or information about Soviet airlifts of military goods to the Middle East. So there was our love affair. At a midday reception at Spasso House, the US ambassador's residence in Moscow, Mr. Voronkov, the Soviet deputy minister of culture, thanked the arena stage troupe for presenting your art of realism by coming here and performing, he said. You have made a new contribution to developing cultural relations between our two countries. You have provided a new stimulus to relations. He offered a toast to the friendship of our peoples, to the friendship between artists of the two countries and to the further continued success of arena stage. At the very same time, Soviet Jews were attempting to send messages to Senator Henry M. Jackson to convey their appreciation for the sponsorship of a measure which linked most favored nation trade benefits to the right to emigrate. Madam Firsteva, USSR minister of culture, left her box under the American flag one evening in Moscow to appear backstage at an intermission to thank the company for coming to the Soviet Union and to invite us back to a list of other cities. At about the same time, Representative Hanson of Idaho read into the congressional record from the house floor commendations for arena stage for bringing to the Soviet Union a play about freedom of speech, inherit the wind. Reminding house members of the harassment of the Russian writer Alexander Solhezhinsen and others, that was making the performance of such a play in Moscow so unfortunately timely. A passionate love affair and a complex one. Oleg Tabakov, the director of Sovremnik Theater in Moscow. Perhaps the Soviet company that most resembles our own in temperament and style, said it well. It was at that historic party their company gave us hours lasting until 3 a.m. Oleg made a speech in which he said that artists could not really do anything. Only politicians could do things. Artists could only point out what had been done and set the stage for the feelings that were needed to bring them about. He quoted Karl Sandberg in Russian. What has been? Already has been. But the future is in our hands. We said, we shall never forget this evening. And he said, it is not enough to not forget. Something has to come of your not forgetting. And he noted that the children in the room were not sleepy or bored even though it was very late because as he said, children know when something important is happening. Another meaning of love. Pinned to my bulletin board above my desk is Hegel's comment. Love is a little moment in the life of lovers. And love remains an inner subjective experience leaving the macrocosm of history untouched. Human history cannot be grasped as the unfolding of human love. This admonition for objective action rightly taken has been useful to me in the past. It has urged me to make decisions I thought were right rather than those that make me popular. It has kept me from setting too much stock by what is called whatever it may mean success. It has kept my nose to the grindstone, my principles essentially private and my eye upon the sparrow. Human history cannot be grasped as the unfolding of human love. Surely the ambiguous and confused situation between the Soviet unit and the United States over the past several months as rail politic rattled the house the detente had built reminds us that love is not enough but there is something deeper to be said. For love does not need to mean precisely love in the sense of pleasurable subjective experience as I have been describing to you. It can mean something far less personal. And far more basic, more imperative, tougher, more biological if you will. Over and above man's search for pleasure and his desire to unite with his world, pleasure or no. Man's attempt is for union, for being one with the objects of the world and among those objects first of all his fellow man. Saint Augustine, I did not yet love and I loved to love. I sought what I might love in love with loving. Man, the discontented animal, seeks the life proper to its species. And his history consists of a forward moving search for a lost time when he was indeed in that prehistoric life without effort or anxiety, a part of all around him. In this search, art plays a unique role for it makes objective and transferable our deepest human impulses and yearnings. There are times when you meet another human being on terms that are neither yours nor his. You simply show something you have made and it pleases him. This is when we are at our best. At these times, the optimistic element of life takes over. That conscious tendency to synthesize, harmonize, reconcile, organize the conflicts that we find in life is in the ascendancy and we are for a moment fully human and most alive. For that moment, what we all too lightly call cultural exchange is taking place. So we played on a very large stage, larger than the Moscow art or the Pushkin, a stage set by the two great powers of our contemporary life. That there are conflicts and divisions between them is not the final point. And surely we didn't alter the course of history of these two great powers with 14 performances in Moscow and Leningrad. But we feel that the things we made and shared cause important feelings in them and in us. And we feel that if those who have political power, as we do not, will exercise their will and insight, their intelligence and leadership will, as Walter Lippmann once posed as a final requirement of his diplomacy, keep talking. Then it may turn out that we have set in motion uniquely important reverberations. That love affair could turn out to be more than a passing fancy. It is our fervent hope that it shall. And now I'd like to invite Michael Kahn to come back up and reflect on this speech with us. No, how, did you have different responses to my responses come from then and now? I wonder in this beautiful speech that article Zelda wrote about what a communication between a theater company and the populace of a country that was strange to them resulted in some beginning of relationship that was important to her, which she then saw as happening in a wonderful way, much larger than the two theater community. Did you have any response to that as an idea or what was in 74 and now in 2016? Is there a difference in the world right now between this? I'm not really answering about the world, but I would say that for those individuals, I can't say a big picture. I can't say, oh, this was the thaw. This is what happened when they saw Inherit the Wind. But I think for individuals, yes. Well, it seems today our relationships with Russia are completely different than during that period of detente. I wonder if you could talk a bit. You said you went to Russia right afterwards and what your reflections are about then and now. I'd love to hear. I was personally a lucky beneficiary of this visit because about, it had to be a few years later during Glasnost, the acting company was invited to Russia with five plays by Tennessee Williams, which I directed and I went to Moscow and to Leningrad and then to Eastern Europe and it was still a time when cultural exchange was one of the largest ways that two communities could meet. And it was, we had very much the same response to being there and the actors also. I think that was an important experience and for the Russians too. But I also remember a couple of things. After the United States won the Cold War, if that's what you'd like to call it, I've been reading a book now called Second Hand Time. Just finished it today by a woman who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, a Russian woman whose book is sort of oral history of people who lived in Soviet Union then in the new Russia. After we, the United States won the Cold War and there was a kind of, I think, hubris that we did not need to change the hearts and minds of the rest of the world anymore. And so cultural exchanges stopped. There might have been financial reasons but there was no longer the political need to send our artists abroad to make for a different kind of understanding of Americans to other countries because we had won. And this article only made me sadder in a way that this, at a time when America needs to do this more than ever, ever, ever before, we're not doing it at all. And I wish this article could be read everywhere in Washington at the Congress to see, for people to be able to see what kind of a country, what kind of people we are, not from the headlines, not from the fights, not from the fact that we are now, perhaps as bad a relationship with Russia as we ever had before the Cold War, but that this could happen and it could happen again. And we need to do it in many parts of the world. So this was a very moving thing for people to watch. So I'm talking because you're not, that's the only reason I wasn't gonna talk at all. But for me, it shows in 32 years from when this article was written that we don't listen to each other in the same way and we tend to not try to understand the other in the middle of an election where a lot of awful things have been said about everybody. And we need to be reminded that art can change this if art is allowed to, so. Thank you for that. That really resonates a lot with me. And I think what you said also applies not only just to American relations with other countries but even within conflicts, like we're seeing conflicts in Africa, for example, where Rwanda and the Congo are fighting, just using art as a way of communication of diplomacy in other places is a really interesting idea that I don't think is being done today but could. Something that I was really struck by in Zelda's words was this idea that the politicians are the ones that are doing and the artists aren't doing. They're making people feel and kind of awakening people to these issues. So that really speaks a lot to me because I wonder what the power is of making someone feel. And if as an artist or an actor you can make someone feel to the point where you're mobilizing them to actually change a belief or refrain from making a decision that could be injurious to someone else because a lot of violence or bad things comes with dehumanizing someone or having these beliefs that are enabling you to take an action. So if you cause someone to feel a certain way that then re-orients this person's thoughts about someone, could that then change their actions and therefore be doing something? Like I don't know, I mean is that made up in my head or is that possible? I think it's a great question. Does theater build empathy, right? It seems like, I suspect for many of us who work in the theater or have gone to the theater on a daily basis you might feel like yes, it builds empathy. The audience walked out and said, I felt that. I stepped in that person's shoes. But it's an interesting question. What then is the next step from empathy to activism? What is the role of our theater companies in that spectrum of artistry and activism? Do we have the political space to occupy as activists and or are we limited by our nonprofit status in certain ways? It's a great question. I've been doing some research with neuroscientists and psychologists around this question of does theater build empathy? And did a little research project last year where we were using a drama intervention with older adults and testing what its results were. And what we found, and we just published this scientific paper, what we found was not empathy. It was just a six week research project though. But what they discovered by engaging in the act of acting which is what we put this group through, they became happier. They reported more self confidence and more empowerment at the end of this research project that we put them through. In the midst of it, they reported greater feelings of anxiety and nervousness because the material they were dealing with, the play that we had them working on brought up all that stuff. But when they got to the end of it, they felt like I conquered this, I could conquer anything. Went a little bit skew, but it's the sort of question, like what is the neuroscience? Do we, does it build empathy? Does it lead to activism? And I guess I pose that to the room if anybody has experiences around that to share or an answer around any of that. Perhaps your own experiences. I saw a lot of shaking of heads, of nodding. Yes. Oh, they can't hear you at all. Paul hold it for her in front of her mouth. That's great. I think, I love what you just ended with. If there's something you can do, you're happy to do it. And maybe that's part of it for all of us. We need to be really intentional about naming what the power of the arts are. And intentional and deliberate in a way in terms of how we invite others to participate with us, electeds, those who we perceive to be in power, how we deliberately engage them. And then even here at arena stage, we have this Voices of Now program that does go internationally through the State Department and does a lot of this sort of work, ensuring that we sing it song loudly as well, so others know. And we're not the only one. I think a number of theaters are doing work that does travel elsewhere. But it often, we don't shine the spotlight on it bright enough, so you can help us with that, certainly. Just as an addendum to some of the things that others have said, I'd like to share an image of metaphor that I've had with me since I've decided to enter into the world of theater. Very early on when I decided this was something that I wanted to do, someone said to me, oh well, every day people have their coffee. You don't wanna be the coffee.  Is that what you mean? And that was just absolutely wrong because for me theater and getting out and sharing between theater makers, between the performers and the audience, it's not the whipped cream, that's the caffeine. That's the thing that brings people to the table that energizes them, that gets them looking around and opening their eyes and starting conversations. And so I think that that's one of the most important tools we can have to have a meeting together of people is that caffeine, that piece of theater that helps you to open your eyes and helps you to talk to the person sitting across the table from you. Any other ideas? Yeah, I have a question. It's for Michael and because I don't know which came first, whether the production came and then somebody contacted the State Department and what happened with the acting company as far as... I don't know what happened with the arena. Which came first. But it was a very important sending of the company to Russia. So I would assume some things were decided before the production. And then you were a pro. I mean, the five by ten was... We were asked to go to Russia and we did this play. But doing Inherit the Wind was a very interesting choice because Inherit the Wind, if you remember, is both a celebration of freedom of speech but also quite a criticism of the suppression of freedom of speech by Americans in America. Because it was the Snopes trial and it was about evolution. At that time, the religious right, it wasn't called that, did not want evolution to be taught in the schools. Can you believe it? And there was a trial over a teacher. And so you had both the forward side of America and the, if you want to be pejorative, backward side of America presented on the stage in a country that we had not been friendly with for many years. So it wasn't itself a very bold choice, not just by the arena, but also by the State Department to send that particular play. I just thought one thing, it didn't actually pay it forward to the Soviet Union at the time, but what it did, this is, I'm talking about a different play, but it made Americans aware of what was going on. There was a play called Zalman or the Madness of God, which was done not long after the company came back. And it was about a beetle, which is about who spoke out. He went crazy, he went mad. And he encouraged the rabbi, Joseph Wiseman, to speak out. And it was a direct result, certainly of their experiences over there. So it made Americans aware. It opened up their eyes to what the censorship was like over in the Soviet Union. And I guess maybe on that note, the whole point of the cultural exchange isn't that it's in one direction that one of the country transforms and opens up, but rather that when it comes back and transforms ourselves is really when the exchange has happened, when it's a two-way or multiple-way street, if it's possible. I think this is a wonderful day in celebrating the wisdom of Zelda. And I think she would have been very pleased. So thank you all for coming. And have a good evening. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


Basil Chapman, first off, we want to thank you from TFNN, all the producers, all the folks here. Folks, Basil sends us these nuts every year, and they're phenomenal, and everyone goes crazy. And we want to thank you, man, because it's always a pleasure. People go wild. Great way to kick off the 2022, man. Thank you. Well, it's my pleasure. You guys do a fantastic job. We make it really easy for us hosts, what we have to do is show up, do our homework, and present our show, and we love that. Pretty cool. Yum, yum! Ooh! I know. Okay, what are we looking at?  You know, Basil, I use it now to give it to people. It's phenomenal, man. I mean, it's a... Fresh and... Yeah! Terrific, yeah. Because they make them right there. I see the machines the whole bit, right? Yeah, right. Pretty cool, man. So anyway, so market-wise, we're looking, talking about nuts, we're talking about monster moves intraday for the last couple of days. What's really important about this is there's a pattern that I talk about a lot, and that's just... I like to look at the market as basically three patterns straight up, straight down. That's one cup formation, that's two, and the arch formation, that's three. And then you can get a combination of one and three, or one and two. I'll keep this up here to show you. You see this H pattern here? The reason why it's red is if you take out this left side low, you can go quite a lot lower, and on the right is the inverse Y, green, because if you take out the left side high, you can go quite a bit higher. And you can see, in fact, right here on the chart, this is the daily chart of the day, right at that peak D, you saw there was like an inverse Y, and look how high you went to that doji candle at the top, 36,565, eighth of November, that's actually the day that we were shorter, we didn't keep that short long enough, but it was a nice timing tool that we used for the Chapman Wave methodology, and we went right to the 200 period exponential moving average, and we've been trying to trade from that on the upside, so what we did today after those three very sharp pullbacks, we went along the diamonds as a trade, because the pattern, you can see this pattern, I'm gonna keep this right here for the moment. This H pattern, you can see, we've got to look at that long leg down, and now we've started the arch formation, and there are two patterns actually that I talk about, the other one is this where prices go up, and then it makes lower highs and much lower lows, and then it suddenly forms a base of support, and it reverses, and it takes out that resistance line, so I call that the, just I like to nickname my chart pattern, just call the falling axe formation, it can also be inverted, but right now it's a falling axe with a lower, but it looks like an axe with a handle on a slope, and what we've got here is exactly that in this Chapman Wave inside track repellent zone at the top part of the trend line, that's this trend line here, there it is, that's where we arched over and came back, so I said to subscribers this morning, we're going along before the open, this is a trade we are still holding our core position from last year, March the 23rd, the day of the low, that's where we started with options, and then a week later we got the diamond call, the diamonds themselves, and what we've done now is we've just added a trading position, and I said watch out for the nine and 14 period moving out, just move this away for now, the nine and 14 period moving averages because that's where you'd expect this to stall, that was fantastic support on the way up, every time it pulled back, that's where it bounced when it's shot through, I think it was at two days, three days ago, it went right through and now you've come back again, so the next level of resistance will be this inside track repellent zone, if for whatever reason, I don't care what the reason is, if the down continues to rally and it takes out 36,189, that's the high that was made last week, that's going to be very important because then maybe we have a chance to get to the all-time high of 36,565, I'm expecting that this is going to be a strong resistance area, although we are looking at a number of stocks that have just been hammered, people talk about this as oh, it's not too bad, but there are individual stocks that were leading the market up that have taken 20, 30, 40 and even 50% hits, so individually that's something to be taking note of, now what's really important about this is that within the weekly chart, you can see we're just in basically an up channel and the monthly chart is still near the highs, so this is something that I'm going to monitor very closely for subscribers, we've kept some of our core possessions, we've taken profits, we've also kept core for some of the stocks that we've had for quite some time and they're doing very well, I didn't want to overdo anything today, I thought if there was a big rally today, these are the stocks that should participate and they are, but at the same time, I'm trying to find low price, I'm doing about single digit stocks that I've been monitoring for some time that are doing very well and that are holding well, so for subscribers, I'm trying to see that we've raised cash, I want to put cash to work now on the long side on very low price stocks that have the potential to avoid any big downturn because they're in areas that are kind of away from the marketplace itself, so it's being very selective, and that's kind of the posture that we're in, we've raised cash, we've got very select positions on the upside, we have no, right at this moment, we have no shorts, I expect that in another few days or maybe early next week, we will start putting shorts back on again, so it's a fascinating market, somewhat overboard, it needs a bit of a rest, I'm still saying it's more a rest, unless the Dow at some point in January takes out 33,500, that'll be serious, but in the meantime, I think it's a very well-organized rotational correction that we're looking at, and that's kind of how I want to treat it, I don't want to get too carried away either way. Yeah, you know, it's intriguing, I mean, Tommy on the show this morning, had the chart up from basically 1997, and I have that up now folks, okay, but you can see the type of consolidation from 2000, the market goes sideways for 13 years, and then just never looks back man, I mean, this doesn't happen folks, just so you understand something. What you're talking about Tom, I've got from 2003, I can go back further, but just from the love of October 2003 at 768 in the S&P, look at these beautiful channels, a beautiful channel that went all the way to 2008, then of course we got that huge 2007, 2008, big pullback, we were actually lucky, we bought the very low on the diamonds, the day of the low of March the 6th of 2009, and look another beautiful channel, and now it's the first time that we've gone very vertically up, but even this is in an up channel, and the S&P is still in the leg, be it or the future's made an extension, but the actual cash is in leg B, we'll see if it makes a big, big. And folks, it's very easy to get Basel's newsletter, come over to our website at TFNN, you hit news that as the opening call right on the left-hand side. Basel, have a great one, safe one, we look forward to show you tomorrow.