You know, center, my name is Frank Henschka and the director of the Great Seedles Theater Center, at least we'd like to think of that way at the Graduate Center CUNY in the middle and midtown in Manhattan and the church bells are ringing. It means it's 12 noon and it's a Seedles talk time and it's a restart for us for this season. We decided after having so many Seedles talks close to 200 with theater artists, we now focus on two new fields. One will be writers who wrote books, finished books in the time of Corona. Many of them actually Seedles talk participants. We talked about their work in our individual sessions and we said we'll come back when the book is finished or close to be finished. We have that and we're preparing our film or screen festival for 2022 where we now gonna ask all around the world to see what really was of interest. Did it work? Was there something that happened? We should know about in other places. Is there something meaningful? So today we do have with us the wonderful and great and much admired Bonnie Muranka from PHA, a Journal of Performance and Art. And it is the very, very beginning of our series. It's Thanksgiving week here in America for all of our international listeners. We have listeners from over 20, 25 countries most of the time. And it's a significant week, the greatest and biggest holiday in North America really where everybody comes together to see the families and friends in a setting that celebrates life and art, family and community. And we are celebrating, I think, for good reasons, writers, books. I think it's of importance. Many of us went back to reading in the time of Corona. Many of us couldn't really read because they were blocked or they watched too many TV series and slowly get back day by day, back into reading, but it has been an important part of what we did. So today we have us Bonnie and she's gonna talk about her book, Timelines, Writings and Conversations. And the end of November, we have Teresa Smaleck. He will talk about her book on Ron Water, the great actor from the Wooster group started out with the performance group. And he is much missed in the New York community was made a significant contribution. We're gonna have Emily Mann with us and Alexis Green took many years to write a book. Emily Mann Rebel Artist of the American Theater in the US, Kari Parlov. We'll talk about Pinter and Stopport, a director's view and really look into the work of these two major significant contemporary British writers. And I think it's also a time for us to look back at place and connect to them. We're gonna have Ann Catania with us who wrote The Art of Dramatology, a significant book. Many consider her as America's foremost drama talk as well than the time she has worked in her experience. I think it is unmatched what we have as a literary drama talk. And Bogart is finishing or is close to finishing her book. I think it's gonna go to Princeton, The Art of Resonance, the idea of what does resonate and should be considered that term for the theater. So she will be with us. And then Afar Siridou Lupoudou with Frank Radatz from Germany. She's from Greece. He also works with us. She is talking to us for a very interesting project. Over 20 writers and artists got together and talk about staging 21st century tragedies, theater politics and the global crisis. And Aiko, the great Aiko the dancer from born and raised in Japan living in New York will talk about her book, a buddy in Fukushima, her little essays, not a little, her essays and reflections with performance photos. So I think it will be an interesting lineup. And I hope that it will also be meaningful for all of you who are listening. You can go if you got the email invitation and click on the Google Drive. All of the writers gave a chapter on introduction to the books for free. So you can follow it, read it. And I hope you will decide to go to your local bookstore and order the books and perhaps take some time to read them. So here we go, Bonnie. Where are you and how are you? I'm here in New York City. I'm fine. Thank you. Very nice to be here. It's not often that one gets to talk about books and places for reviews and all that are less and less available, you know, for serious... You are in Soho, right? Soho, yeah. It's at Charlton Sixth Avenue, which has been your artistic home in New York City next to your Hudson Upstate. Yes. So for all of you who do not know, and I'm sure many listeners have heard about her, but might not really be able to place her. So Bonnie Moranka is the founding publisher and editor of the OB Award-winning P.A.J. Publications, and Journal of Performance and Art. It started out as a Journal of Performance, not so much Journal of Performance and Art. She's the recipient of the Association for Theater and Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award. And we're gonna talk about editing today, what it means. And for sustained achievement, and she's the author of performance histories, colleges of theater, theater writings, for which she got the George Mason Award for Traumatic Criticism. And she just finished her work at the New School, where she was a professor of theater at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. And Bonnie took the time of corona, as we said, to look back at 12 years of writing of essays, introductions to a great journal that comes out periodically and throughout the year, like the Super Bowls and the World Cups, and you press in those baseball seasons, the P.A.J. magazine comes in our mail. And it is next to TDR, I think, the significant, really, archive and recording of a performance history and also theater history. And she has helped to actually also shape the history of performance and was a great sense of responsibility. And she does ask, why is one piece more important than another? And that she really is looking for new ways and new forms of essays and critical writings and focuses on that. And she reflects on the ideas of our time and how it shaped artwork. So I'm gonna just show the book and it's also that beautiful, beautiful cover. So Bonnie, how does it feel to have the book out? I guess, no book tour. I've actually never gone on a book tour. I'm just happy to have the books out. This book is the last 12 years of my work, much of my writings and a number of the artists' interviews. So I'm glad to move on after that and that I have the work out and together. And I more or less organize it around 2019 and I've been working on it then because I had to write many different sections of it, the introductions, the preface, a lot of the research material and all the copy editing, everything. I had put it aside. And then during the pandemic, I had worked on the conversation with Meredith Monk, which we did an expanded edition of and then I turned to my book and worked straight through. So it just came out in the summer, actually. So I mean, I feel good about the book and the work and but now it's done and it's out. So is solitude good for writing and editing? Pardon? Is solitude good for writing and editing? Oh, well, you need that. I worked on the book partly in New York in 2020 and then partly upstate. The preface was written between Hudson Valley and also New York, but definitely as a writer and also editor, you need a lot of time alone. It's time alone, solitude may be another category, but I'm not the type of writer who needs to close myself off for days and work day and night. I get a lot of energy by taking a walk or being with people or I'm easily interrupted if somebody calls to go out. I'm not a kind of a obsessive writer that's glued to my desk. I don't have a plan every day to write or anything. It's not like that. So you write in the description. So we give our audience a little feel for it. You turn to far-reaching subjects that include catastrophic imagination, landscape and writing, performance, drawing, cultural history and the issues of emotion, beauty and the spiritual in art and her perspectives, your perspectives on performance, visual arts, media and drama and the work of so, so many great artists, Joan Jonas, Karen Church, Lamont Hover, John Jesseron, Dick Higgins, Meredith Mung, Schneemann, Shepherd, Fornes, goes on and on. There's a beautiful quote, which I like. You said, the editor is invisible ink. Like a figure in the carpet, the editor remains in the published journal in its relationship with artists, in its authors, in its worldviews, in its history, in what is not. Tell me a bit about it, in what is not. That piece is called Remaining Paragraphs. I was asked to contribute to the Contemporary Theater Review, one of their anniversaries and I wrote a piece about editing. So the passage you read, it comes at the end of the essay, which is rather short and it was really talking about all the work that needs to be, that needs to go into copyediting and corrections and permissions and getting photographs and doing things over and over and over again. And I guess I was reflecting on where the editor is in a journal. One could say it's in the adverbs or it's in the dashes or something like that. And I guess I was thinking about, it may not always be apparent to people who are reading a journal what an editorial profile is or they may not think about that, but years ago when people used to read a journal from start to finish, one would have planned like how the journal opens and what you go to next and then next what things fit together. Unfortunately, those days are gone because mostly journals are read online and people don't read all the issues anymore. They read in a very specialized way, which is very a lesser experience in my view to just read what pertains to your research rather than something start to finish even if it's over time. So an editor always has to focus on an issue. What is the balance? What are there too much about one country or one type of art? Do we have enough about theater, little dance or performance or music or things like that or interviews? So the editor's hand is always and the editorial staff is always thinking about what to cover. You're always working on one issue that's maybe at press and you're on the next one already as we are or when you're working on the spring issue. So I was playing around with these ideas of the deep place of the editorial profile that's not always apparent that may not be visible, but it's between the lines or it's in the margins. It's always there because you have to decide how you're going to cover something, who's going to do it, what things need to be covered. You don't always reach your goals. It's always a kind of utopian process because you're always striving to find things and it's always possible to find the writers where people who've seen something or to get coverage, especially if you don't have a staff all over the world. So it's a very dynamic process and it's part of a kind of slow philosophy that I have too. A journal is a slow technology. It's not like a blog or something that people write comments overnight or something immediately on the spot. Journals have reflective pieces and because they really come out three times a year, so it gives time for reflection on something. So that way it's a slow philosophy. Yeah, yeah. I think Eurodia, you said a journal is a more traditional technology whose form is purposefully designed as a place to set down well-considered thoughts in unharried sentences that open to fields of paragraphs. And I think it is really something that makes also P.A.J. different, the literary and the quality, I think, of the essays and of the work. I mean, you said, you know, I've always written out of the love for writing, you know, one can feel that. I feel the book is a bit like Adrian Kennedy's biography in a way of her vignettes, so little islands in archipelagos when she wrote People Who Let Me To My Place, it could be Bonnie as Maranca's artists who let me to my essays, you know, it's a reflection or sometimes they're longer, sometimes they're shorter, sometimes it's a page and a half, sometimes it is 10 pages. It's really an archipelagos that you created and the names you all mentioned, of course, are all leaders in our field, most of them, all of them in a way you know personally. So it is quite a significant and important memory. You said it's a mental space and what we need and we need to have that and to have peace to allow dreams and thoughts come into your mind. So I think you, in a way, right? In a much more personal way, in a much observative way. So it is in a way different from performance studies and you actually once said, I see my work as an alternative to performance studies or PHA also. So what do you mean by that? Well, performance studies, first of all, it does not focus very much on the text. It's performance oriented and oriented more toward the culture and also oriented toward the philosophy that anything is a performance. I've never held that point of view. I don't think that everything is performance and I've felt that way for decades. PHA, along with Tom Sellers publication and his staff, the Yale Theater Publication, are pretty much the only two that consistently publish plays. They don't recall if Tom publishes a play in every issue as a matter of format, but we do. As a writer, I'm extremely interested in writing. Performance art took, I mean, performance studies took off in a way much further diverted than Richard Schechter's broad spectrum theory because it became very theoretical and very much tied to cultural issues and current theories. PHA has never been theory-based. It's always been a journal devoted to the primacy of the artwork and the critics voice and it's not based on applied theory. So I've always been very interested in my own work and experimenting with different critical forms. I started that at least by the early 80s and I tried to seek out experimental texts. I realized that the word experimental is also kind of a strange word to use now. It's not a period of experimentation. Though there are texts that are not, let's say non-mainstream texts. I tried to seek out writers that should be known or known better or their texts are very interesting, their plays. We've published maybe 1,200 plays by now and from almost 2,000 languages. So I'm seeking these from around the world. We publish a lot of work in translation. It's always been that way. So it diverts from performance studies in the sense that our main focus is not the study of performance. And it's very confusing now for people because some people use the term theater, some use performance. I mean, in a way the PHA is a theater journal even though from the very beginning before people became much obsessed with talking about interdisciplinarity, we always dealt with performance art, music and opera and dance and installations and video. And we had in the late 70s for eight issues that we published until the early 80s another magazine called Live, which was really a kind of a zine, you could say, devoted to performance and it covered more of the clubs and a lot more of the downtown scene than we could fit in the journal. Then the journal gradually opened up more and more and we began to include more from the visual arts world and then we no longer needed that other publication. So we've always covered performance but I always say PHA is a theater journal. It's not a performance studies journal. Sometimes people don't realize the difference between our journal and something more devoted to performance studies just like the Richard Goff's Journal Performance Research which is more of a performance studies journal. We're more akin to the Yale Theater Journal because we published work that the writing is very different, it's more literary and less academic and theory-based, let's say. You insist and you say there's a distinction between criticism and writing. Yeah, in a way the distinctions are changed now because now you could say there's a difference between arts writing and academic writing because there's so little criticism. People don't really do criticism in the sense that say Harold Corman, and you mentioned Harold Corman or someone like Stanley Kaufman or some of the older generation like Bruce Stain and... Daniel Gerald, Anjay Veritya. Gerald, there's someone. Hilton Alls writes criticism in The New Yorker with Joan Accella, two verified writers in The New Yorker. They write criticism but you don't find that kind of writing in academic journals in the English-speaking world. I hope to have it in P.A.J. when it's at its best. Criticism like that or arts writing, whatever you want to call it. But in the academic journals, that kind of writing no longer exists. It's kind of literary essay writing doesn't really exist because the works move toward theory-based essays when they're not artist writings. Yeah, there is a way one could say it. A tendency in P.A.J. journals that perhaps also still focusing on urgent significant necessary plays but or works which should be pointed out but also you move to broad themes. I think you're right about spirituality, about landscapes, food, drawing, the idea of drawing, my line. Do you feel that is a tendency towards you go more to or do you feel it established itself over time, over the five decades you've now published P.A.J. that you are focusing on these larger issues? You talk about Buddha and you talk about Michael Jackson and the same, of course, and the same essay. But so do you feel there are less? Over time, in the beginning when the journal was first started or when I first started writing, I was interested in, like many people, understanding the new theater around us. When I entered the, when I came to New York and I looked around and saw new theater, there was a lot of plays, you know, off, off Broadway, they were plays like Fornas and Shepherd and, you know, you could see some of the living theater, you could still see the performance group, you could see the open theater. You know, there was quite a lot. And then there came along people like Richard Foreman. I began to see his work by the mid-70s, early 70s. Wilson's work, which I first saw on 73, Mabu Minds, which I saw at the same time. And in that case, I was interested in developing a vocabulary to think about that kind of work. And that resulted in my first book, The Theater of Images. Which was a significant, you know, new contribution, yeah. Well, I was trying to, you know, think about the new way of making theater and performance and text and how the performance function in that. And that also was reflected in the journal. People were writing essays about new theater, about new drama and trying to understand it and define it. After a certain while, the definitions became in a way kind of clear or people understood that. And then people moved on to other topics all throughout the history of the journal. People and I myself moved to other topics by the, you know, by the early 80s. I was, I also turned back to Chekhov and to Pirandello. And I wrote very experimental essays on those writers. We were always interested, as I was in the journal too, of really the whole 20th century. So it was always contemporary work and the historical context. It wasn't just the work for that year or the last five years. It had to do with seeing things in a much larger context. It could be, you know, Dada could be a writer from the past or a symbolist writer or maybe a surrealist or something. We were always publishing a lot of writers. For example, we published some years ago for Fernando Prezoa and people didn't know that he also wrote plays or we published Fossbender. People didn't know his films but they didn't really know that he published plays. You know, it was like that. We were always going back and forth. But with the Pirandello essay, for example, it was a really experimental essay in the early 80s and it was an essay that I wrote in several sections and then I spread them out on the floor, several titled sections like little paragraphs or a page or something. I spread it out on the floor and I put it together in some order. Or you've worked over a year or something, right? Yeah, I worked a year on that. For one essay, you know, just stunning. Same thing for my Gershwin Fine essay. I worked a year on that. I had about 90 pages of notes. The one? The introduction to the Stein plays? Yes, it's called Presence of Mind. It's in my college use of theater book and it was the introduction to the reprint of her Last Operas and Plays. Yeah, it was a fantastic piece, yeah. But in the 90s, but I worked a year on that also and I had 90 pages of notes that I had taken from her read, just reading her over and over and over again. Tell us a bit, how do you write? What's your process? How do you write, how do you approach writing an essay? Well, one thing, I don't have a year to spend on an essay now, it's too much time. And I moved out of that mode. My process is to read deeply into the work, basically, if I'm writing about an author or about a text. In those days, it was reading many of their works, not necessarily all of them, but many of their works and thinking about them. I was always interested in Gertrude Stein's and play as landscape. Now my approach is somewhat different. My process is generally I like to leave my home and I like to work in a library with a blank table and a neutral space. And I start with a blank page, but I start when I feel I'm ready to start. And I don't know when that is, except it's kind of an intuitive thing. I take a lot of notes and I take my notes by hand, not in the computer, not typed. They're all handwritten notes, all these decades of writing, and they're on loosely paper. And sometimes the paper, if I know I'm going to have a lot of notes on a particular topic, that set of notes might be under one thing, like say landscape or say text or say music or something like that. And I try to organize the notes that way. Or if it's not possible, I have the topic of the note in the margin. And then when I feel ready to write, I start out at the library and then I'll go with the laptop and then start on the computer. I used to write all my work longhand before the computer. I didn't even start in the typewriter. I just wrote longhand and then typed things up. And then I do a lot of rewrites. I do a lot of until I feel it's really right. And then at a certain point, I begin to feel that the essay really wants to live its own life in the world. And then it feels finished. I feel that I can't go over it anymore. And but my work is much of it is much shorter now. I'm interested in much shorter forms and different types of writing in a different way. And maybe less about artworks. I don't know. I don't know what direction it will take now after this book. But I'm interested in developing a short form criticism, which I do in the book, in that section, Writing in the Landscape, where I base the text I'm going to write on perhaps a single photo and try to get a very distilled text of 500 words or 1,000 words and capture everything in that. And that's what I'm interested in. That form allows for a kind of more poetic, philosophical, literary method. A little bit like you did on the painting, the Ann Bennett painting, Our Child, that in your, we're going to talk about later, the writing in the landscape where you start out from an image and reflect on it. For all our listeners, I also want to remind everybody it was the time you come out. I think you were two young grad students in the 70s. You said at Café Borgia, I think, across from Figaro, both places that don't exist, Blika and MacDougall. And you came up, said, we're going to have a journal. And everybody wanted to create a journal, write for a journal. There were many avalanches, Artirite, The Fox, Heraces, and Soho Weekly News. Something that, in a way, perhaps is missing that spirit, to write something for your own as a personal manifesto. I think you wrote, at the time, articles really could have an impact. If Susan Sontag wrote about fascination, about fascism, people would talk about it, right? And it was, people would read it and would go back and forth and be experienced that in nostalgia for the 70s. Also, it was Patty Smith's book on the Just Kids. But it was a time that really invited an idea of a criticism. So what is the role, what do you feel? What is a role of a critic now? What should you, what is the role of observing the landscape of the performance and art? First of all, where is one going to write? So many of the newspapers have disappeared. And most publications, the vast majority of publications publish no theater criticism. Even the New York Review of Books, for example, I would say they don't even have one piece a year. So national publications don't do much Atlantic or harbors places like that. The New York Times has criticism or has, most of the stuff is now turned to kind of like a promotional copy or celebrity interviews or stories about how much something costs. So, the New York Observer has gone, the newspaper, the New York Press, the Soho Weekly News, the Village Voice, all these papers in print that would publish different critics and writings about current art have closed down. And so you have no downtown papers really and then no national media in a way. It's very difficult to have your work written about. There are blogs in different places that occasionally hyper-allergic publishes something very rarely, but most places- Which in a way or occasionally art form does. So the question is, yeah, what is the role of criticism? The people have been questioning that since the 60s, actually the critics role. Most writing about the arts is relegated to academic journals or to journals like P.A.J. Where sometimes, you know, if something isn't covered, it totally falls out of the historical archive. So journals have a specific function in terms of being a record of their day, of the work, the way it was thought about. For example, if a play isn't published, it just disappears and often the playwright disappears. So if a production by a company is not written about, it disappears from the historical record in a way. So journals have an archival function that's very important in terms of somebody reacting with the ideas and the culture of the day to the works that are seen and to let people around the world through these vast data banks that journals exist on to let them know about something. So the critics role is still partly educational, it's partly archival. Also critics write for their own experience of exploring work and thinking about work in artworks that they are attracted to. In some cases now, people don't generally, because they're not writing like every week, every month or so, they don't have to write on a lot of books they don't really like. But one of the things I've discovered in editing the journal is how little people today want to actually write negative, maybe negative is too strong a word, but let's say constructive criticism. People are very low to make any critical comments about a work. So the work today is often very much an advocacy journalism, whereas decades ago it was more critical. People had a more, you know, a definable sense of how art, you know, about artworks and certain kinds of standards. We're talking about the 70s, let's say. Well, that is broken down now and people are also afraid to make negative comments. They're afraid to commit to a certain set of values or to, because of how it might impact them later in terms of grants or jobs or whatever. So that's really difficult to deal with. It's very hard to get people to write in an interesting way about productions that they feel have failed or have not worked very well. Because you feel serious criticism, which is an essential part of theater and of its existence as if you feel it's missing. Well, yes, because there's hardly any place to publish it and nobody can make a living writing criticism. But yeah, but there's webs and blogs and the people can now actually publish more than before, you know, but is it... If you're talking about... You knew Susan Sontag. Tell us a bit about her. What does it mean to have someone like Susan Sontag living around the corner and seeing her in a bookstore and... But you first raised the question about all this criticism on the blogs. That's not archival. That's lost. That's lost the next day. That's really different from writing serious criticism. But it could be provocative. That's what I mean or critical. It could be, you know. It could be, yes. But I don't know that it is in terms of theater, maybe in visual arts or something.  You know, you asked about Susan Sontag. Well, she was, I know, a big figure in the 70s. I think in the 1970s, she was probably in middle age in her 40s. I'm trying to recall. But she was a fixture around a lot. She would go to a lot of theaters and bookshops and be seen, you know, all the time. And I remember many, it was kind of a joke too, because so many people wanted quotes from her around their books, you know. So she, and also people wanted her to come and see their work. They wanted to know what Susan Sontag thought about it. And her work serves, you know, they're still taught today and they're very exciting and provocative. And so many things that she wrote about you know, she was prophetic about, you know, about certain kinds of issues or things that she wrote about early when people didn't really understand pop culture all that much in the early 60s.  She was always interested in criticism as a form. Though she then would later say that she's not a critic.  I attached my ideas to works that I admire. I think she may have said that in the interview that we published with her in the late 70s. But she was always very supportive of P.A.J. I remember we went to interview her in the late 70s just about two years after P.A.J. was published, was founded. And she had just come home from a chemotherapy treatment.  It eventually killed her if she had so much radiation but she lived more decades. But she had just come home from a chemo treatment and we went over to her apartment. She lived on the next block actually up on the upper west side. And we lived up there, Galton, Lescupta and I and we did this interview. And it's really fun to hear it on tape, you know. She was so nice to us and so supportive. Another time I remember when we were living on St. Mark's Place, she came for a meeting that we were going to have there and she had flown home in a snowstorm and she still came to the apartment. And she was very kind of romantic about writing in Bohemia and editing and all that. She thought that that's what people should do, you know, have independent publications and she was always very supportive of the kind of downtown culture and avant-garde work and people whose work that she suspected, let's say. And I asked her in the early 80s to write the preface to the Marie-Ire Bornez Volume of Plays. I asked her to do that at the PAJ and I remember very vividly her coming to the office to deliver it around like 81 or two or something, you know. Yeah, I mean, it is totally incredible that I think the contribution to the field for TDR, yours or the theater magazine. But Bornez, how did you get to writing? As far as I know, you grew up in Jersey, you're an Italian-American family. How, when did you know, what was the moment when did that happen? And that you said, I would like to be a writer, what was that? I don't know if I ever said that to myself that I would like to be a writer. I don't know if I knew what I would do. I do know that when I was in college, I began to be interested in the arts and I, by at least my junior year, I entered college as a Latin major and planned to be a Latin teacher of all things. Then I switched to the English department and with a friend and I, we used to come into New York. At that time, there were seven o'clock shows and 10 o'clock shows, you know, off off-Broadway, like around the East Village or off-Broadway. And we used to come to both shows. Maybe I'd come back Sunday for a matinee. I went to school in Jersey that was very close to New York City. It was easy to get back and forth by bus or car. And then at that time, I started the drama and arts page of my college paper in the late 60s. And then I began to be a critic. I never thought of being an artist, to be honest. I never thought of, it never occurred to me to do anything else, like to direct or write plays or anything. I always wanted to write about the arts, but I was interested in many different kinds of arts. I went to the ballet as well as modern dance. I went to Broadway. I saw many of the great musicals of that era, like Folly's and Company and Main and Hello, Dolly and all that stuff and Sweet Charity, many different things. I went to the opera sometimes, which is classical music. I was always interested in all of the arts. And at that time, I would see stuff at Lamama and, you know, in the East Village. I think I saw Futz or one of Tom Paine's pieces and Rochelle Owens and I also saw, you know, the pinter, the birthday party, the pinter play on Broadway. So I was distinguishing between works. I was seeing all what I considered serious works or works that I wanted to see. And I began to write. I wrote about the living theater that I saw, but I also wrote about Judy Garland. I wrote about plays, I wrote about books. When I then became a music critic and I wrote a lot. I interviewed artists. I wrote about jazz, early jazz. I remember I reviewed that big set of Bessie Smith records when Columbia published them and they came out. I interviewed Cleo Lane when she first came to New York and came known to audiences. I wrote the things like Down Beat and Core Daddy and Rolling Stone. I wrote about pop singers like at that time, Dorie Previn or Melissa Manchester. I remember trying to get a magazine to let me write about Philip Glass but they felt he was too far out. So while I was doing all this other work, I was also seeing Philip Glass concerts at the Ideal Warehouse in the 70s in the Tribeca. You still claim he did some PHA plumbing right in the office? No, no, not PHA. You would not, some people are so many. No, not for us. Not for you, not for others. Incredible time to think of, yeah. So people were widely available in around, around the streets, around different clubs and cafes and bookshops and everything and reading similar publications and everything was more centralized then. But I never really thought, oh, I'm going to be a writer and really focus on that. I then eventually went to graduate school in the early 70s, but I was also writing essays for other kinds of journals like the Michigan Quarterly Review or the Kenyon Review or something. I would write maybe drama pieces. I eventually got out of the music reviewing and then got, once I started graduate school at CUNY, got exclusively into writing about theater. And then I, just by extraordinary luck, I got that book contract just as I was finishing graduate school for the Theater of Images. In fact, I gave that idea for a book like that to a publisher who I become friendly with and I even told him who should do it and he said to me, why don't you do it? And that's what I did. And I got that contract and that kind of solidified a place and gave me confidence and respect doing that book. Then I started the journal and so everything kind of went that way. I don't have a life plan. Like I didn't have something where I wanted to be in five years or 10 years or this or that, but I was always writing. In graduate school in those days, you didn't have to go to conferences. You didn't have to teach. You could go to the theater four or five nights a week which I was doing and also writing about it for the Soho Weekly News. And it was much more free as even as a graduate student to develop and see what you want. So I just, you know, got it. Much less regulated and maybe we talk later on, you know, your ideas about PhD programs.  Which is a great motto to think about, you know and why don't you do it? And there are also a call for everybody to engage, to write, to draw, you know, to engage I think and perhaps it is something that generations afterwards did a bit less and consumed a bit more and did a little bit less. Do it yourself and so I think that spirit of the time or such encouragement to do it yourself is something that I think is so important to a mentor. So do it, but let's talk a bit about also the book. I mean, I'm gonna read through some names on the essays. You know, it's Meredith Mank, Raymond Hoga, Alvis Romanes, Giannina Carabunario from Romania, Laurie Anderson, Caroline Sleiman, Dick Higgins, John Jonas, John Jasram, Abramovich, Herbert Blau, Sam Shepard and then essays, introduction. So it's a whole kaleidoscope and why the whole offering of the Thanksgiving table to look at. And what I liked about it is on one way, we know about Meredith Mank very well in a way, but still you got to know something in that long interview which we didn't know. And then there was someone like the Raymond Hoga, the dramaturg who started out actually as a writer about theater and dance for Pina Bausch. And I would like to talk a little bit about the Raymond Hoga interview. And I felt it was in a way a real discovery. We didn't know so much about it. How did you connect to him? Why did you chose him? How did that all happen? I met him the first time he came to New York to perform. I must've been intrigued by reading maybe a preliminary piece or something I found out about him maybe in another newspaper. I didn't know him and he came to New York and I decided that I would interview him. Tell a little bit about him. So I know you ask him in the interview, who are you?  So who was he? Raymond Hoga, unfortunately he died in May and it was about two years old. He had been Pina Bausch's dramaturg for 10 years in the very early years. I think he helped her choose a lot of the music and work on the different pieces with her. He was very close with her. I felt very bad actually about her, her death that she had already died by the time I interviewed Hogue. What year was that that I interviewed him? I don't even remember in the 90s it might have been. Let's see what year did I interview him in? Well, if you don't know, I don't know. In 2009, he came to me in 2009. So I remember we went to some noisy restaurant in Midtown. It was so hard to hear him and everything on the tape. But I just started from the very beginning. I didn't mean it so literally when I said, who are you? But I started off that way and he told me about his work. The thing about Raymond Hogue, he described himself as a hunchback. He had a very challenged body and he was on the stage. So we had difficulties with some audiences, particularly in Germany. We talked a lot about the body and dancing. He was also very enthralled of certain singers. We discovered that we both had a love of singers. We talked about Peggy Lee. We talked about Maria Carlos. He talked about various versions of operas that he was interested in, music pieces that he was interested in, like Swan Lake or The Rite of Spring or Balero. He had great passion and love of art. And he spoke in a very honest poetic way about work and about these kinds of works that he loved. As a matter of fact, I'd gotten a few notes from different people in The Arts who wrote me about my book. And it's interesting that both of them, and I can recall, pointed to that interview as being very inspiring. Who wrote you from the output? I don't want to say who wrote to me. But anyway, both of them were very... Yeah, it's something that is surprising. First, the idea, I mean, we had heard about of a dramaturk, but a dramaturk for dance. It's so normally in such literary history, if at all. And that even isn't fully accepted in North America. But the idea that he was a dramaturk for the Tanzteata, and Pina Bajneva worked with one before or after him. So that idea that someone guides music, of course, a lot, but also he really, I think, looked in a way at her work. And that is a stunning thing.  Yeah, he established in a way, if yet we haven't really heard about him. I mean, I thought the interview was so beautiful when he talked about the hands of performers. The energy of the hands. When he talked about beauty and ugliness, that it all ultimately is about beauty, but he says society says Arnold Schwarzenegger, he says his beautiful body, and I am a freak. I am ugly, but it's not true. He said, you know...  Yeah, he wrote for the Zeit Magazine. Yeah, it's a very significant... Yeah, he speaks about Pasolini. There's one thing I want... There's one beautiful thing that he says. I want to just read you what he called it to me. He said, and this is the end of our interview. When I started out, and I'm quoting Ryman here, when I started out, what I said was, with my body, which is not called beautiful, I can go very far in looking for beauty. If I would have a body like Baryshnikov, then it would be much more difficult. But with me, you have this break, this distance, these two things. You have what you accept as beauty, the music, and you have the body that doesn't fit what you think. It's like a landscape. You can not only say the sea is beautiful, we shouldn't have hills anymore. There should be both. And my body is more like a hill maybe. You know, I just think he has such a beautiful sentiment in the way he thought about things and spoke. So we had a very nice interview. Then I saw him a couple of years later in Spain, and I had a few more questions, and I eventually published that interview with him. I find that I like conversations with artists more and more. Yeah, he also, he talked about the emotion that audiences are afraid now of emotions. And beauty talks about that. And he says, actually, that is poetry is the ultimate form. And so I thought it was very, it made me think of so many things I liked it. You also talk about John Jesseron in the book, someone who in a way is known and also not known at all, who such a hard time to get produced, mostly is forced to do it on its own, but yet I think you said he created a new contemporary theater language, his deep sleep, snow, fowl, to lock to this, of course, the Chang series, Shedan Massacre, Fire. You talk about Firefall also, I think 2009 a lot. Tell me a bit, why did you choose John Jesseron? Why of that big, you know, there are so many also, there's Maxwell and there is the Wooster group, there's Mack Welm and there's so many also great artists, big dance and elevator, but you talk about him. So tell me a little bit, why you feel he needed to be in there? Well, you mentioned all these other people, but the question was what was there in 2010 when I wrote that article, when I published it. Why was it more important than others? What did you see in that? I don't know, one of the things I regret is that I don't have something on Richard Maxwell in this book. I've always wanted to write on Richard Maxwell and I just couldn't keep holding up the book and being able to do, you know, take on another writer because it would take months or months to read over the plays again and look at videos and all of that. I was interested in a particular reason. It's not, it's very difficult to write and to write about artworks. You have to really, you know, somehow live in that landscape where we're have some ideas about it. I'm not interested. I have so little time actually, not enough time to write the things I want to or to explore new areas. So what really attracts me is, you know, something that I have the ideas that I can work with in the piece so that the piece suggests new ways of looking. In particular, that work, Firefall, was the subject of that essay. But the larger theme was the concept of mediaturgy. Yeah. You kind of coined and I think Ms. Marianne Weems in a talk. Earlier, we were talking about that in an earlier essay a couple of years before that. People now talk about media and dramaturgy and things like this, but this concept, you know, was already 12, 13, 14 years old. Basically, I was talking about it as a mediaturgy in John Jesserin's work, which was done in this very complicated way with people sitting at tables with their computers in front of them and communicating that way and also communicating with, you know, on the screen and in this great, you know, technological kind of experiment. And I was talking about mediaturgy in terms of the way that media is embedded in the narrative. It's the architecture of it. I was talking about the concept of performance as design. So I had a lot of things to say at that time about this particular work. Now we've moved beyond that in the sense of some of the vocabulary and terminology that I use about erasing and deleting and things like that. But it was a very complicated piece that John had developed at that time. And maybe it didn't get a lot of attention and maybe his work doesn't get enough attention in these media histories that are being written and these media overviews. But that was the very specific idea about performance as design and as a new way of thinking about performance and actually that takes place totally on a computer. I think what's happened in a lot of scholarship is that a lot of young scholars, I have to say are showing that their historical methodology is kind of weak. I think we'll leave this to be true in theater and I've talked about it with many people. There just isn't the kind of preservation of the theater legacy as you find in dance or in visual arts. And I think that people are too focused on what they're reading now, who's in and who's out and what the current books and conferences are. And I feel that people don't know foundational texts or enough about even the very, very recent past or even a couple of decades. And it's showing up in the kinds of essay submissions we even get from theater, the lack of historical knowledge and documentation. And I feel this is a problem for theater that it's too focused on the contemporary. I think it was, yeah, interesting that in the Jesseron piece where you said one way, say it's open source material, he called Lages, you know, out of the vast ocean of internet news as a world digital archive. But then you said it's a little bit like the 1930s living newspaper, you know, it's kind of a beautiful connection you made there. And you talked about the Homo media, you know, I like that the idea of the Homo media when how do human beings exist linguistically, visually, spatially and digitally in our global age? I mean, these are questions and artists are negotiating it. So I thought that your approach to something that also seemed a bit foreign, you know, you had to write about screens and projections and it's actually a little bit away from Becket and Pirandello and what your norm is, but you engaged, I think, with the material and in a work that perhaps, no, not perhaps, it would be, you know, not recorded and now in a way it will be there. When we asked you to share a chapter, you said, but maybe, yeah, you said, let's use a writing in the landscape. Why did you, what do you mean by that? And why did you choose that out of the book? Well, the writing in the landscape section, there are four or five or six sections in the book. It's the last one. And all our readers, by the way, you could go to the email, you got the invitation, you click on it, you can have it in our Google Drive, it's down there, yeah. This section follows an interest I've had for a long time. Actually, if you even go back to what I was talking about with the theater of images, I've obviously always had an interest in text and image. And by the 80s, I also wrote a few pieces which were taking a photograph and writing caption-like or longer sections based on that image. And then, and I've done that periodically in these years of writing, these decades of writing. But in recent years, I've been working specifically on a kind of short-form criticism. And as I described it, all these pieces have to do with a single artwork or an image of that artwork. And mostly outdoors. And that's why it's writing in the landscape, mostly outdoors in which I use this piece to have a more dreamy poetic literary and maybe philosophical representation. But also, and again, I didn't put all this together like from the very beginning of the book which is called Timelines. But I had been realizing that over the last decade or maybe five or seven years, I had been introducing the element of time in my writing, where I am or what I'm doing. And it's just been coming out that way in a sense. So this short-form criticism also allows me to do that. And I do it also in the preface of the book. I like the idea of introducing the element of time. And my work I've always tried to base on the voice that you can speak the work. I know some years ago, I don't remember when I'd have to go back and check it. I like the idea of writing as almost a form of prayer which is to say a different rhetorical style from the way we speak or from the way we write in a more formal way. I like different rhetorical styles in writing. So I play with this as well. But Timelines, but I mean, the writing landscape, there are five or six or seven pieces in that section. And they all have to do with the outdoors. So you mentioned the piece, you mentioned the Amy Bennett painting and the piece, Our Towns. Tell us a little bit, yeah, about it. Well, that had to do with a painting I saw in the gallery in which this artist, this visual artist, painted a scene of our town that was being staged outdoors in a kind of mountainous landscape. And the strange thing about it is that there were armed guards at all of the parts of the tents in which the last scene of the play took place. And the tent is kind of evangelical, why to bake outdoor tents, you know, like... Yeah. And that you would see in the summer festivals, but I use that and I put that together with the shooting at one of these outdoor festivals in California, this garlic festival. So that's why it's called Our Towns 2019. It has to do with a certain kind of violence in our town and the simple small town life and fares where this violence, you know, hangs, who knows where, whether it will erupt or not. Another piece I wrote for a book that Daniel Sack had edited called Imagine Theatres. And it was about just sitting in my backyard in the Hudson Valley and writing the description of what, writing just a list or a description of what was happening at that time with trees and birds and sound. And I was actually doing that in the context of writing about how I was always interested in Gertrude Stein's concept, the play as landscape. So I was looking at the landscape in that sense. So that's what I've done there. Another one was about the trees at Watermill. Villa Pansa also, you know, in Italy, right? Wilson's, which wasn't that inside the video installation? One of the, one part was the owls. The owls, yeah. Inside the Villa Pansa in the Varese, Italy, but the other house that he created, the permanent structure was outside and it had a permanent installation and it had a tape recording of his voice, reading Rilke in it. Let us to a young artist. Yeah, I feel, I felt they're very, yeah, as you said, they're very personal, they are poetic, intimate, observational in the moment, a little bit zen-like and also touching on, you know, on some very specific artwork, as you did in the early PhD writing, but then also in kind of, you know, what you now also tend to reflect about, like mysticism and spiritualism, Buddhism, religion. Instead, you know, we're just noticeable, instead of saying what now also is at the forefront, which is gender or race and all that. So it's a different, it falls out on the current chorus of voices. Someone said poetry is to a novel, what like jumping is to a marathon, you know, and like we jump up in there and poetry is that. And I felt these pieces in a way are also your jumps and we hear your voice even more clear and less the service, the great service to the field you have done as a worker in the vineyard, you know, of theater to keep, you know, we all foster these plans, cut this away, put that in as an editor where you say very clearly also, I'm not a curator, by the way, why did you say that I'm an editor? I'm not a curator, what? Oh yeah, I think that people tend to now refer to the artistic directors refer to themselves as curators or editors as curators. I think it's just kind of funny. It's just absorbing the language of visual arts because it sounds cool to be a curator. But I'm very proud to be an editor and to connect to the, you know, the long, long history of editors and publishing. And that's the tradition I belong to. What does it mean if I said I'm a curator? I don't have to say that I'm a curator, I curate the issues. That just sounds kind of pretentious to me. Yeah, and also our great important texts so many from the Old Testament to the New, they were all edited of different sources from different people. People had to make up their minds. Before we close a little bit about also the chapter which I thought is interesting on performance drawings. It's an interest of you. I, you know, when you say, when is a personal line, what does a line mean? Can a person be a pencil? You wrote is throwing his thought, can it a drawing? Does the arm follow the thought? Is the thought comes first and the arm follows? And so you interview artists about their practice of drawing and performance and you question whether the rhythm of the drawing can be found in the actual artwork. Why are you so fascinated? Because it seems to such a contradiction. On one hand, you say, we are literary journal. We are not performance art. Our models is Farah Strauss and the publishing houses. But here you look at drawings of lines of charcoal on a paper and you look for answers. Why? Well, I became interested in performance and drawing about 12 years ago and I started a section in P.A.J. And since that time, we've published a lot of artists who have drawing as part of their making of a performance. You know, as a writer, I'm interested in a lot of things. I've written about food. I've written about, you know, garden literature. Garden book, yeah. I'm interested in much as I have time for. But still, your garden literature is not connected to performance. The ideas with poem like Joan Jonah's interview, for example, where you ask her very clearly, what does it mean? Yeah, and each name and also when you speak to them, you say, you know, what is the intersection? What did you learn? And why is it of interest? Interestingly enough, there is now a move toward the kind of thinking about performance and writing about performance as a kind of garden theater also. That's a new line in performance studies. But I found that just in my research or knowing about artists or reading about them, that a lot of them draw, they draw before the performance or in some cases like Joan Jonas, they draw in the performance. They make studies or they, perhaps afterwards, a lot of dancers, of course, do that. But it's different than notation. Trisha Brown is the outstanding example. And we just published some piece about her drawings. Even Richard Forman, there's the little tiny boxes. Wilson, of course, he is so famous for that. Wilson was the first portfolio we published. We published his drawings for three-penny opera in 2008. The essay he referred to about performance drawing was what I was, I was asked to write the preface to a book that just came out in England on performance and drawing and new art practices since 1945. It's just that it's something that's been there beneath the surface. And yet there's really virtually nothing written on performance and drawing in theater scholarship. I'm very interested in drawing, works on paper. I like that very much. And it was something new to write about that I hadn't written about before. That's how I came to that topic. And I'm interested in introducing new topics in P.A.J. I'm interested in new directions in my own work. And... Do you draw? Do you make drawings? No, I don't draw. I don't do any visual art at all. But I'm very interested in that I love visual arts. And... I know you published a book on Etel Adnan who unfortunately just died, The Great Lebanese writer. Also theater writer, writer for the theater. She worked with Wilson also early on, but also a great painter and drawings. It was just, I think it's still up at the Guggenheim with the Kandinsky. And you did that book, right, on her. We published a book called The Sun on the Tongue. Once I was introduced to her work, I loved her work right away. And I mean, she was one of the great artists of our time. She died at 96. I have for some of her drawings, you know, which are beautiful. Well, she made tapestries, she made films. She wrote essays in the book. There's a wonderful essay on Pina Boush that she had written. She wrote on philosophy. I have many, many of her books. She was a great poet and thinker born in Lebanon. And so she had the wisdom of several continents, Europe and the Middle East and the U.S. where she lived in California for several decades. So, you know, like many great artists, I mean, she had worked in so many different mediums and she had a great world wisdom. And she was painting up until the time she died. Her paintings are on an exhibit.  Yeah, last 14th of November. Yeah, and she was painting. She sat at her desk and painted with a very thick palette. She wasn't writing in recent years, but she just had a book out last year Shifting the Silence. Shifting the Sun. A Journey Towards Death. Yeah, I'm watching about. I make this very much in writers and increasingly in poets and poets theater. Yeah, no, it's a really great also that you share that, your thoughts that you encourage people to write and also why don't you do it? Also to, you know, performance makers. Why not making drawings and think, find out something? That might be something in there. It's quite, I think, also always, I feel the spirit of it is optimistic, it's hopeful, it makes you think, it asks you to question something again. And there's some openness about it. It's always so well written. Your work also, your sentences are so clear. I think Schechner once said he could see right away that you studied Latin when he saw your writing. And of course, Richard also hit such a tremendous and fantastic and brilliant work and you and so many others. It's a real great legacy of a generation that really cared about question and put in hard work to publish. Also other voices, not just their own. And I feel that is truly exceptional. And they tell a non-book because she just thought it is a great P.A.J. book that really deserves.  It fits in your pocket. And ideally you can take it with you and there's something to be said for that. As a last question, I think I will ask you to read, maybe something from the water mower, the tree, about the tree lines, I would like to hear about it. But last question, I think you in one of your editorials when you write about the process of the editing, you said one of the questions is what remains to be done? So my question to you also is what remains to be done? What's, I know you work on the book on Dick Higgins, will you also talk about that? So close to fluxes is and his graphics, you know, all that we didn't talk about at the instructional place. And he was so upset that actors in a traditional theater follow a script that someone else wrote it.  So it questioned everything which I did like, but what's up for you? What remains to be done?  I just want to go back for a second to say that, yeah, I've always considered Foreman's work. I mean, Shector's work so provocative of that generation of Herb Lau and Brustine and those people. And it's unfortunate that artists don't write more. I love to publish artist's writings and their drawings show so much insight. For example, Annie B. Parson, we published some of her drawings and her particular charts where she draws the props that she uses over and over or how they're used in a particular piece. So drawing illuminates a lot about performance thinking, what I call performance thinking. But artist's writings are really in short supply now. You know, Richard. People should contact you. You're open for submission, for articles, everything. You're open for business? Well, the thing is that, you know, the recent books are by Lee Brewer. He wrote some of the recent... Lee Brewer, yeah, we did his last interview, actually. The volume of artist's writing. Shector wrote so much about the works that he directed. He wrote provocative ideas. Even if I don't agree with him, it's fine. He's in the world and it's something to think and talk about. I've always valued that. People used to argue and fight over ideas and disagree. We don't have to agree on everything and be nice and have consensus, you know? So I just want to say that I admire that from that generation, it's a real loss that we don't have more directors and playwrights writing about their work. Everything is now interviews or something like that, you know? Yeah, press material that gets reworked. So you ask what's to be done. What remains to be done? I think more and more artists writing, of course. I'd like to pursue more in the performance and drawing. I'd like to see people, and I personally would like to continue to experiment in new critical forms. Are you talking about the field in general or as an editor? For you, your life as an editor in general, yeah. What I'm working on now is a volume of Dick Higgins' work because people have known him as Fluxus, as a Fluxus member and founder, but they don't know what a great theater man he was. And I think that there's more than 250 performance scores that he called graphics drawings or recipes or maps or photo music are really completely unknown to people. So I hope that when this book comes out next year that it might give new impetus for people to again, experiment in writing for the theater and writing for performance, whether it's in performance scores or plays or different kinds of texts or also drawing because many of these drawings were performed as a performance score. The performance score. The structural performance scores in a way. Yeah, performance scores. And so with vacuum cleaners and blow dryers and vocalizations. Page idea of sound, yeah. Yeah. But some of them were drawings. And so sometimes they were placed on the floor as a map actually and performers were in them. I think people should be more free and more experimental, but I realized that there's so many factors that are so difficult with the corporate boards and finding an audience today and the politics and everything. I wish that people would be less conformist and more free and imaginative in their thinking and really think about where the theater is going. Where is it going? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we're coming closer to an end. I, we didn't go to, but I also liked your line where you said real world action is now also supplemented by articles or essays, which you said often exaggerate the subversive cultural impact of us. So we write about critical, what people did in artists, but a real world action about climate change, hunger of children in America. Supposed to be up to 30% experience what the Americans call food insecurity, which means hunger. It's unimaginable, you know, the people in jails and whatever that, you know, the question what the engagement was the real world or what Sartre said, how can we talk about art?  So I think there's also something more to explore about Bonnie as the very end, I would like you to read, I think, which I like very much. Of course, we all do admire Bob Wilson and his great water mill center in the tree. So I, and I think it's also in the book, it's a very special essay, a very special poem in a way, long form poem, what you wrote and maybe read us a little bit and as a goodbye. So we also hear your voice. Okay, this piece of one of me to read is Tree Lines. It was written for Bob's 70th birthday. There was a book published in Germany and I was asked to write an essay in it. So that was 10 years ago actually because now he just turned 80. And it was also a celebration of Water Mill. I think Water Mill's 20th year anniversary. This is his laboratory and art center in Water Mill, New York and Long Island. So this piece is called Tree Lines. This is a section from it. At Water Mill, the grounds act as a kind of book of nature. It's pages bounded by vistas of garden field and path. There I walked round and round, stepping on crushed stones and down terrace stairs, flanked by billowy grasses, gathered up for the winter, like rows of fertility goddesses. Through the joints of the building, its meditative heart, I saw distant trees framed in open passageways. There are tangled branches, so many slender drawings in the open air. Trees are outside and they are inside, inside out. In this theater of illusion, they live among the furniture visible through the glass doors. The site of trees beyond bookend, bookend along corridor of interior rooms, calmed by the solitude of sculpture. Whenever I looked through a window, trees were framed in the reflection of its glass panes. Gertrude Stein would probably have said it was window-full to use one of her capacious words. Wandering along pathways in the woods, I found myself in the company of spirit guides in the shape of large steels, clustered in discrete sites, as if they were other populations gathered into the artistic life of the water mill community. A group facing this way and that seemed to be conversing. Others, tall and proud, conjure a different species of wisdom in the forgotten signs carved onto their wooden chests. Here and there are the sacred coffin lids of ancient cultures and continents, a poem to the cycle of time. Even a spiritual ladder has its own setting. Bob the traveler, Bob the lover of lost civilizations. He places well-worn totems far from faraway islands by long island walkways, designing sight lines for strollers. Footsteps on stones and leaves and soil tell time in organic matter. Everything matters. A forest of myth, a place of dreams and over there a stage. How the landscape makes a play. That's part of it. Fantastic. Yeah, it's a beautiful image. And I like that word window full from the way we say, which also I think is what PhD does. It really does open windows. Venetians say when the door closes, sometimes windows open. And I think lots of doors in the moment seem to be closing, but also doors are opening and some of them are opened by you. The things between heaven and earth and what they've banned doors, supposedly is named after by T.S. Eliot, his poem. So I'm really, Bonnie, thank you for your window full work, for your great contribution to New York's theater as an archivist, you know, where you say, so many focus on theory now. But what about the artists? What about the places? What about the theaters? What about the productions? Hope, you know, it's a little bit, we have a little bit less on it. It's a little bit out of balance before maybe there was not enough theory and it's also a call, you know, to re-engage. And as your friend said, why don't you do it? And if Bonnie could do it as a young student, you can do it wherever it's listening. So please do engage. Thank you again and our highest respect and congratulations on your great work of 50 years publishing a journal. So many we heard close, you stayed open. It looks easy. It's so much work, what you did. As a mother courage, as I said, pushing the PHA wagon, you know, through our times. And so thank you for spending some time with us. People don't go out and look at the book and dream up your own book, what you would put in there and what it might be something very meaningful inside there for you. And the audience says, thank you for taking the time to listen to us. I know so much is out there now. So much more content when we started the Seagull Talks. It was very little at the time now. I think it is one of the forms of engagement we do have. So but we really value it. And it means a lot that you join us as thanks to the great HowlRound VRBJ for making this possible. My team Andy and Tanvi and Cactus Juice, it's a go rough. It's really important to have you all with us and it makes a big difference. And join us with Teresa Smalek on November 29 after Thanksgiving, we have a little bit of time talking about Ron Water, a very important significant New York artist who unfortunately died too early. And if Marianne Weems and also John Jesser and both names came up today, they will be with us and talk about him and his work. So Bonnie, thank you again. And I hope to see you soon. Very enjoyable, yeah, good. Yeah, and it's so great how you can. You also mixed an urban life in New York with kind of a rural country setting and that both places are of real importance to you and it also reflects, I think, in your work. So goodbye, thank you and all stay safe and till the next time, bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.


Hello everyone, thanks for joining us today. Today, Xin and I will give a deep dive and introduction to the data protection working group. My name is Zhang Qian, exercise please. I am a software engineer from Google. Hello everyone, my name is Xin Yang. I work at VMware in the cloud storage team. I'm also a co-chair in Kubernetes 6 storage and co-chair of the data production wing group with Xiang Qian. Thank you, Xin. Next slide please. Today, we are going to go through a couple of topics. First, we will reiterate a little bit what is the motivation of this data protection working group. And then we'll go a little bit to recognize over who are the organizations that get involved in this effort. And then we talk about what we think about data protection is in the Kubernetes context. And then what are the existing building blocks to support data protection in Kubernetes? And what are we missing for the building blocks to support this feature better and how to get involved? Next slide please. There were not sufficient fundamental Kubernetes building blocks to easily allow users to do backup and snapshot of the stateful applications as of today. They want operations for deployment, management and rollout of stateful workload are well supported. There are volume operations either through CSI driver or entry drivers. And they are workload APIs, deployment stateful set, et cetera, to support that. With more and more stateful workload moving to Kubernetes, the desire of providing fundamental building blocks to allow users protect the data is getting headed. GitOps could potentially be used for rolling back of stateful workloads. It is still insufficient for stateful workloads as the data cannot easily be managed by GitOps. This working group has been built, targeted at designing and implementing Kubernetes native building blocks to allow backup windows to quickly build backup solutions for the users. That's to support the data operations for data protection specifically. And this working group has two major stakeholders, SIG apps and SIG storage and potentially SIG node. Next slide please. So who are all in world? This is a weekly meeting and those are just probably incomplete list of companies that are supporting this initiative. We saw a lot of contributions from storage companies, cloud providers, backup windows, et cetera, et cetera. And thanks to all the contributors, we are making good progress over there. Next slide please. So what exactly is data protection in Kubernetes? The main purpose of data protection is to make sure that an application and its data can be recovered to a previously preserved state. We call it backup for the state after any corruption or losses. That can include badly rolled out software costs, data corruption or it can be disaster recovery when you lost the whole data center, et cetera, et cetera. In the Kubernetes context, it mainly involves two pieces of data. One is the API resources that describes your workload in the Kubernetes cluster and the other is the persistent volume data that application uses. This is a complicated and layered problem. Likely including backup and recovery at a couple of levels. Persistent volume level, application level and the cost level to satisfy different goals. Next slide please. Part of this working group's charter or emissions is to define a list of Kubernetes native constructs to enable protection at different levels. At the volume level, there are volume snapshot features and we're looking into volume backup features, volume restore. In the application level, we are looking to define what consists of your application and how to acquire an application such that application-consistent snapshot can be achieved. She will give more details later on and just glance in through this concept. The cost level, what if I want to backup the whole cluster and being able to restore into a completely different cluster. Next slide please. Here, this diagram shows you a pretty typical stateful application backup workflow. A user generally starts a backup either with your COI or something. It has two missions to do. One is to backup the Kubernetes resources and get them archived or exported to an external externally managed storage, typically object storage systems. And then the other piece, the data backup. As you may aware or some of the stateful workloads like MySQL, Postgres, Radius, etc., they have this so-called application-native data dump. So what they're capable of is an COI tool which allows you to download the current state of the application into a local file. And this local file can be later on used for restoration. In this case, if such application has a native data dump, a user can choose to use the native dump and export the dump file into the remote bucket, object bucket. If there's not, there's a controller coordinate backup workflow that typically will happen. Where does it typically quiet the application and take a wild snapshot or backup using the Kubernetes construct and unquiet the application? The reason why you want to quiet your application is to make sure during the process of backup the data is being maintained in the consistent application level. Next slide, please. The restore workflow is the reverse. Users start to import the backup, including both the Kubernetes resource piece as well as the data piece and the PVC data needs most likely to be handled specially. PVC and the PV data restoration, again, it branches into two pieces. If the backup turns out to be a native application dump, then use the native application tools to restore from the dump, otherwise just rehydrate the PVC from the volume snapshot or volume backup. Next slide, please. So we talk about the workflows. What exactly is there as of today to support these workflows? For application, they reach sets of workload APIs, state, for-set, deployment, demand-set, et cetera. There's also an application CRD, which groups a set of resources together and abandon them as an application. In the storage piece, we have volume snapshot feature, which is already G80 and 1.21. Next slide, please. So how does this work? How does this building blocks fit into the workflow? As you might see the green box over there, workload APIs and SIG apps application, CRDs can help the backup system understand what are the Kubernetes resources this backup should contain. Next slide, please. Volume snapshot feature majorly sits in the controller or coordinate workflow where the controller can literally create a volume snapshot object, and this will trigger a snapshot over the system of the twice cookies called. Next slide, please. In the restoration workflow, the same thing. Volume snapshot can be directly used to rehydrate PVC from it. Next slide, please. We talk about existing. So what are missing? This is just a short list of missing features. We're looking to design a build. Volume backup, volume snapshots. In some of the windows, they are stored externally. In some of the windows, they're actually locally stored in the primary storage system. Backup repository. Where do we put or where do we put our backup manifest? Quiet and quiet hooks. How do you trigger a command in an application such that it can quiet itself and unquiet itself? Application snapshot and backup. This is basically an application level of extraction, including controller that allows you to do application consistency, consistent snapshot and backup. And there are more. Next slide, please. This is a slightly busy slide. If we take a look, the boxes in orange are the missing blocks. And boxes in yellow are the ones that are under design or work in progress. Boxes in green or blue. Boxes in green are existing ones. So the volume backup, just like volume snapshot, fits into the picture of controller coordinated backup process. And a backup repository serves as the storage place location for when you try to expose the backup. An application backup is a higher level construct, organize all this and coordinate in all this process. Next slide, please. In the restore workflow, a pretty similar thing. Backup repository this time serves as a source of the backup to be pulled from. And there's a COSI cap, which is to build a generic interface to all the object providers, to object providers, which is in progress. Application restore, in this case, plays a role of orchestrating the restoration process from the application level. And the volume backup again falls into the same box as volume snapshot. I will not go too much detail into this and I'll hand it over to Xin to cover the details of those missing blocks. Xin, please. Thanks, Zhang Xin. So I'm going to talk about what are the missing building blocks. The first missing building block we identified is volume backup. We needed this because we need to extract data to our secondary storage. We've already got a volume snapshot API, but there's no explicit definition made in the design to have snapshots stored on different backup devices separate from the primary storage. For some cloud providers, a snapshot is actually a backup that is uploaded to an object store in a cloud. However, for most other storage vendors, a snapshot is locally stored alongside the volume on the primary storage. So without a volume backup API, backup vendors can handle different snapshot semantics differently. For storage systems that take local snapshots, you use the volume snapshot API to take the snapshot and then have a data mover to upload a snapshot to your backup target. For storage systems that upload snapshots to an object store automatically, the snapshot can be treated as a backup. Alternatively, backup vendor can also move the snapshot to a different backup target. We just started discussions about this in the working group. In this diagram, volume backup is next to volume snapshot. We put it in an orange box to indicate that it is a missing Kubernetes component. We have started discussions about it, but there's no concrete design yet. The next missing building block is CBT and change file lists. Without the CBT change block tracking and change the file list, backup vendors have to do full backups all the time. This is not space efficient, takes longer to complete and needs more bandwidth. Another use case for CBT is snapshot-based replication where you take snapshots periodically and they replicate it to another site for faster recovery purpose. So what are the alternatives? Without CBT, we can either do full backups or we can call each storage API individually to retrieve CBT, which is highly inefficient. We are currently doing design for the CBT feature. As shown in this diagram, the CBT box is next to volume backup and volume snapshot is used to make backups more efficiently. It is a yellow box now as we are currently working on the design. The third missing building block is the backup repository. Backup repository is a location or repo to store data. This can be an object store in a cloud, on-prem storage location or a ANSI-based solution. There are two types of data to be backed up that we need at the restore time. The first one is Kubernetes cluster metadata. The second one is snapshot data. We need to back them up and restore them in a backup repository. Currently there is a project for object store backup repository that is object bucket provisioning or COSI. This introduces object storage Kubernetes API to support orchestration of object store operations for Kubernetes workloads. This brings object storage as the first class citizen in Kubernetes, just like file and block storage. It also introduces container object storage interface or COSI as a set of GRP interfaces for provisioning object buckets. Kubernetes COSI is already a sub-project in six storage and it is a pretty active project. It has weekly design meetings and stand-up meetings. It is targeting afar in 1.22 release. In this diagram, COSI is in a yellow box indicating it is a working progress Kubernetes component. This is an object store backup repository. It can be used to export backup and store the data. Let's look at the restore. COSI is used to import backup data at restore time. The next missing building block is the volume populator. Currently, we can only create a PVC for another PVC or for a volume snapshot. But what if the backup data is stored in a backup repository such as an object store? The volume populator feature allows us to provision a PVC for an external data source such as a backup repository. In addition, it allows us to dynamically provision a PVC having data populated from the backup repository and honor the wait for first consumer volume binding mode during restore to ensure that volume is placed at the right node where part is scheduled. There isn't any volume data source alpha feature gate which was introduced in 1.18 design and part tapping for volume populated implementation or in progress. New repos are created. One repo is for Shell library for use by volume populators. The other repo is for the controller responsible for validating PVC data sources. This is targeting beta in 1.22 release. As shown in this diagram the volume populator is needed at restore time. Volume populator is in a yellow box indicating that it is a working progress Kubernetes component. It is used to rehydrate PVC from a backup repository during restore. The next one is quiet and unquiet hooks. We needed these hooks to quiet application before taking a snapshot and unquiet afterwards to ensure application consistency. We investigated how quiet and unquiet hooks work in different types of workloads. They have very different semantics. We want to design a generic mechanism to run commands in containers but we want to mention that application specific semantics is out of scope. We currently have a proposal called container modifier. It is submitted and it is being reviewed. Let's take a closer look of the container modifier cap. This cap proposes to introduce the mechanism to notify a selected set of parts to run pre-specified commands defined in line in those parts specification. This is achieved by adding an optional modifier field in the container to allow users to specify commands or signals which can be executed or sent. We are using a core API object pod notification to trigger specific command signals specified in a pod. We plan to introduce the changes in multiple phases. In phase one, we propose to add an optional field notifiers which is a list of container notifiers in the container. Add a container notifier handler which defines a command at a core API pod notification which defines a container to trigger the execution of container notifier in a pod and add a single trusted controller a pod notification controller to watch pod notification resources executed commands and update their statuses. In phase two, we propose to add an API called a notification and a controller which processes notification resources. In the notification spec, there is label selector to select pods. There is also a pod selection policy. If policy is all pods, it means the controller will keep processing all pods matching the label until the notification object is deleted. If policy is pre existing pods only, it means the controller will only process pods created before the notification object is created. In phase two, we also propose to add an inline pod definition for signals and allow the API object to send a request to trigger delivering of those signals and also move logic in the pod notification controller into Qubit so that Qubit will be watching pod notification objects, runs the commands and update statuses of pod notifications. In phase three, a probe may be added if needed as an inline pod definition to verify the signal is deleted or whether the command is run and results in desired outcome. Let's take a look at this diagram. Continuity fire is mainly used at a backup time to do choirs before taking a snapshot and unquires afterwards. The next one is consistent group snapshot. We talked about the container modifier proposal which tries to ensure application consistency. If you can't choirs the application or if the application choirs is too expensive so you want to do it less frequently but still want to be able to take a crash consistent snapshot more frequently. Also an application may require the snapshots from multiple volumes to be taken at the same point in time. That's when consistent group snapshot comes into the picture. There's a cap on the group and group snapshot. It proposes to introduce a new volume group CRD that groups multiple volumes together and a new group snapshot CRD that supports taking a snapshot of all volumes in a group to ensure right order consistency. This cap is being reviewed. Let's look at this diagram here. We don't have content modifier to do choirs here but we have a consistent group here that facilitates the creation of a snapshot of multiple volumes in the same group to ensure right order consistency. We have snapshot APIs for individual volumes but what about protecting a stateful application? There's a cap submitted that proposes the Kubernetes API that defines the notion of stateful applications and defines how to run operations on those stateful applications such as snapshots, backup and restore. This is still in a very early design stage. In this diagram, application backup handles the backup of our stateful application. It can leverage content modifier to choirs and use COSI as the backup repository. Similarly here we have application restore that handles the restore of a stateful application. So this are all the missing building blocks that we have identified and are working on. Next, I'm going to talk about how to get involved. As discussed in previous slides, this or in group is working on identifying missing functionalities in supporting data production in Kubernetes and trying to figure out how to fill those gaps. We are also working on a white paper on data production workflow. We have bi-weekly meetings on Wednesdays. If you are interested, please join our meetings. We also have a mailing list and a Slack channel as shown here. This is the end of the session. Thank you all for attending. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to retell to us. Thank you.


i hope if you're watching this you actually did the stuff i spoke about in the previous video because this is building on that quick disclaimer that i'm not an action coach i'm not an acting consultant i am an actor who is doing this as if you were my best friend and you were like belgica que hago? dime. so i'm just telling you exactly what i would tell my best friend first of all what i'm about to say is gonna put some of you off get vaccinated and boosted if you're not and that's wait wait wait wait let me tell you why because a lot of acting classes do require you to be up to date a lot of jobs require you to have that so it's not like okay once i find an acting class like i'll consider it once i get booked in a job i'll consider it as you probably know it takes at least two weeks in order for all of the magic to work in your body i'm just saying it's gonna make it a lot easier i'm not telling you that this is what you should absolutely do i'm just saying like if you're asking me if you want me to tell you what to do that's one of the things and i'm also not a doctor i'm not i don't really know what's gonna happen long term with all of this so i'm just telling you as an actor sometimes you got to do stuff that maybe you don't quite like now we're going to start choosing some acting classes for beginners the biggest piece of advice i can give you especially if you've never taken an acting class is do not get stuck trying to find the perfect acting class a lot of people do research of like okay which acting class can i take that's going to help me become the best actor ever and make me famous don't try and go at this in the most perfect manner because you're never going to start especially the beginning you want to take some kind of intro to acting or um if there's a a certain technique that you've done a lot of research and you're like yes i love this technique let's do this one but you're going to take more acting classes trust me it's not the end of the world if you choose an acting class and you're like huh that one wasn't for me there's some questions that you really should ask yourself before you go ahead and sign up for that acting class and i already made a video about questions that you should ask yourself so please watch this video specifically for like the nitty gritty of each of the types of acting classes that i'm about to talk about i'm a firm believer in in-person acting classes i am not going to advise you at least not right now in the beginning of 2023 to go take an online acting class if you are able to like if you don't live at the end of the earth please take an in-person acting class i think they're far more beneficial not only will you get the experience closer to what you will be like on set um you will be working with people and having to interact with a bunch of different people but you're going to make much more close-knit relationships if you are going to acting class with them so if the instructor is also a casting director or if you're fellow other actors in the acting class or producers or writers or you can just make projects with in general you're going to have such better relationships if you're actually in person and having to rehearse out of class there's a bunch of different kinds and you don't have to say yes to them immediately there are workshops that are very short commitment so usually there are a few sessions or one session for like five hours those are the most flexible so those are really great and just getting to know yourself and what kind of acting classes you like and the techniques the different techniques that they are acting classes at a studio where you meet weekly for a few months years or indefinitely those kind of acting classes you have a lot of potential of being able to research them because you can ask around online and see if anybody in the area has taken those asking other people for their experiences is really good to get their perspective but remember you are not going to have the same experiences them get a little bit of an idea of like oh there's this one student or there's this one section of the class but once you get passed out it gets really good like just little nuggets of whatever might happen i talked about facebook last time and facebook again there's so many acting groups on facebook where you can just make a post and people will tell you so many different studios in classes they've taken so that is an amazing resource and of course you can just do a post anywhere else instagram tiktok wherever and ask people hey have you taken any in-person acting classes in houston that you really liked or that you really didn't like a lot of those classes will let you audit them which means they will let you go into the class and see what one class is like or have an intro session and a studio that i know has an intro session is a meisner studio in burbank that i've talked about in previous videos and i can tell you that the audit and the actual class are actually very similar in the audit you get to participate you do exercises you introduce yourself you get to know the instructor though if you're interested in that one it's in burbank la and the next one is january 14th 2023 but if you're watching this after that they constantly update their website and you can see when the next one is i also audited the beaverly hills playhouse when they were in san francisco a long time ago and i also really enjoyed it so i suggest that you audit more than two i i'm crazy and every time i audit a class and i love it i'm just like i want to take it but maybe you're less crazy than me and you should audit a few more and really get to know it i'm giving you advice of like mistakes i made and what i know should have would have been better so audit a class while you're doing research for those acting classes there's also books about techniques that you can be reading to see if you like them meisner on acting is a great one if you're interested in meisner technique and this one also gives you a lot of really great like beginner things to acting classes so if you want to go into the acting class knowing a little bit you know not just going in there not knowing any acting terms or anything read at least a couple of chapters of a few different techniques so you can see what you're getting yourself into in those classes and always ask what kind of technique they offer in these specific classes because sometimes it's just intro to acting by i don't know my friend timothy holes and then you're like okay but what are you gonna teach us timothy so do your research make sure to go watch that video of what questions to ask yourself before you do sign up for the acting class and start training this might seem scary to you but i want you to start practicing self-tape auditions and we're going to start in the most chill way okay first of all i want you to look around in your home and see where there's a solid wall white if you have one like this one practice your slates and this is more to get yourself comfortable with being on camera and talking to the camera so just go ahead and do your slate like hi my name is belgica rodriguez i'm 510 and i'm based out of burbank it might be a little bit echoey the lighting might be a little bit strange right now but it's okay and do that for at least five days and five at a time just say it say it say it because sometimes people really get stuck in like saying it like a robot or get really nervous and hi my name is belgica rodriguez 510 located in burbank like it's just just be a little bit more relaxed i personally think that more relaxed slates are a little bit better and while you're doing this make sure that you watch back your slates so that you can find out do i keep fixing my hair which is something that i do a lot but not during my slates do you clap your your hand on your side when you're doing your slate see if you move too much or blink too much when you're doing your slate and you can be like oh i don't do those things normally i'm just nervous in front of the camera i'm just not comfortable in front of the camera yet it does help if you imagine yourself in a specific situation like you're introducing yourself to somebody who maybe you know who they are but they don't know who you are and you're excited to meet them hi my name is belgica rodriguez i'm 510 and i'm looking it at a burbank do it a bunch of times and then eventually it will start feeling better i'm also going to open up a way as a friend as an actor not an acting coach a way that you can send in yourself tape and i can give you some feedback about what you can improve as far as like the framing the lighting the sound and you're acting a little bit as well but really you just need to go to an acting class and have somebody in person give you feedback in this next video we're going to talk about headshots resume creating a reel at home yes already so that people can really see what you're like on camera and setting up a good self-tape studio


The reasons we introduced MEDL, our e-portfolio system, was we were looking for a solution that allowed our learners to be able to develop and upload their work and manage it and track it electronically. So we looked at a number of different solutions, both those that had to be paid for and free solutions, and MEDL, which was a system developed in New Zealand universities, seemed to be the one that fitted the bill, if you like. The advantages are that they have complete ownership of their own work. Nobody else can interfere with it. The learners, as well as being able to upload their images, videos, texts, whatever it might be, but also allows the tutors to give the learners individual feedback. I think what we're looking for is a full rounded experience for the learners where they are able to build and develop their portfolios to take with them at the end of their studying here at the College of Oxford Monarch, allowing them to present it to future employers, whether they're going on to university perhaps, but overall enable them to capture their complete learning experience while they're here at the College. The students quite like it because if they don't meet a target, the little box turns red and they stop danger, you've got a target that you've not met, if they achieve their target they can tick them off like a little to-do list, so it helps to keep them focused and it keeps them on track with their deadlines. It's really easy, it's like using Facebook really, but in a different way because you're always talking to tutors as well by sending them comments back to say if you're stuck on something in the comments you can always work back to the comments then and say what do you mean by this and you can still communicate with your tutors on Merthal as well. I've used Merthal to upload my assignments so the tutors can mark it and then if we need any rework on any certain bit they'll tell us what we need to do so we can go back and do it and they'll tell us if we've passed so we know where we are with our work. What I'd like to see in the future is I'd like to see this extended across to every single learner no matter what their level of learning is if you like, where they all develop these portfolios and record their learning whilst at the College at St Mulloch.