Look here, I'm wrestling. Tell me a truth regarding love now. Why do people want to tap the real truth about Ruth's theater?  Why do people want to tap the real truth about Ruth's theater? Because God doesn't ask me a question, I'll go right in. Good afternoon, and welcome to week three of Ten Weeks in Jamaica, theater conversations from Jamaica to the world. I am Akiba Abaka, and I'm one of the co-founders and co-artistic director of Akiba Abaka Arts. We are an international theater production company that creates plays, concerts, and talks, as well as processes for making plays, concerts, and talks for the world stage. This series is presented in partnership with Raw Management Agency, an esteemed talent agency representing artists and groups across all genres of film, theater, television, voiceover, branding, and endorsements. We're very grateful to work in collaboration with Ms. Nadine Rollins, Raw Management's Managing Director, and co-curator of Ten Weeks in Jamaica. Ten Weeks in Jamaica, theater conversations from Jamaica to the world, is a talk series very unique in its structure because it shares the behind-the-scenes stories of Jamaica's theater community with the global theater community, as well as the Jamaican and Caribbean communities in the diaspora. Each week, Jamaica's leading theater pioneers and practitioners narrate their histories and memories of the Jamaican stage, as well as offer their visions for the future development of theater in Jamaica in this 21st century. The series is made possible by our sponsors and publisher, HowlRound.com, a free and open platform for theater makers worldwide that amplifies progressive disruptive ideas about the art form of theater and facilitates connections between diverse theater practitioners. Ten Weeks in Jamaica is also sponsored by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the City University of New York in Manhattan. The Segal Center is a home to theater artists, scholars, students, performers, arts managers, and local and international performance communities. We are one is the motto of the Jamaican people and Jamaica's theater legacy dates back to the 15th century or 1400s and represents a diverse collection of stories about the people and cultures that have lived on the island for over 400 years. We started the conversations on November 1st talking about the iconic Jamaica's iconic Ward Theater with special guests Oliver Samuels, Brian Heap, and Anola Williams, producer of Kingston on the Edge Arts Festival. Last week's conversation was also dedicated to a Jamaican icon, an iconic theater, a little theater movement and a pantomime and a legendary Miss Louise Bennett. In this conversation we were joined by Anya Gludon as well as Ms. St. Ellington and Dr. Deborah Hickling Gordon. For today's conversation we venture down the road of the highly popular commercially dominant genre of Jamaican roots theater. Now Wycliffe Bennett and Hazel Bennett. I'm going to hold up this amazing book that every human should have in their library and their collection so just check it out. Make sure you check it out. Wycliffe Bennett and Hazel Bennett, authors of the book The Jamaican Theater, highlights of the performing arts in the 20th century, compares roots theater to the pre-dramatic ceremonies of ancient Greece by stating some of these ceremonies also provided opportunity for considerable bi-play and mockery between participants and spectators. Probably the most noteworthy characteristic of the Aristocanic comedies which survive is their commentary on contemporary society, politics, literature and the Peloponnesian war which was raging at the time. These were the times when in addition to fantasy farcical situations where typical and considerable emphasis was placed on the pleasures of eating, drinking, sex, wealth and leisure coupled with the comic elements were some of the most beautiful lyrics and some of the most obscene passages in Greek literature. These flames and their reception are not far removed from what is experienced today by those who attend the Jamaican roots or comedic play. Now last week we heard from Ms. Fay Ellington. She called out the names of some of the pioneers of Jamaican roots theater, Ed Bim Lewis, Harold Holness, Ralph Holness, the producer who is credited with naming the genre roots theater, and playwright Paul Beale, author of over 50 roots plays among them the classic Andaminous and Ovia Weddin. I remember those two plays. Today we are joined by an esteemed panel of three of Jamaica's most popular thespians and stalwarts of the roots theater stage. Our first guest is Mr. Valier Muffy Johnson. He started his career in theater as a student at St. Andrew Technical High School when he gained a role in the Jamaican hit classic movie The Heart of They Come. You may remember him. He's the guy pushing the push cart next to Jimmy Cliff. He launched his commercial theater career in productions by Ed Wallace Productions, the pantomime, the Jamaican pantomime, the National Theater Trust, Basil Dawkins Production and Center Stage Theater to critical acclaim in productions such as cantaloupe, trash, room for rent, stepfather, toy boy, Pinocchio, children children, breadfruit kingdom, and strength of a woman among any others. He's also been a TV star with regular appearances on programs such as Oliver at Large, Claffey and Sarge in Charge and the very, very popular legendary lime tree lane. Gathering nicknames from each program as he goes. The nickname has stuck with him throughout his career is Claffey. Well, a lot of us kind of remember him as Muffy from that scene. Give generously. Welcome, Bolier. Hi, how are you doing? Doing very well. Like to introduce our next guest, Miss Maylin Lowe. Miss Lowe was born in Kingston, Jamaica and began ballet at age four years old and trained for over 12 years with the Norma Spence and Roe Ballet Company. She transitioned into musical theater as a teenager in productions such as Cats and Aladin with the Jamaica Musical Theater Company and the Little People Company. She studied acting and completed the summer program at AADA in New York and then went on to Emerson College in Boston Mass. So she is an Emersonian like many of the producers of this series and she made where she majored in acting. On her return home, she landed a role as Tanya Blackburn in Jamaica's longest-running soap opera, Royal Palm Estate, which she played for over 10 years. She has worked with all major producers in her industry such as Father Ho Long and Friends, Oliver Samuels, Jambiz Theater, Daily Harris Productions, Shibata and Stages Productions and Basil Dawkins Productions, just to name a few. In 2010, Miss Lowe won Best Actress at the ITI Actor Boy Awards in Jamaica for her role as Annie Palmer in the White Witch of Rolls Hall. Her latest role was with Basil Dawkins, Pressure Drop at the Little Little Theater. Welcome, Maylin. Hello. So nice to be here. Thank you. Nice to have you. Hello, Emersonian. Our next guest is Keith Shibata Ramsey, a Jamaican actor and comedian best known for his appearances in Roots Plays. He is often to refer to as simply Shibata, a nickname given to him by his father. In 2006, he entered his first season of CVM TV, Later Television of Jamaica, and he entered a competition in a comedian elimination show called Comedy Bus, where he placed third. From there, he was recruited by Stages Productions to appear in Roots Plays, such as Bashmik Rani. In his careers and after, Shibata has done over 20 plays, including The Wedding Scama, Crosses, Clash, Chick Stuff, Set Up, and Get Out. And of course, we must not forget, Shibata comes to town. Welcome, Keith, or should I say Shibata? Well, any name we'll use for me, honestly. All right. All right. So listen, before we start, right, because we're all theater, and theater is nothing that speaks to the times. And as the Bennett's pointed out, the Roots Theater, like the Greek Theater, was a theater that commented on current events of our times. Currently, there's an incident that happened in Kingston recently with a young woman, Kaelin Dixon, Dixie, if I get her name correct, and some statements were made by you in your character, not so much in the man as Keith Ramsey, that were landing on some of your fans in a way that is a bit sensitive and hurtful at this time. Can you say something to that before we continue the program? I just want to say that my statement was very clear. What I said about Kaelin, I must say that I do not condone violence against women. I don't do that. I want to make myself clear what I said the other day as it relates to Kaelin. I just want to make myself clear that my statement, I do not condone violence against women. Period. Thank you so much. Sometimes in our character and in the roles that we play, we're working in the moment of the time. And sometimes some things may be said and taken out of our real character. So we really appreciate that because we want to uplift black women. We are black women ourselves. We want to uplift our stories and we want to elevate the great and amazing theater that's coming out of Jamaica and mashing up the world. And so we just want to say that we want to no harm, no hurt to anyone. No harm, no hurt. With respect for all and wishing Kaelin and her family a speedy recovery with love to all. Okay. All right. So Mr. Valier, I want to ask you a question, sir. You were making your way between the film world and the theater world when Roots Theater entered the scene in 1970. What was it like at that time? Was Roots Theater a disruption of the North? No, no, no, it wasn't. Roots Theater was always been there, you know, it's always been there. It was just low-keyed and it was like a community thing. It was always been a part of the Jamaican culture. Right? And we had now the major theater, the mainstream theater that would present you with Shakespeare and you name it. Until in the 70s when Jamaicans started to write Jamaican plays, Roots Theater then become prominent because the Jamaican theater now started to adopt and started to take after the mainstream theater that was produced in all these foreign plays. But Roots Theater, Roots Theater, right? And then the order of man on the street would gravitate to the Roots play. So they had a mass audience. They ended up having a mass audience. So Roots Theater is the theater for the ordinary man? The ordinary man. The ordinary man. The ordinary man. The modern industry, uptown, downtown, all around town, every color of the town. I was surprised to know how much the uptown people, and you know what we mean by uptown in Jamaica.  Yes, uptown. Up across. Yes, up across. And a lot of them went and saw, because they were curious and they wanted to know, what is this big thing about Uber wedding and Andaminos? And they went downtown and saw it in the Roots Theater. They went down there and looked at the show. And I told them I was surprised to see what was being done and why people enjoy it so much. Nice. We're going to talk a little bit more about what was being done and why it's so well enjoyed. I want to toss this one to Maylin. Now, Maylin, how does a classically trained ballet dancer, thespian Shakespeare, what are you doing at the Roots Theater, Mrs? What's going on? Talk to me. What are you doing in Roots Theater? How do you find your footing? Voller is very right in that, you know, Roots is kind of, it was looked down on. There's this class thing with Roots. And for me as an artist, I'm very interested in form, and I'm very interested in genre. So I like all types of theater. And Roots Theater came into my face because of its popularity. I don't think it's something that started in the 70s as Voller says. Maybe it's kind of got its footing and emerged. But people always wrote stories, always told stories, repeated myths, and their culture lived this way. It's like music. So it has its place. And for me, I just had to get involved to find out more about my culture firsthand, taste it, live it, experience it. And it was just thriving. I was lucky that I jumped in at a time that Chewbada was really dominating the scene and still. So it's wonderful. I think also on a political level, the world is going through a renaissance, a little revolution and an awakening. And this goes back to even language and patois, and us realizing and accepting and using and practicing. And also practicing our native tongue, practicing the tongue a lot. And also being comfortable with it. And Roots Theater is a part of that. It's a part of our heritage, our culture, how we talk, how we behave, how we tell stories. And it's very important and very relevant and timely that you're doing this talk now on Roots because of what's happening globally. Do you feel me? Yeah. Yeah. Globally, cultures are trying to find themselves. People are fighting. Yeah, people are fighting. And for our creations, go ahead, sorry. Quite right, oughtn't be silenced. And so I think, you know, and Jamaica is very particular. Jamaica is not just West African culture and history. It's merged and mixed and wonderfully interesting. And we're just brilliant, eloquent, warm, musical type of people, Caribbean people in general. And so I think we're very good at being able to communicate and comment, as you stated earlier, on the times. And the times, of course. Let's ask this to Mr. Shabada. Keith Shabada, which one would you say? Is this the anyone? Shebi. Yes, shebi. I'm going to talk like a member of the family. Shebi. Here we go. Shebi. Yes, love. The Shabada factor is a term that Caribbean producers use to explain what happens at the box office when your name is on a ticket. In my experience, your work, in my experience of your work, you have created a classic representation of Roots Theatre with your approach to comedy and improvisation, as well as your crisp and precise performances and a wit and a comedic timing that is on the level of athleticism. It's like you're the UC and both of comedy, my brother. What drives you as an actor on the Roots stage?  It is a shocker to say that. However, I mean, I didn't even know that I have this gift inside me. I don't even know what I'm doing. You understand if I might say that because it wasn't a gift that learned. You understand me? So when a person says to me that I am extremely good, I'm like, okay, it's I really can't hype over it because I really don't understand my own gift because it's so big and it's so wide. However, coming into theatre now, I normally bear harsh critique where acting is concerned. Anything of art is concerned. Dancing, singing, so I'm really harsh in that area. And me coming into theatre was a blessing because when I started with Comedy Boss, I said that I want to entertain the world. You understand me? I don't want to be a comedian. I want to entertain the world. So maybe within me, I know that there were there were much more to express than just with a mic. However, that call for stages production and this is where my gift now started manifesting. And I gained knowledge of everything I think what I'm doing. Bachelorette, you understand me?  I didn't watch things to do in the show, but there and then I saw that the production needed help. And that's when I started creating characters and letting others know others know that you can create characters behind the scene without being on stage, without them being present. You understand me? You got to do the research deeper research character narratives to build out your it was on the stage. It was physical. It wasn't anything taught or written. It was all physical. And we started with Bachelorette and then we did Shabada come to town and they wanted to challenge me. My own coworkers wanted to challenge me. So they said that I'm going to play three characters. And I did. And I'm saying to myself, why are they doing this? And then they asked me to go like father likes son and I was not in the script at all for father likes son. So I said to the producer, okay, I will insert myself. And that's exactly what I did. Now, get out, which is one of my favorite favorite right behind Bachelorette. No, that's a parody on the horror film get out, right? Okay. All right. Okay. All right. Well, they introduced my producer said to me at the time said to me that he wants to work with this white girl. So you know me friend for tourists. So you thought you thought he was going to cast a tourist? Where are you going to get a white girl in Jamaica? I said, okay, I am on the north coast. Yes, I'm at the biggest hotel. And these tourists, they are coming in.  So I said, yeah, let me work with mailing. And then when mailing came along and I said, okay, then how is it that she's going to understand my attitude, my style, my everything. But what I like about mailing is the fact that we are best friends off stage, but on stage, the worst enemy ever. Beautiful.  So mailing, I might never tell you this before, but let me use the opportunity mailing you are a beautiful soul. I must say that you and John Palmanoa. Also, let me, well, so let me just connecting this characterization and character development and the professionalism that all three of you bring to the roots stage to the origin of roots theater. Now, when you talk about professionalism, I come to understand that roots theater take its roots from a thing called tea parties. And if an actor wasn't professional, there was a way that the audience dealt with those people earlier. Tell us about the tea party and how the producers used to make their money at the tea party. The tea party was something like, you know, in those days, you never have light and running water and people just live in a little house, two bedroom house and have a big backyard and things. And they call a tea party. They call it this party, this concert as such. And people write them on a poem and then they send them song for singing and thing and thing. And of course, they would come and perform and while performing, they have people bidding to keep them on stage or to take them off stage. If they're not good, people pay a penny and a heap and a trapeze, six pounds to take them off stage. And then, if they are really good, they would pay shelling and salt and put them back on stage. I mean, it was a community thing, a real community thing. And I'll tell you, in those days, we used to have drops, coconut drops and fritters and pudding. All of that was. All the nice Jamaican dessert. Yeah, little Jamaican, what do you call it? Confectionery? Yes. Yes. What would be there? And we would also have a cup of tea. You can get yourself a cup of tea and our chocolate, our coffee, you know, we have very good coffee in Jamaica. The best. Right? Yeah. So it started from there where people were trying with means and ways to entertain themselves. You know what I mean? We don't have a TV, we don't have a radio. At least, I want to tell you, maybe in the fifties, forties, fifties, we don't go back so long. Still. People never have radio. You know, I read other strange things to some people when they're here reading themselves and listening. So this was the kind of thing. They had to create their own entertainment. And they had to take jobs at the church and drive the church and drive the politician and drive the man who lives with his wife. It reminds me. So many characters. So many people to mimic. It reminds me a little bit of the Vaudeville tradition. It also reminds me of the early days at the Apollo, because when you think about the Sandman, if you were good and the crowd got up for you, you stayed on the stage.   You were throwing money on the stage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, all right. It was fun. It was real fun. And people didn't look forward to it. I can tell you, as a producer, I would love it if the audience would throw money on the stage as well, if the actors are good. We American and world producers would love that as well. So, you know, speaking of the traditions, you know, this is really good to know where the culture comes from, that people were gathering. People were always, like you said, mainly before the 70s, before what is chronicled. And Brian Heap, Dr. Brian Heap said this on the first week where he pointed out the war theater was not where the real integration of Jamaican theater and African Jamaicans were doing theater long before the war. From the day they brought the theater with them from West Africa.  You had the opportunity to travel abroad and get your studies in the classics. However, you have not separated yourself from Jamaican culture in any way. You actually deepen your Jamaican culture with your studies. Yes. And then so, some would say, you know, the language in rooms theater. Well, you can't understand it. But it's so brawling. It's so ghetto. It's so how do you handle the language? How do you treat the language? I love it. I embrace the language. I'm better at writing patra than speaking patra because unfortunately, I grew up with the colonial shadow over my head. So the high school I went to or the upbringing, so to speak, you were chastised for talking patra. It was considered, you know, speaking bad, or you're going to get in trouble, that kind of thing. So, I just, I was a good girl. I was submissive and I didn't, you know, I didn't want to have anything to do with that kind of talk. And it's so funny being able to think for yourself as you get older, not just embracing patra and Jamaican heritage and my culture, despite what people or the majority might think about it. I'm not waiting for it to get the respect. I see respect do so. But this goes into a lot of what I do. So I like to discuss women's issues. I like to discuss, you know, it's funny that Shabby and you open talking about violence against women, because that's something that I really explore with conceptual art, conceptual photography during COVID. It's very important to me. So it's just been really rewarding to learn and to listen and to educate yourself about some things you might not know, despite popular opinion and see for yourself. You know, yeah. You know, it's interesting as a child, I remember I went to school up until about age nine in Jamaica. And, you know, I too had the privileges of being raised inside of the colonial, the uptown people. I was on the other side of halfway tree, so to speak. And I remember as a child, you know, well, yeah, I'll let you jump in. But I remember I personally love the sound of Jamaican language. I think it's sound better. And I understood better. And I remember I said to somebody at school one day, and I got beat from the teacher. And that day I hated the English language because I said, if you're going to beat me to sound like the people, this is not something I want to be a part of. That's not right. I'm about it at seven years old. Something about that beat didn't seem right, because I thought I sound beautiful.  Valir, talk to us about the language. What I was just adding to the conversation was that different parts of the country, Jamaica, speak different patois, different levels of patois. If I take you to St. Elizabeth, and let the people have known you talked to you, you need a translator. So St. Elizabeth is the southwest? Southwestern Jamaica? Yes, yes. And the language there is difficult to understand. Although my parents are, my father is from down here. So I understand them.  But I can't even mimic them. I believe people from different parts of Jamaica who speak, it takes your time to unravel what they're saying. I once had the opportunity to go up to a compound. A compound is a big hotel. I'm saying it wrong, but I've been there for too long. I had the privilege of going up to La Cobia. Yes, I went up there to visit with the maroons for their annual festival, and the sound, the sound is, it has a rhythmic sound, but it also has elements. Jamaican language has, especially the Jamaican, that they speak in that area. Yes, yes, it has, there's a beat, there's a movement, and there's this bang, bang, bang sound, right? I remember thinking, this is language, this is not English, this is not a broken, this is a completely different language. That's true. With its own vocabulary, its own vowel sounds, its own syncopations, and that the language has survived for so long, thanks to places like Dancehall Music and Roots Theater, that the language has survived to the point where my nieces and nephews who are born in the US calling me, Auntie, can I get, can you get me a book? Because I want to learn Jamaican. People go sit down, that's how you learn Jamaican. Let me tell you how you learn Jamaican. Shibata, one of the things I observe when I watch you, I was watching, the other day I was watching Shibata come to town, and I was watching a scene where there's a character, the actor is known popularly as Bad Boy Trevor. I don't remember his character's name in the play. Ringo. Ringo? Ringo, Ringo, Ringo, Ringo. So there's a scene where, in which Ringo is the igla, the stallkeeper, and he tells you to watch his stall because he has to go off and go take care of some other business, some other politics in the neighborhood. And in that moment as I watched it, I thought, look at this, this is an important part of the culture, because the Roots Theater has specific stock characters. And I noticed that the stock characters are not just the historic stock character of the country come to town, like the character we see in The Heart of They Come, and your character in Shibata come to town. But when we see the shopkeeper or the stallkeeper, and we're seeing some of the aspiring artists, you see the singer, you see these stock characters. Talk to us about how Roots Theater, as you're making it today, is incorporating elements of really critical parts of Jamaican culture and preserving it. Talk to us about that. Okay, let me give my honest opinion about all of that. Theater to me back then, and I'm not being a hypocrite, I'm just stating my facts. Roots Theater, before I came in, I didn't like their performance. I think acting was forced. If they shout a lot, they overlap a lot. I believe that they don't listen. I believe that, not honestly speaking, you understand, I believe that Roots Theater is just that cutting edge as the Tea Party, as Valeo said. I think the Roots Theater to me would derive from a place. This is just my thinking out of the box to me. I think Roots Theater to me would derive from a place where, you know, you're burgeoning them, you're your friends on the corner talking. I know you are the clone. You are the clone of the class.  If you're funny, you can do a stand-up comedy.  If you're entertaining a small group like this, challenge yourself as to how you can entertain a large group.  I get back now to what you asked me about the incorporation of Roots Theater. I mean, when I look at traditional theater, it starts one way. For me, it starts one way. And if you can follow, you can simply explain and tell the conclusion. That is to me, though. The thing that Roots Theater didn't have at that time that I'm talking about is the fact that they weren't paying attention to traditional theater.  You can have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Exactly. I think soccer is for everybody. And mainly in our value, it must have said that it was for uptown people. Theater back then was for uptown people, but Roots Theater, you understand me?  That is me.  Brilliant statement. If you don't believe that uptown theater is for you, because it's theater. It's telling a situation and making it believable. It's not reading from a book and trying to understand the content. You understand me? That is different. But when you're going on stage, and this is me, where a person can't understand, and this is where I made my name, because no one in theater has ever done what I did. What I did, I teach on stage. I direct on stage. I produce on stage. I write on stage. I do all the important stuff that should be done off stage. I do it on stage. And in the same way, I see a character on stage with this character that I'm playing for another production. So there's no possible way as an actor you can ever be stuck in our box. And for such, I work mainly, no. Honestly, to God, up to today day, persons have to, to today, persons have to be able to tanyam. And that's your character from ghetto. No, that's royal palm. I mean, she was so given. She was so given, she was willing to learn. And that piqued my interest.  And I said, no, I love this girl. She wants everything. That is there. You understand me? And when I worked with mainly, no, mainly, no came back stage one night and me, but mainly not summer painting to do, you know, but let me jump in here. Shabana, let me jump in here and just stick to this, this notion of you're getting where you see yourself. That's a brilliant statement. And I really appreciate that because I'm a producer. I'm a producer and I'm a director. And we're always looking at growing and welcoming our audiences. We're always looking at integrating our audience. But history has shown across the world that theater can sometimes be just speaking to one group of people. Now, Valiere, speaking on this, getting where you see yourself, when you started as, as an actor in the classical Jamaican theater and in film. And then as a Jamaican person, right, growing up in Kingston, growing up, you know, with relatives in the countryside. Where did you sit in? Where do you see yourself? And where do, you know, when I, your most memorable character for me is definitely the, the, the priest in, in all of us gives generously. Yeah. Where, where is your sitting and as an actor, how do you try to meld all of those worlds together? Because roots is, roots is not for everybody. It's not. But for those who it is, there's nothing like it. Tell us about that. No, let, let me tell you now, you see, when I went into theater in Jamaica, I started at, at the first show was skits written by Trevor Rohn. Yes, Trevor Rohn, my orange. Yeah. It was just skits. It was, it was a name for it in theater, right? Yeah. And so I had within a short period of time, you have to change from one character to the other to another character. And I thought, I thought it was funny to the, to the things like that. But then I went to Lloyd record that was doing West Indian plays, which I thought was very cultural, was very cultural stuff. Like the rose sleep in the beautiful Caribbean, pillars in the mud, those plays are very cultural, cultural to Caribbean people. Right? The work of the SNI, Paul, the work of Derek Walcott. Walcott, yeah. Yes, yes. You think of Moon on Monkey Mountain. Yes, yes, yes. Continue. And then now we go into commercial theater, that's Edward is commercialized like he was going to a movie on a Wednesday evening, you know, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. We had like six or seven shows a week. And it was really commercial theater. And it was all about, you know, love and marriage, sex, that kind of thing. As a matter of fact, there's this show named Love and Marriage, Sex, you go doctor, you name it. And we used to translate shows from American scripts, translated in Jamaica, like Murdoch or Johnson, Jamaicanized it. I live by myself. And Grace McGee, we played it. So it was, I had a cultural experience. And then I had a commercial experience of commercial theater. That is the time when the Roots Theater take off also in Jamaica. And I always wondered what would we like to work in a Roots Theater? Because at the time, it was exciting, disorganized on stage. They were, I mean, it's the first half of the show. That's slightly, that's slightly what it was. True. Disorganized, right? So what can I want to do it and do I want to do it because I don't see. But when I went to work with Shabbat and all and with Roots stages, it was, then no, I realized that they were trying to keep the thing as a storyline. I care what we did to it. We keep the storyline and the essence of the story. So it became more attractive. So you had playwright Paul Beale. Yeah, Paul was like that. The works for four stages and also is the author of Underminals. And let me just, I reference Underminals for those who don't know. This one is one of the classic Jamaican comedies. And it's actually about a very overbearing father by the name of Aloysius. And he kind of takes on the character of many Jamaican fathers who work very, very hard to send their children to school. And their daughters are their prize.  They actually have more hope in their daughters than they do in their sons. There are many Jamaican fathers like that. I know many of them personally. And Aloysius, he's overbearing. He's very cheap.  She's going on in life. And what happens is because of the way he is, all the boys in the neighborhood get together to figure out ways to fool him and to take away and to pursue and persuade his daughter. And when you look at a play like that, and you look at the social commentary, you may laugh at the top. But when I watched Underminals now so many times, when I was a young child, I wasn't allowed to watch it. And then I became a woman and I was able to watch it. And I looked at it and I said, you know, you're laughing, but there's so much truth because number one, fathers, black fathers, Jamaican fathers are not put out as protectors, as being there, as constant, you know, patriarchs of their families. There's a negative stereotype around black men in general as fathers. But those of us who grew up in the society and know this, we know that fathers are there. They're in the home. They're providing for their children. So speaking to Shibata, talk to us about even though there is a lot of comedy at the top, what is really at the root of Ruth Theatre? Because I think it's a very political theatre. I mean, I believe that Ruth Theatre to me, and this is always my belief, and I only can speak based on my acting. This is why I do what I do. I believe that Ruth Theatre is a way of telling someone who, let me just say this, this is just like an analogy. Someone who don't understand English. It's hard to speak to somebody that is a literate. It is hard to speak to them in an English form. What is it that they're going to understand? So I believe that Ruth Theatre is a way of expressing the truth and expressing one's mistake. You understand me because a lot of people watch a Ruth's play. We do things, we depict situations from the inner city. Even from a family or from a particular community. This is what we do. Theatre, and we laugh at it. But even though as an actor, you have to put yourself in an audience standpoint, in an audience seat also. So you're just as an actor, so you're clueless to all the audience react out to their reaction to whatever you're delivering. And I think Ruth Theatre is a place that tells the truth. It doesn't come with theories. It is the raw material you get. What you see is what you get. We are telling you, Mr Officer, how the fight really happened. This is it.  So theatre reflects. Theatre is reflecting. And as Brett, you know, they say Shakespeare says that theatre is too, you know, in Hamlet, we hear young Hamlets say to the players to hold up as we're a mirror to nature. And then Brett comes, Bertolt Brett, the great German playwright and theatrical philosopher comes forth and says, no, theatre is not a mirror to nature. Theatre is a hammer that smashes. Exactly my point. So I want to, you know, and so we see, we see in a lot of ways in the Roots Theatre, the mirror, and then we see the hammer. Choose one. Choose one. If you can't merge the two, you gotta choose one. Oh, you gotta choose one. Well, I prefer the mirror sometimes because sometimes I prefer to merge the two. So listen, we're getting, we're moving now into the Q&A. We're getting a lot of comments from the, from the audience. A lot of great questions and great comments. And before we move into that, I'm going to toss some questions to you guys. But first, tell me something, Valiere. You mean to, I heard that tens of thousands of people attend these performances. Bashmeh Granitoo. Uh-huh. Break record. And people brought their dinner. Break record. The parniel porridge, their chocolate tea, and they lined up for hours. And never forget to say at night, I will went to this, this place in Maypin. We couldn't keep it as a normal spot. At a normal, like in the, in the, in the garden of a hotel or anything like that. We kept it in this. Give me my shibara. This dusty place. Yes, yes. It was a big theater. It was a big place, an open space. Because no actual theater can hold you. You actually have to be outside in a theater. 7,000 people were there that night. In one performance, 7,000. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. You're going to get some calls from some U.S. producers soon because they're going to want to know what you're doing. I can't, we have a place out here named, um, well, when I placed an Oxford Road name again in Shibata. Where? Well, we're going to skip, um, stage show, an Oxford Road. A pure one. No, Oxford Road Band in Kingston. Oh. Mass Camp. Louis. Oh, Mass Camp. Miss Camp. It's called, um, and I'm Mass Camp. It's called, um, it's Mass Camp. The Golf Academy. The Golf Academy is one, but I remember over there, Mass Camp on a Mother's Day. A house in trust. Right. Yes. That is, that is the big field. These are like stadiums. So you need to tell me theater in Jamaica is selling old stadiums? Yes. Wow. Oh, wow. Mass Camp. I think I'm in the wrong genre. I think I need to come down to Jamaica and start producing. Okay. No, you don't. You don't. But the tradition. I think I see where my career is headed. Listen, let's take some questions from the audience. Right now we have Cheryl Ali from the comments on YouTube and she asked, Shibata, you have the freedom and of improv within Roots Theater. You're very good at improv and really great timing and instinct. Do you see yourself transitioning more into or more into or doing going back and forth between traditional scripted theater with a more scripted structure or do you just to confirm you repeated the two questions? Okay. So do you see yourself going back and forth? So would you be working for a jam base or would you be performing in the pantomime anytime soon? And then we also have a, I have a question for you after this one. I mean, I can only see myself where I want to go. So if I'm doing well without being scripted like that, I think I want to pursue this. I want to continue. I want to perfectly with this side because it makes no sense. If I'm freely living like this, I want to cage myself to a script. Mark, I've worked with many directors, many writers, and I gained some knowledge that persons do write for them for themselves. You understand me? When I touch the stage, I feel the presence of the audience, they are hoping for something I have to give it to them and that I would enjoy staying where I am. Okay. You know, it's interesting because I look at you and I'm thinking, you know, I'm thinking about some work here in the U.S. by some incredible, incredible writers. And I think, man, we could really benefit from your, just your, the way you move your body on stage and just your comprehension. So as I said, don't be surprised if the U.S. producers call you sometime soon. No, if you can help us, no, you see it. No, you can help us out to understand. We have a member of our audience who talks about the pantomime and just wanting to, you know, they mentioned that we, we talked about the pantomime last week. The question is, last week you talked about pantomime and not roots. What is the difference between the two? And just if you can talk about Ralph Holness and his transition out of pantomime to being a pioneer of roots, if you can talk a little about that. The pantomime is different in, it's not even like the pantomime you call the pantomime, the pantomime is just pantomime. It's not even like it's a tradition. The pantomime is a musical. We adopted from England. Every Christmas in England, at every theater, there's a pantomime, right? Good. So it's really a musical with commentary, social commentary, and singing, a lot of singing, right? Singing and dancing to tell the parts of the story. So that's what pantomime is about. Okay.  They were a comedy duo, right? Yeah, and clover. Okay. Kind of like Laurel and Handy. For those of you who are scholars of Vodville and American comedy era, kind of that kind of Laurel and Handy classic. Yes. And then what Ralph did was, I think it was, Bim wrote a script. I can't remember the name of the script. And Ralph took it and produced it. But Ralph was a clever producer. Very clever. Ralph is the only person I see in Jamaica as a producer who put out two full page ad, center spread ad in the Galina. Oh, wow. The most major paper in Jamaica, right? Right. And at that time television thing was, you know, people wouldn't advertise on TV. It would depend on the Gleaners to tell us what is happening in theater. If you saw the commentary about theater in the Gleaner. And Ralph has two full page ad in it. Yes, and? He was going to be seen.  Crowd. I don't know who I'm going to call them inside the poor white theater. But in full, the theater, in full theater, they were called outside the theater to the debris glass door at the front. They used to have to do four shows a day and the war. Yes, especially, especially if it's a holiday, like a boxing day. Boxing day, the day after Christmas. Yes, or not in the Commonwealth. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Our New Year's Eve day. Our Easter Monday. Who's in New York City? He is a resident of New York and Carl is letting us know that the roots play still out in New York as well. It's awesome to see the response. He notes that even people who don't understand what you all are saying, they don't understand the parts, but they feel the energy from the performers. And I really thank you Carl for that comment, because when we met earlier, Meiling, you talked about that, especially Meiling, you're a dancer. So your whole, your whole, you have what's called kinesthetic intelligence, meaning, oh my, reading for the girl, okay. She has what's called kinesthetic intelligence, which means what any, any movement in a space, it's learning through movement, learning through the body, learning through your sensations. So as an actor, training ballet to stand, you know, upright, what do you do when the audience is cackling and talking to you? How do you respond? Well, listen, you know, Shebi was the best tutor because Shebi actually method trained me on how to stand up, how to do a dem girl stand up, how to, what we call one debate, right? How to relax the body, the whole body language of, of the persona. It took me into Franklin Town ghetto many times to experience chicken back in a bag, like you remember these things, Shebi? Like all kinds of things, like for me to live really grow. And you know, I wanted to add as well that as someone who's really been, you know, doing mainstream commercial theater in working with Shibata, I don't think he even is able to articulate or really understands what he has done for roots. Now, Volare mentioned that roots, you know, pantomime is musical song and dance, telling a story, sort of commedia dell'arte. And I think Shibata and writers like Paul Beale, what they have done is they've taken these stereotypical archetypes of good and bad, like you'll still have a villain and so on. But they, it's such a modern form. I can only compare it to some writers like UNESCO. Oh, yeah. And why I introduced that is because with Shibata. Right, rhinoceros. You think about the absurdity of rhinoceros. But not just the absurdity, Akiba. Also, the human quality, there is no good and bad. So I'll be playing a character in the ghetto who is good, but to have bad ways. But I might be the hero, but I also was a little bit of an antagonist. So it's introduced because of a very modern form of theater. So he's taken these archetypes and they're there in the script, you know, but the brilliance of the actor, what I'm saying is they've given it a human quality where when you sit down and you watch the play, you see yourself because no one is completely good or completely bad. Are they or the villain has their story too? So it's remarkable. I don't even think he realizes what he has done with roots because roots, to me, roots back in the day was, you know, passive, very passive. As much as you see in Karimea, Kiguel, instant market, it was very passive. It was not as aggressive. It was not as quick. It was not as sharp. And Shibata has really set a standard there, so he pokes and he prods. I'm going to take a state, share a statement from another audience member, Phillip Clark, just in line with what you're saying here, mainland. He points out that who started out as your theater, which is the theater of realism, like you point out with the UNESCO's work in Ibsen and all of those European and, you know, Eastern European writers. It's really celebrates the survival of the common man forced to live in challenging conditions. Trevor Rohn and Errol John, you know, in two weeks, we're going to be speaking to playwrights. We're going to start our playwrights series in the talk, right? And we're going to talk. The question is a statement that George Bernard Shaw visits Jamaica. He visits Kingston in 1911, not even 2011. Shaw visits Jamaica in 1911. And he makes a statement of the fact that the theater that he was seen was not represented. It was not Jamaican theater because the Jamaican theater, the Jamaican people, there, the prolet, the working class Jamaican people, their story wasn't on the stage. So what Shaw was saying is until you have that story, you don't have a theater. And so what you and Phillip Clark are really honing into is that theater cannot just be for the uptown people, as earlier put it. Theater has to be a place where everybody can see themselves as Shabbat is saying. That is profound. That is really profound, guys. That hit me at my, that hit me at my core. I have to, I have to pause there. But Akiba, that applies to everything. For instance, with history, there are no women writers. There are no women heroes. Who are you going to look for? Nanny of the Maroons? There were more. There were hundreds. But you don't hear about them. You don't hear about them. There are, in other words, people have always been, been telling their stories and Roots Theater has always been. It's a, and they deserve a voice and they deserve to be heard and to come out, you know. This, this one way of theater is not even always. It's not even, you know, anyway. Go ahead, Valier. Go ahead. I don't think you should say it's not even always. You must say it's not we, not we. You're not we. Yeah, but it is, in other words, it's not, in other words, we are many other things. Things. Exactly. You know, or many things. So it's only fair if I'm in, you know.  Even in the way we speak to each other. And I mean, you can't actually stand up and don't hear what I'm saying, but understand where the conversation is going. By our gestures. Yeah. That's, that's, that's what Jamaicans are, right? I spent some time in Italy and I don't speak any Italian and I went to a lot of theater. Yeah. I learned and I gained a lot. I didn't understand what those people were saying. Yeah. I enjoyed the play and for some reason I came out transformed. I felt something. So I'm going to transition into this notion that people like to talk about aesthetics, aesthetics. You've heard that term, aesthetics. The thing has to be aesthetically pleasing. And my good friend and mentor points out to me a notion of aesthetics. People align it with beauty, but my friend and mentor, he points out that another friend of mentor of his changed his viewpoint of aesthetics, that aesthetics isn't about pretty things, beautiful things, aesthetically pleasing theater is Shakespeare and ballet and Moliere and all of those great people or even Wilson and Baldwin and Hansberry who we all love. But aesthetics is the opposite in its root of the term anesthetic. And an anesthetic is something that doctors give people to cut off their feelings. And an aesthetic is something you give people to make them feel. So what is the aesthetic? What's the thing that you're doing to make people feel to the point where you would bring in box office drawers, people would line up in the rain with their little bickle, as we call it, your pot of food.  What is, what are you making people feel? What's going on here? Don't reveal the car meal porridge, Shabana. Go ahead. I mean, for me, for me, and this is what I'm going to use the privilege of being a bit of brother, a brother and mailing part. I mean, I started working with a mailing. She was the one on stage to just stop and watch me. And forget that she's on the stage with me. You understand me? And she said something to me one night. I don't even think she remember. She said to me, oh my God, Shabee, you are so good. And I'm like, I'm like, okay, ma'am, but this is what the show should be about. But I understand where she's coming from. And as you talk about that feeling as an actor, it can never be on the director or the producer to tell you that this is how you must emote. This is the feeling that you must, how you must emote certain scenes, certain feelings. It is that you have to read with understanding and understand your audience before the show starts. And a lot of actors, you don't understand your audience. The audience, they are not obligated to laugh at anything that we say or do. It is our duty to play a sales representation in front of them. So in some ways it's like you're a salesman?  And no one is going to buy your goods if you can't sell it authentically.  I'm not going to lie on your age because as I said, you got this day to face. So I'm not going to call out disrespectful numbers. 52 years. Say 24. 52 years. Somewhere in that neighborhood. In your years in the theater, both in the classical theater, in the film world, in the television world, and in the roots theater, they like when I watch your work, it aligns with what Shabada is saying, this sense of responsibility to represent a truth in the narrative, in the lived true experiences of the Jamaican people. Where do you center your work as an actor on the Jamaican stage? Where are you pulling from? What are you trying to make people feel? The first thing, when you get a character, your research is the character, right? Either for the 52 years I'm on stage, I've been doing that. Research, whether it's a character or anything. You must make people who are watching you believe what you are doing. It must be believable, right?  That is what it must project to your audience, right? I have played a lot of different roles, but I mean some of my most enjoyable roles, I remember being madman three different times, and it's three different madmen, three different. One of them aggressive, one of them is just a real nervous breakdown, you know what I'm saying? One of them was trying to calm them with a true life and lose everything. I think it was a pandemic trash. We had to tiptoe through that show for two hours on my tours. It was the very last initial that I went down on me and stood on me. Right? In Cowboy, I was a, oh, it's just a, my nerves gone. It was just, I was a honest person, very honest person, and I ended up in prison because of my honesty.  I care about that.  But you have to make the story believable. And when I worked with Shibata, that was what we aimed at, although we were doing different things on stage and something like that. But keeping the storyline and make people believe what was happening was true. You know, in the moment that you were telling that story of your character in Toy Boy, you made me see because the truth is, I talk about poverty, I talk about mental health as conditions, not characteristics, right? They're not even things you can inherit poverty, yes. You can inherit some challenges with your mental health, yes. But they're conditions that we can move in and out of. When you tell that story of that character, you know, having had a hard fall, then end up homeless on the streets and all of what come with homelessness, hunger, not being able to take care of your daily custodial needs to show yourself, toilet yourself properly, all of these things. And when we see this character on stage, when we see him on stage at the Little Theater, at the Ward Theater, we see somebody we know, but we also see somebody we fear we can become. Yes.  We walk past them every day and we don't look. Right. Yeah, we don't pay them any.  Then we used to teach, you know. Wow. Hard to see them with a secretary. And this is what happened to her. But I remember doing that play, Leonie and myself, Leonie Forbes. Leonie Forbes. Yes, the great Leonie Forbes. Right. And I got best actor for the part. But I remember doing it in the night. And more than one occasion, people came out of the theater saying that they know somebody who the same thing happened to. Yeah. Yes. So you have to be able to play, make the character believable.  So the theater, they see the aspects of their lives on the stage, even in the Roots Theater. You're going to see it more in the Roots Theater because the Roots Theater is going to be more deeply embedded in Jamaica and everyday life than stories and narratives brought to us from different parts of the world. So that's very valuable. I just want to go quickly back into the comments, questions from the comments. We want to shout out to Mr. Glenn Campbell. Glenn Titus Campbell is in the audience. That's an honor to have you. We're actually going to be talking to Glenn next week about the business of Jamaica Theater. And Glenn Campbell is an actor, comedian, extraordinaire, extraordinaire. And also a serious, serious businessman when it comes to theater in the line of a Ralph Holness and the Paul Beals, you know, knowing how to pull the audience and how to manage it. So we're going to talk to Glenn. Glenn wanted to give all three of you, Valer and Shibata and Melina and you guys can watch the recording later, but he just wanted to send his love and camaraderie to you. We have a question from Krissa Leed who asks, for Melina and Valier, are there any aspects of specific to Roots? So there are aspects of Roots Theater that has helped you to hone your craft and or think about within the traditional theater space that you could benefit. So what are you taking from Roots Theater back into your traditional Western European style of theater and playmaking? Listen, I don't even know how to answer that question because I know when I went over to Roots Theater and for the couple years I worked with them, I gave a lot to them. I used to work with Mr. Beals. Mr.  Yeah, really. What would I take back to traditional theater? I don't think I take back anything to traditional theater because I was spent so many years in it that I had not more to give to them. I learned more going over to the Roots Theater than what I had to give back to the traditional theater. So in a lot of ways, Roots Theater expanded you so much that you're not really looking to take anything back to traditional. No, Roots Theater was, it was fun, real fun when they were on stage, believe me. They were nice when we were on the show and we climbed this own box, the one on our team. Yes, it was fun but the story which we tried, we have to fight hard to keep the story lying together because the audience behaves. They're really roaring and they're not laughing, they're roaring. I mean, 10,000 people laughing and responding to you at 7,000 people. Yeah, 10,000 people at one time. It is a roar. Melin, any aspects of the Roots style, the Roots genre that you bring with you when you are working? If I bring you and cast you as Lula in The Dutchman, what would you take from your work in Roots Theater to give us Lula? It's not Lula, am I saying her name right, Lula in the Mara Baraka, the Dutchman? What can you borrow if I were to cast you in that role? To me, Roots Theater was a real aggressive reiteration of fundamentals in theater, which is listening, not just listening on stage, but Shabada said it earlier, listening to your audience and feeling your audience. So it was a very sensory experience for me with Roots. Roots also has audience interaction, which is something that I'm not necessarily used to. So there was a time when somebody would all throw some garbage on stage at the effects with you. These are things that happen during the show and like I look at Shabada and you look at me and we just know continue and you actually have to incorporate it into your character. Don't be afraid or startled by it. So it's taught me constant awareness and it's taught me, aware of my audience on the sensory level, but really a lot about listening and timing. It's sort of like mainstream theater, but on a lot of amphetamine. So you have to be quick, you have to be sharp. It's taught me a lot that way. You know, I think about when we were prepping several weeks ago for this particular talk, we try to stay away from these like American and European comparisons to the art because if you look at anything, you can compare anything to anything. And I don't like the idea of legitimizing anything that Black cultures do by putting it in its place to a European culture or even any quote unquote first world culture. I think what you have is what you have, but as I think about the power of roots, the power and the brilliance of roots to speak to an audience that's sometimes being excluded, the audience who I call the all arts medicine. For me, arts is medicine. Every art is a medicine. And to me, when we leave out groups of people because of their social economic background or their use of language or their history or the tone of this, whatever, what part of what zip code, what neighborhood, what part of town they come from, we are poisoning our culture because we're not giving the medicine to all. So I think about roots data in comparison to the gospel stage play in the US, the works of Tyler Perry and the works of David Talbert, which uses that same culturally specific mores, the media character, the rising star artists, these particular stuff characters to speak to the massive that sometimes the more gentry large institutions are not speaking to and are not welcoming in. And I feel like that's what roots theater does. And to do it unapologetically and to do it unapologetically quite right what you're saying. Yes. And you know, to think about it, many people when we first thought about doing the series and I spoke to some folks that I know who are also Jamaican. And I said theater, they said two things. They said the ward and Shabbatah. No one brought up Baldwin, no one brought up Lorraine, no one brought up Shakespeare, you know. So we have to be able to make a space for everybody to be where they see themselves, as you say Shabbatah, that is truly profound. Well, yes, I'll let you have this and then we're going to start to close out. I just want to say this about roots data and I think I would be so hypocritical and unfair if I didn't get this out. I think what about roots data and actors of roots data? I mean, some actors like myself is that when I'm on stage, you have to understand that I'm working. So whatever I'm issuing, you are going to get your money's worth. Now, if you want to leave this going about what I said, how I portray myself or how I bring across this thing, it's up to you, but you're at a play called roots play. We tell it like it is.  We tell it like it is. As Mellon said, unapologetically, we do that. That is what we do.   We are going to call the streetlight stoplight pedestrian white line.   Because we get roots playing the pigs line of ghetto people and uptown people, meaning that the upper class and the lower class. And when you merge the two together, you are thoroughly entertained, but yet you leave with something. As Valia said that we sign now to keep a storyline. Yes, we do. So roots are theater as earned space on the map of theater. Anywhere in the world.  But Philip Clark talks about just one more statement from our audience here. I'm going to take it from Philip Clark. Philip Clark says, Shibata, I know that you say you may not learn much anything from the traditional theater, but I believe that the crossover could widen your reach and strengthen your ability to execute. Would you try a crossover? So would you cross over into mainstream theater? Can I cast you in my production of rhinoceros? Let me say this quickly. I mean, I have done traditional theater. I have done that.  And then, yes, I did pretty good, but when I checked the levels, there wasn't anything there exactly that I would really want to take from it. If you understand what I mean, not disrespecting it or anything, not doing that. But, you know, being as a child watching all of these traditional theater running, you understand me? How much more can you make it? Oh, authentic. Can you make traditional theater? That is the reason why I can say that because in traditional theater, as Mary in Kentilly and Vale in Kentilly, is that you work based on blockings, you know, and staging. And there is no night that the audience can rail for you in a traditional theater and you change your line. You have to be reviewed like that.  There's no freedom, so to speak. Okay, so you need the freedom of improvisation that you're going to express myself. If I'm going to express myself about the situation, I mean, I want to express myself the best way possible. I do want to express myself through your eyes. I mean, the situation asks me, how do I see it? You understand me? And if you can, as a director, if you can merge it with the actor, or if you can say, all right then, you're stronger.  Okay, you're telling me, you're telling me how to reach you because I'm going to find the place about it. I'm calling you back. I'm calling you and sending that script. I'm coming back to you. Mr. Johnson Kentilly, every audience and every night, they are completely different. I can believe it. So as we close out, we're going to just do a quick visioning. And if you can, you know, we're at the end of our time. So if you can make it one nice, clean sentence each, or even three words, that would be good. But what's your vision for Roots Theatre beyond COVID? How do we walk through the gateways of the 21st century, preserving this amazing, amazing part of Jamaica? Let me just stop. Let me just stop you there. I mean, after COVID, Roots Theatre is going to take Jamaica, better yet, the world by storm. You know why? Because people are dying for entertainment and they want to live what happened in COVID through the stage. Okay. What about you, mainland? What's your vision for Roots beyond COVID and through, as we walk through the gates of the 21st century? I just, just a phrase taught the teams come to my mind. Definitely. And on a virtual platform because of the virus, you know, COVID not going anywhere right now in a Sherb. What about you, Volier? Let me tell you something. I'm looking forward to see the amount of COVID please that will come after COVID, right? And I'm sure it's going to be very funny, because a lot of people have already had different experiences during this period of time. And my tears, somehow we're hungry again. Hungry, suffering, right? So we have all over the story.  And of course, your election over there where people know how to work with others. We had everything, them Roots Theatre people had everything to them, when I'm ready. I'm sure it's going to be fun. We're going to see some black lives matter. We know we're going to see Kamala on stage, because Kamala is half Jamaican.  It's going to be funny. Kamala, they may call you to play Kamala too. Yes. Listen, we're going to wrap up and take it home. We have, let's see, yeah, I do need to devise piece that allows tons of improv. Folks in the chat are saying, yes, Akiva, you got to find something for Shabana to do in Boston, and I will. Listen, next week, we are going to talk about the business of the Jamaican stage with the very, very successful Jambiz Entertainment. Speakers are Lenford Salmon and Glenn Campbell, producers of Jambiz. Glenn Campbell is also a legendary actor on the Jamaican stage. Lenford Salmon's history in theater dates also back to the little theater movement, working with Trevor Rohn, working even with Ralph Holness and many of the luminaries here called today. Jamaicans have a saying when they depart, we say, what good? And what good means? I wish you only the best in your life. We theater people, we have a saying when we leave each other, we say, see you on the boards. And for actors, that's also a blessing because the boards are the floorboards of the stage. And if an actor says to you, see you on the boards, it means see you at the next gig, see you at your next job. So listen to our audience, to our panelists, and to all of everyone who has helped to support us, what good and see you on the boards. You hear?


by Don Narrow, scaling the Ansible community to new heights. Good luck. I am pleased to be talking to you today about some of the work we've been doing on the Ansible Community team to basically help grow and strengthen and sustain the Ansible community. And I'm gonna start out with some intros of our team and some of the things we're gonna talk about today. By the way, the slides are in their LinkedIn schedule, so if you wanna grab them there, you can find them. So the Ansible Community team at Red Hat, we are all kind of funded positions to work with the Ansible community and I thought it'd be great to introduce some of the people that do some of the work that I'm gonna talk about today. So there's Andre, he works a lot with collections, he's been doing some great work with execution environments and doing a lot there. There's Carol, who is really kind of, she's almost like the engine of the team. We'd be nothing without Carol. Carol does amazing outreach, organizing events and is just kind of almost like our spiritual guy. There's Anuisha, who's the release manager for the community releases and she also does great outreach. She's very active there and just all kinds of things. Then there's me, I just, I don't know, sometimes I just try and make it look like I do stuff. Carrying on, there's eight of us in total. There's Greg, who's the team lead and community architect, just unbelievable insights and experience from Greg and really he's awesome dude. She's Sandra, who's the docs lead and she's also kind of like a project manager for us and like keep us on track with a lot of things. Leo from Argentina, who does like a lot of also outreach and he's working on labs and he gets involved in some of the schools with Red Hat ambassadors, I'll tell you a bit more about that. And also Walter, Walter is, he's kind of the guy that helps us interface with Red Hat a little bit and he advocates for us and he helps make sure that like we have, and I say we, the entire Ansible community have the direction and support that we need from Red Hat to succeed. It's really a critical role there. So one of the things I'm gonna start talking about, this is all about like work that we've done in the past year to build and grow the community. And one of the things, like if you go to ansible.com today you'd notice that there's a lot of Red Hat focus content that's about the platform and products that Red Hat sells and there's not a terrible lot for the community and it exists, there's a community page. But what's been missing is the central place, like where can the Ansible community come online and have discussions. I think like one of the things we've been dealing with in the community is a lot of fragmentation and this comes in like different ways like ansible.com but also discussions. There are things that happen in GitHub issues, GitHub discussions and there's lots of decisions and chats that happen in these various places and without having a central space it's hard to kind of have a view into everything that's going on. It also makes it extremely difficult to know when a community decision happened to have like a historical record. When you get several years kind of down the line from a decision and it's like, well, how did this come to be? And you kind of, you lose that record. That's an important thing for the community to have. So we've been building a community website. Again, the links are in here. We've got some fantastic help from the Fedora community. This is places where things have come together. Mo who's here has graciously given us some great advice to help us get started. Also like Michael Scherer gave some great tips for choosing a static site generator and he's like, look, static site generator's come and go. We've had to rebuild things in the Fedora community a couple of times. What's important is you kind of like abstract the content away from that and choose tools that the community uses and meet them where they work. So we're going actually with Nicola which is built in Python and uses Genja templates and it's all familiar tools and tech for the Ansible folks. So building, this is the wireframe but if you go to our repo, you can see the work in progress. It's deployed to GitHub pages. You can join us on Matrix if you wanna get involved. We're gonna start building out the final thing based on wireframes that we've got. And this will serve as that central point for the community in the web where you can like get access and nowhere to go and kind of have a home on the internet. Along with this, we're launching a community forum discourse. Greg again has been spearheading this. I think he's wanted this for years, like four or five years at this point and coming together and again and kind of collaboration and cooperation with the Fedora community. And like working with CDCK, we will have a place where community discussions can take place and where we can have those records, historical records of decisions and like have a lot of the discussions and community topics and votes that go on. They use GitHub, which is kind of it works but it's a little awkward sometimes and like kind of the flow for like having a vote and then closing a vote and like closing the discussion and just be a little awkward. And it can be difficult for new people to get involved with that.  So another big part of the Ansible community and the team and the work that we do are meetups and events and all the outreach that goes into it and we've Ansible community days. There have been a couple of RA this year just gonna be one in Berlin soon. The community days are just, it's a time for everyone in the community whether you're just individual contributor or not if you're just a user, if you're an enthusiast or even if you're a Red Hat customer, you can come along and talk about Ansible and learn, share and it's a place where everyone can get together. The contributor summit is more an opportunity I think for contributors to come and talk to Red Hat teams and work with Red Hat engineering to find new solutions and all that good stuff. Some upcoming meetup and events. I already mentioned the community day but there's stuff that's going on all over the place. DjangoCon should be really cool too. One of the things that I mentioned Ann Weisha, she has created a meetup organizers toolkit and this is to facilitate the community to with a set of resources that will help you plan and carry out Ansible meetups successfully. It's available here and it's also something that would benefit the Fedora community and we kinda wanna share this because it's broadly generic for anyone who wants to organize a community meetup but this is something that Ann Weisha noticed that hey, we need this. People are trying to organize meetups and it's not always going so well because they might be new, they don't know how to do it so hopefully this will facilitate a lot more in-person interactions. Leo, as I mentioned earlier, this is him at a university in Buenos Aires and he's going in and working with Red Hat Ambassador is to reach out to students and Ansible is this great starting point for open source and if you wanna be a Python programmer, if you're interested in like sysadmin, kind of like DevOps, there's something for everyone with Ansible so getting into universities is something that Leo's just started but it's really great work. So, community releases. How many, just quick show of hands because I'm doing a lot of talking, I kinda see people out there. I wanna get a bit of interaction. I like some conversation. How many have, how many of you have downloaded Ansible from PyPy, pip install Ansible? Really? Okay, okay, there we go. There we go. I'm sure some people on the virtual audience have. Well, so that's the community release and that involves Ansible Core, bunch of Ansible tools like for running playbooks as well as community collections and that release process has been handled by Anuisha Das. Since seven, RC1, she started, she was the shadow release manager now. She's the release manager. She's been doing great work with those uploads and building and making them available to the community. And of course we've had some help from friends along the way like Christian and Sandra and the steering committee. Also, one of the things that it's, this year this team has been doing is trying to open up more and give back to the community and give them the ownership of some of these processes and making sure that they not only have visibility but they can participate and they can drive this. And it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to come from someone who's a red-hatter and the processes shouldn't be behind red hat firewalls or whatever. And Anuisha's been documenting this process with the steering committee and she's also been automating a lot of it through GitHub actions and different workflows so that it'll be easier for people from the community to get in and handle that process. One of the things I've been working on is what's become known as the Docs Lift and Shift. And this is, we kind of had this point where we were trying to get like all these community doc initiatives going, like creating new content, revamping stuff and restructuring. We restructured the user guide that was just this big honking chunk of all these different topics and like being able to retrieve and find information within that was a lot of work. So we decided to like kind of break things up. So we're doing things like that to improve the doc and to get more contributors in through the documentation. And one of the things that we found was that some of the people in the core team, we were just kind of getting in each other's way a little bit, like, you know, were there sanity tests and some of the things that the core team, some of the needs that they had didn't exactly align with what the community needed. And there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of, there's all the documentation for, you know, kind of the end user documentation, most of the collections and stuff like that and like stuff that's owned by the Ansible community and the Steering Committee. So we've created separate documentation project and that's been a little controversial because some people think that like documentation should always belong in the same repository as the code and the thing that it's documenting. And that kind of docks this code approach, which I adhere to myself. But we just kind of got to the point where it just made sense to create a separate documentation project so we can really accelerate some of those efforts. And it's, so far it's been really successful. We've seen a lot of community engagement with that. And so that's been great. We've been adding like new workflows and doing all kinds of fun stuff there. Another thing that I've been working on is revamping the Ansible dock site. So the dock site just to quickly kind of disambiguate the term that I'm using here. This is just like a set of like static HTML pages. It's kind of the landing page when you go to docksideansible.com and you kind of navigate around. It's those top level HTML pages that are in front of the actual documentation once you drill down. So it's the main entry point for most new Ansible users. At the start of the year, this is a snapshot, kind of actually when I joined, I'm still fairly new to Ansible myself. And around like May 7th last year, there were these big kind of cards that took up all this real estate and they were focused more on, there was community, then there's the platform, the downstream offering, and then there was some core stuff. So it was more focused on kind of like the tools and not really taking the user's perspective too much. So we decided to create a more user journey, user centric approach. And to start doing that, we started identifying personas. And persona is just a representation of the user or the person who's looking at the content. And we defined a few, you can find them there here in Markdown, which we put everything in Markdown in the open. So it's in plain text and it's there for contributors to look at and it's not in like some kind of like slide or whatever. But we focused on the needs, the attitude and the knowledge of the personas as well. We identified them and then we said, like what do they need? What's the type of content? What's the attitude? The attitude helps you determine the level of verbosity. Say like a Python program is gonna want like all the programmatic options and their expected behavior. But if it's like an SRE somewhere, they just show me like when the red light's flashing, show me remediation. And then the knowledge also helps you tune in more and like meet the needs because a hobbyist is gonna have a different set of knowledge and say like a solutions architect. So once we had our personas, we decided to like, like what do we do with those? What's the next step? Well, I started as new to Ansible and I came over from J Boss. I've spent like a lot of my career in middleware for my sins and a past life, I think. But yeah, I was like really super familiar with Kubernetes and there's this, this for me is like the Kubernetes journey. And it seemed like a very like sort of abstract kind of, you know, this could be applied like these different milestones could be applied to most like projects with technology. Someone starts out to become aware and they evaluate and they adopt and they start using and then you scale out. So these milestones describe these progressions that you would kind of go through and we decided to start with human motivation is the first thing and we started mapping out like these the journeys against those milestones for each of the personas. Again, we've got those and mark down. You can check them out there if you wanna find out a bit more. And once we had the persona journeys mapped out like where they're each step to 10 minutes left. Is that 10 minutes? Sorry, just so I'm clear. Did quarter pass? Like 10 minutes. Yeah, 10 minutes roughly. We're running into lunch so if you run over it's fine. Okay, yeah. I've got like 40 slides here I've been practicing so I'll try it. I think 10 minutes would be good. But hopefully you guys are into this anyway and we're having everybody's having a good time. But you got the milestones and then the steps underneath them to complete them. And so we've got these things and we're gonna like build the new dock site based on these. So when somebody comes in they're not gonna see like, oh here's community docs or here's platform.  How do you do something with Ansible? So once we had those things we decided to make things available to the community. Again, we're trying to use tools and tech that the community is familiar with. They created this ginger dock site.  But yeah, the ginger dock site. And when we started building the new dock site making sure the community get to it was vital. And this is actually the first thing they came up with. I went wild, I went bold at first. Part of the idea there goes back to Cunningham's Law. We wanted to get feedback from the community and if we release like, oh here's this great like really high polish site and I'm like, yeah, it's great. But we wanted to hear, we're building this for the community. And so intentionally putting some things in there that didn't really fit and like kind of like bold colors. And it seemed to work. We got a lot of really good feedback. Sandra, who I mentioned before the docks lead was fantastic and going out to the community and finding out what she hit Reddit, like Matrix. We have this docks meeting and you can see her here. But we got a lot of feedback. A lot of it was like super critical. A lot of it was like, yeah, this isn't so good but we kept going. We gathered feedback through the Bullhorn newsletter. We iterated quickly over it and over time we got more and things started to trend more positively. And then we released our journey-based Dockside. So if you go to docks.amsible.com now, you'll see there's like each of those kind of like milestones and then the steps you need that are direct links to the documentation. So you just get in and you find where you're going much quicker and it's more mapped to actual things that you're doing and your tasks. It's not mapped to like a product or a tool or something. But yeah, so this is where we, and you'll see there are sections for each of the personas that we identified. So that's some work that we've been doing. Along with that, we've actually done a lot with the documentation in the past year. One of the things that I noticed particularly when I was joining and trying to like navigate around was like, there's this whole ecosystem of all these projects in Ansible. And it was very, they were all like, some of them were hosted on Netlify, some on Read the Docks. And some of them, they were even like third party kind of like forks of documentation or like mirrors that were on Read the Docks. So you couldn't trust anything from like just looking at the URL or looking at it. Is this Ansible or is this like this third party thing which it's fine but it's hard to know if it's I guess official or whatever. And they're like marked down and like some repo. So you get the idea, there's docs all over the place but it's hard to know what is Ansible community and what is not and what can I trust. And it all looks different. So one of the things we've done recently is we got the Ansible namespace and Read the Docks and we put all of the Ansible projects under that namespace. So now it's like a consistent URL. And if you go to the Ansible Read the Docks you can see all the projects that are in the ecosystem. And then you have like deterministic URLs and there's also community themes that we've been applying so you get a consistent look and feel while you're browsing the documentation. And this really helps to kind of build trust with the community and create this cohesive identity.  And when I joined I was like, I went to Ansible, docs.ansible.com and it's like, where is that? How do I start using Ansible? And there's like a link to a quick start video that went to a red hat site and the video didn't load and then there was another link that took me back to docs.ansible, so there's this loop. I remember spending about like 10 minutes just trying to answer the questions like what is Ansible and how do I just even use it? So, you know, even starting quick start guides and getting started. Andre on our team has done a fantastic job and he's, you know, execution environments so it's just basically it's like container image that kind of acts as the control node. And this is something that we noticed was causing confusion for the community and like a lot of people didn't even know like what an execution environment is and it's this thing that gets talked about a lot more kind of downstream than in the community even though it should be available to the community so even working on that is one of kind of our points to fix and make it easier for community users to get in and start using stuff quickly. Also, Leo has been working on community workshops. I mean, combine the couple there, they're a little bit out of date and there's a red hat one that is kind of mixed with AAP stuff which is it's all good to learn from but it's not quite Ansible community and we've got some new stuff that's coming up with Instruct Labs based on like new community users is one of the main personas and then like more advanced users. So real soon we'll have a whole set of workshops that you can go online and, you know, self-paced. Now, that's kind of a whirlwind tour of all the stuff we've been doing. One of the things that I wanted to do when I came to Flock and this is actually my first lock but I've been a Fedora user for years now and I've been having conversations and trying to talk to people and like how can we get the Ansible community and the Fedora community to come together and we've learned so much from the Fedora community already and we want more of that. I think like the toolkits that we've been working on would be great to have Fedora community users using them and even stuff like Ansible tests should run on Fedora and I was talking with Cabin about all the Fedora infrastructure uses Ansible and maybe we can help there to update some of the syntax and find some ways to improve it so this is a direct call to the Fedora community and, you know, just saying, let's hang out, you know, why not? And as always, we're totally open. Please come and join us. You can find us on Matrix. You can find us on Mastodon. You can subscribe to the Bullhorn newsletter if you want to get all the info about what's going on in the Ansible community and you can also, you know, you're welcome to come share your news and add to the Bullhorn. The Ansible community weekly meetings every Wednesday. There's lots of special interest groups. I mentioned docs. I know there are a couple of documentation people in the room, some tech writers. Please come and join us. There's tons of work and if you're looking to get involved in open source or if you're like really experienced but you don't know Ansible that much and you'd like to, come hang out with us. We're on Matrix. We're your friends. Thank you. Any questions or anything? Do we have time for that? Thank, but I think it's lunch so we can take one or two questions here. Well, you know where to find us if you do have questions. Thank you very much. Thank you. We break for lunch now. Thanks everyone.


So thank you very much. First, thank you for pronouncing my name right. That's that's probably a first in an event. That's why they pay me the big bucks. So my name is Yuvash Khoj. I'm the head of product management with checkpoint for everything cloud security. What I do want to discuss today is, you know, back to how we started the event, like the cost of cyber threat to us is in a place where we just have to do something else. And I'll talk about this something else. For me, everything that we do today has to include some kind of automation, some kind of capability that is not part of just man work and women working on something. We have to really shift left by also shifting into a more AI ML focused cyber security capabilities. And it is within our thoughts and it's within our processes and it's within our products that we use and develop. So before delving into this, let me just kind of make sure that we all understand what what really keeping security people up at night. And first, it's a lot about visibility. I'm an old school guy. I was a CISO service providers back in the days where a pizza box wasn't just something you bring pizza in, but it was a one you server. And in order to save to understand what's happening, you just needed to map the wireings, right? You knew what's connected where we don't have this visibility. We do not know where our crown jewels are. So how can we protect what we cannot see next? And this is a developer conference, right? There are a lot of developers and DevOps people here. How do security people keep still their values and, you know, are they really valuable for the organization? And the reason is that back in the old days, security peeps were involved in designing systems as they were just thought about. And today's in a lot of cases, we see the DevOps team and the developers team coming and say, we're ready to go production, please secure this, right? So this is this is actually like, am I still valuable for the organization question? Next is complexity. Just think about how complex for someone who is not part of the DevOps community, not part of the developer community to understand the differences even from a technology, but also from a risk perspective of VMs versus Kubernetes containers versus serverless functions, et cetera, et cetera. Last but not least, and this is something that did not change ever since day one of information security is how do I keep myself off the Wall Street Journal headline? This is like the number one concern. How hard is it when, and I'm not calling developers, you know, non-knowledgeable or, but they do not understand security always, right? And how do I make sure that there are no mistakes done on the left side because we're shifting left? How do I make sure that we're not making mistakes there? So the use of machine learning in AI is really critical in order to grab so much information and make it actionable and make it something that is insightful. And a lot of times I hear people say, I'm getting so much data, but it's like finding a million needles in a wheat field, right? That's one of the challenges that we see today. So this is why we need to use AI. The more data, and I'm sure you know that, the more data you feed to the machine learning beast, the accurate it's going to get. Last but not least, if your organization still thinks that we could use all tools to solve new world problems, it is not going to solve these problems. We have to use new solutions. And those new solutions, what I suggest is really look into machine learning and AI in order to solve these problems. Now, let's take a scene like a day in a lifetime of a security person working with DevOps and development engineers. First question is, okay, you're asking me to secure this Kubernetes cluster. What network traffic is happening in between the cluster nodes? What's happening in between, you know, east, west, north, north, south? And the answer is usually, well, I don't know, like, we don't have any policy, right? And then the security person talk about the old world solution uses the number one advanced analysis tool in the security policy analysis arena, which is an Excel sheet. And let's get all the logs into an Excel sheet and crunch it and find the unique connections. And this is how I'm going to build my solution. It does not scale. It does not respond well to changes. What do we do differently? And this is exactly where I want to turn into a small demo. And again, I just want to really show you how could you harness AI in order to create a security policy model. So what you see here, you know, a very simple, very traditional, almost three tier, if we're still allowed to use this term, application with, you know, a front end, an application set of capabilities, and then maybe a more secure system. So how do I know what different relationship from a networking perspective do I need? What we will do is we'll actually use a discovery agent to first understand what assets do I have, which is also, we talked about visibility. I don't know what service do I have, right?  The first thing and discovery agent would do is map the different nodes, the different pods, the different services, et cetera, et cetera. Very limited visibility, right? Only one namespace because nothing still happened. But once we turn on learning mode, we could actually start understanding what's happening in between the nodes and build a policy model. It's not just let me record this, but really build a policy model. And yes, there are things that we could statically, you know, do from day one. I don't want my system to go to malicious domains, right? But still, I want machine learning to actually tell me what's happening inside my system. So once you turn machine learning in order to build the security policy, you're going to start seeing, and this is, I think, the beauty of machine learning, it's going to grow as you go. It's going to be very coarse at first. And then it's going to, and it's going to tell us, listen, you're at high school now, you need to keep learning until you get to a professorship, you know, position in terms of like, I know everything that's happening there. But the more you go, it's giving you, it understands now like what namespaces are being used. It understands now the actual connections and relations between the things. Now, maybe it's not as colorful as the diagram we saw at first, but these are the network vectors that you see. So once we have this, we can also start looking at the policy model that it suggests. And the suggestion, of course, again, new world, we can't use IP addresses as security policy constructs, but instead things like pod names and resource names, and services, et cetera, et cetera. So what we saw here, in a matter of hours, getting from not knowing nothing about the network traffic and knowing exactly what security policy we need and everything is courtesy of machine learning that built really the model. You're changing, you're adding a node, you're adding a pod, it will relearn everything. So you can always use machine learning again and again. Let's look at another scene. Another scene where someone needs to understand what's the permission model that is needed. And you go to DevOps engineering, developer engineering to say, well, we don't know. It's an S3 bucket that is pre-configured by a third-party tool that we're using. You cannot secure a black box. You cannot. You need to really understand what the permission levels are. So in order to do so, let's see how do we use machine learning in order to again build a permission model, not a network security model, but instead a permission model. So first thing that when you have, and in this case, it's a serverless function, that you can see is like, what different resources do I use? But by the way, there are cases where engineers don't even know exactly what's being used because it's a third-party tool. But also when they build it, if they don't document everything, they just don't know. After using machine learning, static code analysis, et cetera, we could understand two models, the configured model. And because we're calculating all the paths that the code could take, what is the required security model?  Now, try to go to a developer and tell them, reduce the permissions on the S3 bucket, and they're going to say, well, what does it mean? I want to be able to do everything I do. And the benefit of using machine learning in order to build a policy model is that not only tells you what's needed, it empowers the security people to speak the lingo of DevOps and developers in order to even give them a YAML snippet in order to configure the resource. So again, in a matter of a minute and a half, just running the function once, twice, 10 times, the more you run it, the more accurate you get. You get from, I have no idea what's happening to a, I know everything there. So let's summarize. Remember, especially if you're a developer or from the DevOps community, the more data you send to the security guys doesn't mean that you're giving them more visibility or more insights. And this has to be something that we always remember. You have to create a situation where you have insights. The second thing is that the more information you actually feed to machine learning, unlike a person that just needs to read an audit log, the more information you feed, then the more accurate your beast would be. We live in a world where we're not looking for a needle in a haystack. We do not. Advanced persistent threats are here to stay. We're going to see them even more. And we're looking for million needles in a wheat field. It's not just a stack. Think about where your system is distributed across multiple cloud service providers. How do you understand what's happening there? And with that, I'll thank you. Thank you very much.


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Hi everyone Joe for jazzy's case breaks.com doing a quick little team random For hoops pick your team to brand new release premium stock So this just 11 spots were just randomizing only your names and matching you up with some teams right here So just your names not the teams as usual. There's everybody right here Thanks to Sean Ryan and Kenneth for buying spots straight up. We appreciate that and congrats again to the winners of the spot That's why you have a little rooftop next to your name. Let's see what you end up with Let's roll it to randomize it three and a three hard six six times Good luck one two three four five and six and final time after six boom Ryan s Your names on top And then we got you there on the bottom and everybody in between good news is is you get a team Ryan Shackleton with a spot he bought straight up Pelicans Sean with the Grizzlies John with the Knicks Frank with the Wizards Mitchell with the Celtics Brianna with the Thunder Kenneth with the T Wolves and Sixers Sean with the Spurs Ken with the Magic and Ben with the Blazers There you have it. You're in pick your team too. We'll see you for that in a separate video jazby's case breaks.com