It's academic and it's theater and it's the place where they both meet. We have the audience and the process of it for each other. This makes your practices a start of the practice. Come home, everybody please. Samples of the limit. Sharing. What is that you do? Sharing how you do that. There's no way you can ignore that. You don't know it anymore. We're going all in on it. You can come and see the talk about it. This starts out all the way in the right way. Left, blue, completely open. Theater for everybody. Yes, everybody. That's just what's really done. And indeed my understanding of life, relationships, that have already changed. Survival of theater has a platform that depends on that. So welcome everybody to the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center here at the Graduate Center. CUNY and thank you for watching our propaganda video. But it's good to know, you know, what also what we do here. It's a very big day for us. It's the opening actually of the Pen World Voices Festival, a great festival. Perhaps the most significant festival of literature in the Americas. Definitely North America. And it was founded by Paul Auster and Salman Rushdie during the first Bush government where they felt there was not enough listening to voices from around the world. There was a tunnel vision. 95% of all books published are in English language from American or British writers. The other half, the other 5% are German or French. And so only two books maybe are, you know, often writers from the 180 or 200 nations around the world and musicians listen to world music. It's very important for their local practice to think globally. And I think in theater we have to do the same. So this is our small contribution for over 10 years. We are the partner of Pen. And it is really right at the center. It's very, very important to us. And thank you for taking time out of your life to come at four o'clock. And finally, some sun is out. It really means a lot to us. We need good theater, but we also need good audiences, audience who are interested. So it really means a lot to us. Thank you very much for coming. My name is Frank Henschka. I am the director of the Siegel Center. We bridge academia and professional theater, international and American theater here. So this is right at the heart of what we do. And also the opening of this has, we've worked for almost a year on this. We have eight of the 10 writers coming.  We fundraise for it. We don't take, you know, any admission fees. So we are really honored and that the writers are coming and that we are able to pay them and that we are part of that important course. Also check out Penbold Voices Festival right now. It's going on this week. Brilliant programs. Fantastic programs. What a chip put together the new curator. It's really an amazing array and it makes New York City what New York City is. The beginning and the end of the play, as one must say, is a big moment. In between people forgive you what you do. So again, this is the beginning then of our festival. So this is also important. And we have with us here Magalie Mugel who came from France with us to be with us. She flew in on Saturday or Sunday. She's going to fly back tomorrow. So we will join us for a discussion afterwards. The reading will be about 55 minutes and please fill out our little audience forms because we always want to know where you come from. You can keep the pencil. It's our gift to you.  So please, if you have a cell phone, please do take it out. I'll do the same. Here it is. And it should be ringer off. Okay. And your eye watches. I think so. Thank you very much. And you can leave the forms outside to give them when you go out. But again, thank you all for coming. And now it's the beginning of our festival. And again, thanks for you, Chen, for producing it. Michael, Bella and everybody up there. Selma who is stage managing. Elida, Brooke who joined us. So this is a big moment for us. Thank you for coming. And here is the beginning of the first 3Z, Susie Stork. Thank you. It starts here. It happens here, right there. The exact geography of where it happens doesn't matter. It happens in the house of Susie Stork and Hans Vassili Cruz. 17th of June, 1037 at night. The sun still hasn't set. In the kitchen, wine bottles on Susie Stork's table. Three, more or less empty. Susie Stork is by the window, waiting. Waiting for Hans Vassili Cruz to come home. And it all comes back to her. Like a body from the earth. Like a story you pick up.  Her desire to refuse to fulfill her conjugal duty by not having any children. It happens here, right here. 17th of June, 8.54 p.m. We hear the sound of a car in the distance. A car is starting, moving off. Susie Stork is there with her face stuck to the window. Now moving, waiting, heavy heat, just before the storm. And evening when the setting sun never actually sets. Susie feels the need for another drink. In the distance, upstairs, we hear the sound of children's voices. We hear the sound of tiny hands jiggling something metal in the walk. A knock on the glass front door. Stork Susie, Susie, do you hear me? Open this wretched door! Madam Stork goes to the door. And up goes Susie Stork's hand. And Susie Stork's hand rests on the door handle. And Susie Stork's hand opens up the door. Madam Stork comes in, sits down, face to face. Either side of the same table. They look at each other. For a long time, they look. There's plenty they can say, but they don't. Madam Stork slaps Susie once, twice. How is it possible that a woman like me could end up with a daughter like you? I tore myself to pieces. I did everything. I mean, I never said a word. I always held my tongue. I've been a good mother. I'm certainly not the worst. I've spared you everything.  Disarray. The disarray of my life, that's you. I look back at how I got here, and you, that we got here. Complete disarray. I don't know what to say. Quantify the things I've done and those I can't. I know nothing for sure. I'm basing you here, Mother, and I can't quantify anything anymore. I don't know if there was ever a time when I could. I can't quantify any of it. All I did was try to hold something together. A dead chick in the shell. I don't want anything back. I'd like to keep quiet, but I don't want to take anything back. I'm scared for a reply to my ceiling piece back. Asking me for an explanation. I don't know what will happen when you get home. You think he'll give you a kiss? I don't think there'll be flowers. I best till strangle you, and at worst till sapphire to your hair. You didn't like that. How would you like me to look at you? You think I should say, well done. I should drag you to the sink by the scrap and drown you. That's what you deserve. Please don't look at me. You hear me? You hear what I'm saying? It's a look or a beating to death. Which would actually be doing you a favor. What are you doing? I'm going for a little walk.  You should probably start praying. Praying. Praying Hans Vassili doesn't come home. Praying? Praying hard. It happens here. Right here. The geography of exactly where it happens doesn't matter. The 17th of June, 9.14 p.m. The sun's still up. Madam Stark hit Susie one last time before disappearing through the frosted glass front door. Susie alone.  Like a story you dig up. I hear the children panicking upstairs. And of course you know they're not panicking simply because of the fierce heat of this sun that won't stop shining of this sun that won't stop not going down. The children are panicking. I locked the bedroom door. I don't have the strength to climb the stairs. The sound of the swallow still swirls around the roof tiles of the house. This will be the last time I ever hear it. I wish my heart were like a beast going out to slaughter a hen having its neck rung over a stone basin. I try to feel something. I try to feel the pain. I know I should be feeling, but there is no tension in my shoulders. My neck loosens. Curves collapse. A release that I don't know how to describe. The kids in their bedroom they'll soon wear themselves out trying to open the door I locked. There's really no limit to how long my patience can stand the noise of a paper clip jiggling in a narrow lock. My patience can still stand that noise. I can't remember whether the shutters and the children's were closed. I can't remember whether the shutters were closed. I don't know. I'm unaware of the temperature in front of it. How could I explain to those children that Hans and Celie Cruz may not be coming back. That I may never again be able to open the door and meet their childish eyes. I'm not as planned adequately that I may have committed an act of thoughtlessness. I try to tell myself that what's just happened is surely not the sort of thing likely to alter the normal course of my life as I'd envisaged it. Hans and Celie Cruz left the room. His face was limited. He left the room and did not look toward it. He left his room and his livid face like crumbling, chalky rock. Fray the edges of his cheeks and it was ravaged. I saw it. I heard the scream explode from deep within his gaping throat and I heard the screams of my children. First, Lawrence, then his brothers, but still screaming in my head. He screamed like a sheep at the slaughter. The sound of a disemboweled sound echoed across the valley. But no one hung him upside down in the tree. And I remember looking in the mirror above the kitchen sink, looking in every corner of the yard and I remember, up goes my arm and hang out the washing. Up goes my arm to slap one of my three children. Up goes my arm to pop the baby's dummy back in its mouth. Up goes my arm to hang the empty laundry basket on the wall. Up goes my arm to endow it in my trouser pocket for a cigarette.   And I think about the flies buzzing around. What keeps a legend sun in the air? It's 9.22 p.m. The radio buzzes in the kitchen of homes of a seedy cruise in Susie Storkhouse. The sound of a dead sheep in the period. A decomposing corpse seizing with life. I think about the flies. I think about the meadows where my parents sheathed the trees. I think about the apples we used to throw at them. Rotting apples that fermented in their guts and made them drunk. And I think about the ones that got slaughtered. Hanging from the branch of an apple tree by a rope around their hind legs.  The smell of animal flesh that isn't quite dead yet.  That smell of fat.  I think about it all. Skinless skipping thoughts. While the children wear themselves out jiggling away upstairs at a tiny little rock. My heart is a clock and I throw its doors open to let in the wind and take away the screams of my world. Thought. This in which Susie Stork tries to find some clarity. Everything mounts up. Everything gathers speed. The last few days all jumbled together. The last few months become confused. The last few years melt and dissolve into each other. Her heart is a clock and she'd like to snap the pendulum. Susie Stork doesn't want him to come home. Han to the Sealy Cruise. Susie Stork doesn't want him to come back. Han to the Sealy Cruise. She has no desire that he come home. She has no desire to see him cross the threshold of this house. No desire, whatever. She remembers the effect of Han to the Sealy Cruise's voice. She remembers what it's like. She remembers his voice and the effect of that sound it makes. It's voice. She remembers and time runs backwards. A few days ago, in the middle of the heat, the swallow's flooding about the roof.   Where's my shotgun? I'll take a look and show them how you deal with birds. Are you going already? I don't have a question of going. I'm making the most of a moment. Is that a problem? Just a quarter of an hour or so. Free time with my kid.  You've got them all day. All day they're with you. You get an eternity leave and everything.  Check the fridge temperatures. Check there's no breach in the cold chain. Check the end aisle displays are in end aisle display condition. Checking the block from morning till night. I'm not leaving. It's not a question of that. I'm making the most of it. I'm taking a moment. Where's the shotgun? I'm on my own all day. We could have had a moment together. Are you on your own? Lord, get the catapults if you can't find the shotgun. I get up in the morning not because I've had enough sleep, not because my eyes sprangle, but not because I suddenly feel like getting up. I get up in the morning and I do what needs to be done to keep everything working so everyone knows where they are. I wake you, I wake the children. One second, the baby cries and I breastfeed him. Up goes my arm and switches on the coffee machine. Up goes my arm and switches on the toaster.  Picks out the t-shirt he massed for from the pile of washing and I smile at everyone and I watch you all leave the house and I'm left on my own with that baby that people get up in the morning. That's what people do. They get up in the morning and do what they have to do. It's what we do. I get up for my own benefit. Who does? Who? When I get up to take the kids to school, when I get up to check that they both have everything they're supposed to take to school, when I get up so I won't be late and get there before the first beer delivery of the spring, is that me getting up for my own sake? What I think of what I am doesn't matter. What I'd like to think of me doesn't matter. What I want from the world doesn't matter. What I once wanted from you doesn't matter. What I once wanted for us doesn't matter. So what do you want?  You can't. Not in the morning either. I can't. We all have our process to bear. I've got mine. You've got yours. That's how it works. What are you doing? Baby's crying and you're not lifting a finger. Her heart is a clock. She feels the second head speeding up on the circuit. She feels something give. I have a job. She worked in chicken, Orient poultry. That's where I worked. She took a job there because Orient poultry can just as easily have worked somewhere else. Sporting goods, baby's nappies. It was a toss up between poultry, sportswear, and nappies. It's not that she preferred poultry. It's that a child's potential is very quickly obvious. Are they more suited to poultry, sportswear, or nappies? It's quickly obvious whether you'll be a secretary, a chief production manager, a human resources director in poultry, sportswear, or nappies. I took pleasure in working there. She took pleasure working there in chicken. I could have done something else. She could have done something else. Cutting and selling. She could have been a seamstress. But that's not much of a qualification, so better take a health and social care course or childcare than a technical qualification or conversion course. I could have been a nurse. She could have been a seamstress. She could have been an employer. She worked in chicken. I took pleasure in it. Him too. Ponds with silly crews also worked in chicken. They worked with an elastic band. Ponds with silly crews packaged and prepared the crates of cartons of chickens. Supervised distribution. They worked in the same place. Orient poultry. My place of work. I did it because you have to do something.  I weighed and labeled on special days I tied the chickens feet together with an elastic band. Ponds with silly crews packaged and prepared crates of cartons of chicken and supervised distribution. We had our breaks at the same time. We'd bumped into each other. Occasionally. One day they spoke. Chickens on the way out apparently. Bird flu. We'll go into rabbit. They're closing down. There are rumors they're closing down soon. We'll live. Just go somewhere else? I'm going to buy a spar.  I better get back. Me too. That evening he waited for us. She didn't have to make her own way home on that particular evening. He said. I just want to kiss you Suzy store.  Feel the heat of your saliva flowing in my mouth. Feel the effect of that in my lower portions.  I just want to kiss you just like this. We can't do that just like that. Close your eyes Suzy store. I put my lips on yours.  We don't have to be in love. It's just a kiss. So we kissed. He moved in together. Me and Hans and Silly cruise. Orient poultry shut down. We didn't go into rabbit. Suzy store took things as they came. We went into a spa. They carried on flipping together. She took up sewing. He banished a spa. Me sewing at home. For myself. For others. I took up sewing. Pitting and cutting. Sowing. Dresses. Curtains. Tablecloths. We've fallen into a routine. Routine. No drama. Kiss me.  Kiss me Hans and Silly. Make me feel. Feel your tongue. Feel the heat of your saliva flowing in my mouth. I just want to kiss you Suzy store. Just like that. I just feel like it's only me slogging my guts out. I'm back from work. I work like a dog. You're doing nothing. I come home and there's nothing. I don't know. I come in from work. You're there with your stuff.  Sowing away. Always sewing. Well I'm slogging my guts out. There's no room for anything else. These scraps are materials Suzy. There's no room for me. No room for anything else. I don't know what you say I'm. I don't really know what you say I'm to you. I don't know. You and me Suzy. We could have some common interests. I mean we don't have to do everything together all the time. But we could share some things. So kiss me.  You're still sewing now while I'm talking. I'm listening. That's not work. Sowing like that. This can't go on. Suzy Stork on Easy Street. You have to get a job. I looked at job ads. I asked my mom to help. I called my mom. I said, hey I'm looking for a job. She didn't do it the conventional way. She looked for a job by calling her mother. That's how they do things around here. Madam Stork takes out her phone. Madam Stork calls a friend of hers. She's a recruiting sales staff. And tells her that her daughter Suzy Stork is looking for a job. Madam Stork said to Suzy, you have an appointment at my friend's mother and baby boutique. She's looking for a salesperson. Don't. Show me up now, Suzy. Good morning, Miss Stork. Please. Good, please. We're just going to spend a few moments together so that we can start to get to know a little bit about you so we can get to know you a little bit. And to make you feel entirely at ease, I'm going to let you speak first. Perhaps you'd like to tell us a little bit about yourself. Would you? Tell us about your business story. Suzy Stork was not aware that this is often the first question asked by a prospective employer in a job interview. Because it's the top way they've come up with to get to know the candidate. Because it's the top way they've invented to try and analyze the candidate's communication skills. Because it's the top way they've thought of to make a candidate relax. Because it's good to let the candidate speak. I don't feel very relaxed. I'm not used to being asked what I think. Suzy Stork was not aware that this is often the first question asked by a prospective employer in a job interview. Because it's one of the top techniques that enables a prospective employer to judge the candidate's perception of him or herself. While also getting to know his or her personality in a little more depth. Could you tell us about an experience that you're particularly proud of? Something you found particularly motivating. I had a job before. I worked in chicken. Orient poultry, that's where I worked. I worked there because Orient poultry had vacancies. I could have done sportswear or an appies. I chose poultry. Chicken. My mom said, you're more manual anyway. You're not intellectual. So I went for chicken. I took pleasure in the work. I could have done something else, cutting and sewing. I could have been a seamstress. I could have been a nurse. But no. I was in chicken. I weighed and labeled. I can tell you the weight of a bird just by picking it up and weighing it in my hand. Just like that. On special days I tie the feet together elastic bands. And during this working experience did you have to overcome any problems or obstacles? You want to know if I'm scared of obstacles and if I know how to get around them and if I can stand on my own two feet without stumbling over the first little hurdle? Yes. You want to know whether I thrive on a challenge? Yes. Do you really think that if I was scared of obstacles and if I stumbled over the first little hurdle and if I didn't thrive on challenges that I have lasted long weighing and labeling chickens at Orient poultry? What made you leave Orient poultry? Orient poultry shut down. It's hard to retrain from rabbit when you've been in chicken. Working in a team. What do you want me to say? Just answer with a simple yes or no. Yes. Do you know how to say no? Do you want me to say yes or no? You seem tense. Do you live alone? Do you have children? Do you want to eat? Aren't you interested in children? No. Well, I need no more than chickens. And yet you wanted to work in our mother and baby, Bertie. We sell children's records. I know. Look, I'm here because my mother told you to see me. It so happens, I need a job. So let's not beat about the shrubs. I don't care what I have to do, whatever it is, I'll do it. I don't need to keep up this dialogue, this discussion with you, Madeline. We could come up with an easier way for you to establish and evaluate my skills and suitability to join your mother and baby sales team. We could evaluate my skills, but let's just not. I know that what you're looking for above all is and let's not be afraid to say it the absolute best for your customers. Because your customers aren't just any old customers, so you need sales staff. You aren't just any old sales staff.  We know, of course, that the customer community is subdivided into individual units and it will be my duty, should you offer me the job, to make each of them think, feel, sense that each and every one of them is unique. I'm the best in my field. I'm the exact thing this is after. The world of mother and baby products needs women like me.  I don't want children, which means I'm someone you can depend on. It could happen, though.  Madam, my heart is a clock and regulates the rhythm of my entire physical being. It regulates my every organic and hormonal flux. It carries a deep knowledge of the usually unknowable. I don't really want children. Susie Stokes' heart starts beating at speed at the pulses. The blood surges around the rockin' channels of her arteries where the first time in her life Susie Stokes completely lets herself go, commits to the big note, does what it takes to get the job. I promised my mom not to show her up. I want my husband, Hans Vassili Cruz, to be proud of me. Do you have a very particular way of preventing yourself? I want this job. Excuse me. Sir? Sorry, did you just say you don't want to have children to get a job? How can anyone be sure?  Everyone wants children sooner. You're not going to give her the job just because she says she doesn't want children. You can't take a woman on in a mother and baby store if she doesn't want children. Do you really not want children? Fuck, Susie. I'm thinking about flies buzzing in the radio. I can smell the flesh decomposing I can smell the rocks and hear the wind stuffing in the thorny shrubs clinging to the flanks of the periodies. You can't say something like that to say that just to land a job. You don't take a job at just any price. To quantify the things I've done and those I can't... I can't quantify any of it.  You don't do that. Credibility. You just don't have any credibility in a mother and baby context if you don't know your way around the benefits of a breast pump to a customer. You just can't. He has a point. What? He has a point. Your husband partnered. He has a point. Do you have to have given birth to be a midwife? Do you have to have given birth to sell dummies? What if I'm a lesbian?  I don't see why my lack of maternal cravings means I can't sell dummies. It's not just dummies. I mean, we have a whole range of products that you'll have to recommend to our customers. On the face of it, your sales technique on the face of it. Your familiarity with the world of sales seems adequate. But how will you be able to show empathy? Because commerce works through empathy, does it? Do you really not want children? I don't know what you're getting at. I don't know why you're doing this. Hansa Sealy Cruz came home one day. Hansa Sealy Cruz said, I'm just sewing. This can't go on. Suzy Stork on Easy Street. Suzy Stork must get a job. I looked at the ads. I called. I asked my mom for help. I said, I want a job. My mom got me this interview. She said, don't show me up, Suzy. I don't want to show her off. I want you to be proud of me, Hansa Sealy. I've given myself the best possible chance showing that I can be a dependable employee.  I don't know what goes on your head. I don't get it, Suzy. Everything's all mixed up. What's going on? I thought we were going to build a life together. We are. We're building thin air. We're building an abstraction. We're building silence and emptiness. I said, I don't want children. And that's what I'm saying. It's against nature. It's nature. He has a point.  You can't say that. You can't say things like that turning around to a prospective employer and saying, all cool and calm, take me and not her because I'm totally dependable. And I won't leave you in the lurch by having children. You should be ashamed of not relying just on your skill set to get the job. This is really bad. I'm... Yes. Disappointed in you? Take a look at yourself. Saying, I don't want children. It's not a bed of roses. Having children, I admit you weren't a bed of roses. But just because it wasn't a bed of roses for me doesn't mean you're not going to give me a grandson. I really want this job. You mean you're right that staying at home just sewing is no kind of life while Hans Vassili Cruz is slogging his life away at work. I want to have children with you. I want to build something real. Something true, something beautiful. Something that will bind us together. Something that looks like the two of us. I want your children. I just want to kiss you as soon as you start. Start with the kiss.  Feel your tongue in my mouth. Feel your saliva flowing in my mouth. Feel the effect of that in my lower portions.  That's all I want. We did what you wanted, Hans Vassili Cruz. I gave up this job and... Hans Vassili Cruz and Susie Storpe were lying side by side. Hans Vassili Cruz sits up and takes off his clothes. Hans Vassili Cruz places his lips on Susie's mouth. He kisses Susie Storpe. He places his naked body on top of Susie Storpe's still-clothed body. With one hand the left, he lifts Susie Storpe's garment. With one hand the left, he squeezes the right breast of Susie Storpe hard. And with one hand the right, he does what he has to do. While something crawls away itself inside me here, I try to tell myself that what's just about to happen will in no way alter or interfere with the arrangements I've made for how my life will play out. I try to tell myself as I'm crushed beneath Hans Vassili Cruz because whenever it happens it always happens with me, crushed beneath the weight of his body. I try to tell myself that this won't make any great difference. Here it comes. For Hans Vassili Cruz, here it comes. What? Struggle. I know it well, the struggle. I know how it organizes itself inside me. I know the way it forces, how it forces inside me. I know how long it lasts. I know how it splits. I know its rhythm and how it works. I know the sound. I know the smell. I know the yell that Hans Vassili Cruz muffles in my neck. I know it all his way of coming out of Hans Vassili Cruz and always will shoot out. It's no good just closing your eyes.  What I can quantify is how it's organized, the way that the nature of my environment is organized. The incomprehensible weight of the thing that's coming in spite of me, even though I'm there and taking part. Oh, go Susie Stortznik. Not me lifting it at all. Hans Vassili Cruz holds Susie Stortznik down. By the left arm, with one hand, the right. And he comes and it stops. And I sit up and I push him away. It's just at the tip of the hand. The sheath of nature. The skin's damp. There's that smell. I close my eyes to shut it all out. Nothing in the radio. Susie Stortz thinks about flies. What do the swallows eat? Flesh or flies? Silence or corpses? I can feel my flesh decomposing inside. I can smell the wooly smell of the sheath caught in the fields.   A smell that clings and gets under your nails and still hangs about later when I bite into an apple. We had three children from the night time sports of Hans Vassili Cruz. They're beautiful.  Especially Lois. Especially Lois. Mummy, they're noisy. They're children. It's great how they run around everywhere. A little bit of life about the place. I'm exhausted. It's only natural. You're tired. It's natural to be tired. Once baby starts to sleep through, you won't be so tired. I'm going to stop breastfeeding. You're tired. One pregnancy straight after another. It's tiring. You've had one pregnancy straight after another. You're tired. A spot of post-natal depression. And to think you didn't want children. The older two are so funny and such a good sign.  Oh goodness me. They're beautiful boys. Especially Lois. He's so funny. Always playing soldiers.  The baby's crying. Aren't you going to go? This isn't my job, Susie Stork. I can't feed him. Not my job. I'm going to stop breastfeeding. You're just saying that because you're tired.  Little Lois gets so funny when he's playing hunting with the dog.  Are you just going to leave him to cry? Do you want to starve him to death? I love coming here. I love this house. Everything's so the children running about, the little dog running about with the children and you. A lovely couple with their lovely children. Such a happy home this house is. He's hungry. My breasts hurt. That's not his problem. You're just tired. That's all. Get some of those silicone nipple covers. Massage your breasts. Like this. Take some responsibility. It's so breastfeeding. If you think it's all just a bed of roses having children, you're never happy. You don't appreciate what you've got. You've got it all. Everything. And still you're complaining.  You can. So be grateful.    Maybe you should go. I don't know how you can leave that baby to cry. I never left you to cry. Always there beside you. Ready to leap into action. You were a very low-prior. Such a high-pitched voice. Really piercing. I'm not sure it's a good plan to leave him crying like that. Hans Vassili is right. You should go. Of course it's none of my business. And to think you wanted a job. Lucky you don't have one. You can see now you can't do 35 things at the same time. But it doesn't matter. You can't do 35 things at the same time. Just do what you have to do and do it well. Do it properly.  Get up in the morning. Not because I've had enough sleep. Not because my eyes spring up and not because my body longs to stretch out. Not because I feel like it. I get up in the morning and it needs to be done to keep everything working so everyone knows where they are. I wake you. I wake the children. First Loic. The second one. Second. The baby's crying. I give him my breast. The one that hurts less. The one where the cracks and the skin aren't so deep. The one that's less in agony. And up goes my arm and switches on the coffee machine. Up goes my arm and switches on the toaster. Up goes my arm and picks out the socks and clean pants. Not dirty for Loic. And picks out the t-shirt you've asked for from the pile of washing. And I smile at everyone while the cracks get deeper and the sores bead the tips of my breasts as if my nipples have been sliced.  People get up in the morning. That's what people do. Make it up in the morning. That's what they have to do. It's what we do. I don't get up for my own benefit but who does? Who? I'm worn out. My heart pendulum is slowing down. I want to lay waste the battlefield that is my home. Throw the doors wide and let the wind blow through. Set fire to my jail. When you wash up you put the glasses away in the cupboard still damp. You're putting glasses away in the cupboard and they're still really damp. Why don't you dry them? You don't know? I put the glasses away. I put them away so they don't get broken. You put the glasses away in the cupboard still damp. You shouldn't put them away damp. I have to say, I'm repeating myself. I'm always saying this. But it's almost as if you don't care as if you weren't listening to me. And you leave that baby to cry, you leave him. Do I have to go myself?  I want to go back to work. I want to get another job. There's no kiwi fruit left. The basket's empty. Why didn't you get more? And the silence that now descends is not, in fact, linked to the lack of kiwi fruit. What Susie quantifies but can't is how it's organized. The way the nature of her environment is organized, the incomprehensible weight of the thing that's coming in spite of her, even though she's there and taking part in it. To quantify the things I've done and those I can't, the way your eyes rest on me haunts the ceiling, your gaze is so heavy it weighs me down and I can't bear it anymore. The way the weight of your gaze takes me to a place I don't want to go. Contradiction. Confrontation. Confrontation. That troubled space between what I am, think I am and what I could never admit I want to be. I'm sorry about the kiwi fruit.  On and on and on. Put it out. I have to get up in a minute.  Don't put it out. Put it out. I don't know what you're thinking, Susie. There's stuff goes on in your head, Susie. I just don't get. This could all be so simple. If you took things as they came, really? Susie Stork, this could all be so simple. Now, put that light out. Switch the switch and turn it out. Oh Jesus, what are you doing now? I can't sleep. It's nearly one in the morning. It's late. You need to feed him in an hour and then you'll be tired tomorrow. What's wrong in that head of yours, Susie Stork? I shouldn't have turned that top down. You're nuts. You're out of your mind. You're completely out of your mind. Aren't you happy here?  That was more than six years ago. I don't understand what I'm doing here. I need to sleep. Hansa Thiele, I think I don't love them. The children, I think I don't love them. I just don't. Their voices, their bodies, moving about, their bodies all over the place, all over me all day. I can't stand it anymore. They have to touch everything.   They're either yelling and sometimes I think about getting the shotgun down and lining them up against a wall and shooting them, shooting them. So I don't have to hear them yelling anymore. I think that you put them inside me to make me rot away. That's what I sometimes think. I want them to be gone. I don't want them to be here. All this breeding makes me sick. Women should be sewn up unsealed shut. Susie! Really sick. How is it possible that stuff like this can pour out of your mouth? How is that possible?  How on earth could I have made myself sleep with you? Come in, you. You squirted. We have three children. It's just completely incomprehensible to hear you talk like that. It's totally, utterly incomprehensible. Don't touch me.  It's not women who need sewing up. It's your mouth once varying under six feet of earth completely so you disappear. Where are you going? I know I'm not perfect and I may have made mistakes but I don't know, I try to be attentive and make sure that you and me and the kids can hold together as a unit. I know I'm not perfect and I'm all clumsy and I say things clumsily sometimes but I thought I wanted you and me to be yes, something solid. Not something to be splattered like a fly on a window pane. Setting fire to my jail may not be such a good idea. Don't touch me, Susie. What happened to our contract? I'm not a washing machine.  As a proportion of the surrounding population you'd imagine such people would predominate and that these people's concerns dull and uncultivated as they are could be no business of ours. They have their problems, of course but they're old problems. What goes on in their houses can't surely be terribly important however problematic. The domestic problems they may experience are surely beneath our serious notice and smell of cold coffee, cement, dogs, and wet linden. 17th of June. 8.27 p.m. Susie Stork sits at the table. Susie Stork sips her drink because it's been a hot day. She drinks whatever's to hand. That morning, Hans the silly cruise had said, I'll be leaving the shop early tonight but don't expect me. Don't expect me to come straight home. I need to clear my head. How to think to work out where I am with this, work out where we are if we can still trust each other.  The sound of Hans the silly cruise is car pulling up. Sound of the car door opening and they're expecting his Hans the silly cruise. You're earlier than I expected. I thought you'd be late or not so soon. I didn't know you'd be back so soon. You should have taken your time.  I did enjoy it. Are they asleep? Not yet. It's late. They'll be tired tomorrow. The sun's still up. It's hard to get to sleep. It's hard to explain to the child that they have to go to bed and put on something half naked. It's just that t-shirt on. Nothing underneath like that. It's too hot. I see you've been drinking. Drinking alone now, aren't we? I opened these. Someone gave us. No one gave us them. I bought them. Me. I thought they were the ones someone gave us. My mistake. Maybe. My mistake. I got them mixed up confused anyway. I thought a bottle's there to be drunk. It's there to be drunk, isn't it? Do you often open up a bottle on your own? Just this one time? I mean, look, it's not the end of the world! I don't know what's going on in your head at the moment, Susie Stork. Did you change the bait?   You listen to the radio now? I didn't think you'd be back so soon. Am I disturbing you? Do you have a thing? I'm going to go see what the kids are up to. I'm going to tell them to tidy up. It's late. They'll be worn out. It's time for bed. They won't sleep. I'll see.  Susie Stork remembers. Up goes her arm to hang up the washing. Up goes her arm to slap one of the three of them. Up goes her arm to pop the dummy back in the baby's mouth. Up goes her arm to hang the empty laundry basket on the wall. Up goes her arm and down into her trouser pocket for a cigarette.   Susie Stork thinks again about the flies buzzing around him. Then Han goes to the ceiling.  Susie Stork thinks again about the flies buzzing around him. Then Han goes to the ceiling. Susie crashes into the kitchen. Han goes to the ceiling. Susie slaps Susie. Like smashing a fly against a window pane. Where's the baby? In his cot. If I ask you where the baby is, that means that he's not in his cot. He must be in his cot. And it's at this time of night.  Don't just shout at me. You're telling me the baby's in his cot. I'm telling you that he's not.  He's not up there. Maybe he's run away. What? What do you mean run away? He's a baby. You're supposed to be looking after him. You must know where he is. A child can't just disappear. A baby can't run away for fuck's sake. Put that glass down. I don't know. What do you mean you don't know? I can't remember what I did. How can I trust you?  I should be able to trust you. He was with me all day. When I went to fetch the boys from school he was with me in his cram. When I came home with the boys, he was with me. They had their tea and I gave him a drink. I gave him a drink, the breast. He was with me. We went outside and he was with me. He was crying and he was with me. And I remember, up goes my arm to hang out the washing. Up goes my arm. And I can see the flies. You hit me.  Where is he? Stop yelling at me all the time and just stop it, stop it. I can't stand it. Telling me off all the time, accusing me as if I can't stand it. Stop yelling. How can I ever trust you again when you lost the baby? Stop it. I can't stand it. I can't stand it anymore. If those kids, three of them, I can't stand it. I've had enough. I'm on my own all day long. I forgot the washing. What? I knocked.  I know Susie forgot to fetch it in. That's, yes, the washing but I mean, I wanted to tell you Hans Visily that the pram, that little pram is still out there with the sun and Hans Visily it's been so fierce all day today and this evening and Hans Visily cruise stands. He leaves the room without a glance at Susie's stroke. Madame stroke turns her back on Susie. They leave the house their faces ribbon like crumbling chalky rock frayed at the edges of their cheeks and into their eye sockets and a scream then a second from deep in their gayly throats and the children come running down the stairs and Loic with his catacomb in one hand and his little brother's hand in the other comes running into the kitchen. Why are daddy and grandma screaming in the garden? Because that's what people do when they realize that someone has had a tiny lapse in concentration. That's yes, I think I had a moment where I lost my concentration.  Time for bed now Loic. Susie's stroke takes her two children by the hand. Takes them up to their room and locks them in. Then she goes back to the kitchen. Hans Visily cruise is there. In the arms he holds the baby. That's been left outside in its little pram all day in the heat of the sun. Give me the car keys. I think it would be better if he didn't wake up, you know. That would be good. That would be best because I've just had enough. I'm so tired of the reality. Susie's stroke watches Hans Visily cruise take the baby away. She locks the glass door behind her. We hear the sound of Hans Visily cruise's car in a distance. The car starts. Moves off. Susie's stroke by the window. Heavy heat just before the storm. An evening when the setting sun never actually sets. Susie keeps her eyes fixed on the window. In the distance upstairs we hear the sound of children's voices. We hear the sound of tiny hands jiggling something mellow in a lock. A knock on the glass front door. Open this door Susie. Open this direction door. Susie's stroke goes to the door and up goes Susie's stroke's hands. Susie's stroke's hand rests on the door handle and Susie's stroke's hand opens the door. And they're face to face. Madame's stroke slaps Susie once twice. Total silence.  Madame's stroke disappears. Upstairs the children surely have to shut up now. Susie's stroke prays deep down that they'll kill each other. Just to get it over. Get it all over with like the cries of the swallows that once the moon comes up. The radio's still on. It gives out one last buzz like the flies on the carcass of a lost sheep in the vast emptiness of the pyramids before Susie switches it off. At 10.54 p.m. My heart is a clock. I get it right out of my chest but I don't really have any special reason to do that anymore or any real need to do that because in fact I'm watching myself and it all comes back to me like a body from the earth like a story you dig up. My sad failure adequately to express my desire to refuse certain obligations on a personal, physical and indeed economic character I wish I had the courage to refuse to fulfill my conjugal duty and not have any children. I'm going to tell myself that what's just happened is not in any way the sort of thing likely to alter the normal course of my life as I'd envisaged it, but I know nothing for sure. The organization the way the nature of the things around me is organized the incomprehensible weight of the thing that's coming in spite of me even though I'm there, I'm still there and taking part. All that escapes me. I turn the radio off I unplug the cable I cut it with the first knife that comes to hand there's a lot I could do with the cable so many ideas throbbing through my hands and in my head I raise my hands to my neck holding the cable and the smell of my hand stops me there's a stubborn smell clinging to my palms a smell and oh I've smelled the smell of wool the smell of urine I hear a shot from upstairs the children have finally killed each other I think then they hurdle down the stairs and down the hall I drop the cable Loic looks at me and in one hand he has his little brother's hand and in the other the shotgun Mr. Campbell is literary manager and I also a translator and reading assistant was Katie Pedro and for example Isaac Houston Meredith Jones, Stark Berglund and Hayley Palmer there's Nicole German who does fantastic what is the French cultural services we have probably said this time we did it on our own but they have fantastic collaborators and we have done many many things together Nicole is one of the people who really puts artists together from two countries to continents and bridges so Nicole will be here and Sarah and Magali so so Magali Mujel Sarah Rademaker is that correct? yeah okay so I have first one one question for Magali when did you write the play and was the play based on the real event? no okay I'm sorry no good good good sorry I read that you have been written several plays about women is this one part of this series the series is called Guerrière Ordinaire I mean we would translate Guerrière Ordinaire into English like I'm not sure you can translate this word Guerrière because it's a neologisme it's Guerrière Rose but in French for the women so Guerrière I'm not Guerrière the war the war woman or the war woman so yeah in English we don't have the she were yours could you speak a little bit about this series it's a long work I'm writing about this subject actually actually so with Guerrière I put this question what does it mean to say no in a life when we are women so what is a no against society or normal norm norm rules and laws to invent an emancipation so emancipation emancipation of the life so in Guerrière we are free free women the first is a poem about a real fact so the story of Madame Courgeau I don't know if you know this story in French is the terrible story of Les bébés congelés the frozen baby so it's a story of a woman who was a two baby in Korea but she's a French woman and I wanted to understand why we can throw some baby so it's a long poem and I want to I wanted to I don't know in English I'm sorry my English is not really good in a reparation symbolique a sim yeah thank you and the second part is a story about yes in a big big firm and she can at the street of the city because she's too fat so it's not just too fat for real and the first part is the story of no it's not a story it's it's a love story but an awful love story because all I I write is dark I think so but I love jokes so I put the question of homosexuality for the women the play was staged in London for 2017 in translation by Chris Campbell how did the audience react to the play I mean were you there it was at the gate theater I think it's I don't know to say that I mean the audience was very moved by what they listened and heard there were several reviews that highlight the impact of the text among the the community of women feminist well it worked very well in London I mean any comment about the the violence any comment did you have any comments on the violence I think it's not the more important I don't know and maybe Sarah how did you approach the text with the actors how did I approach it with the actors well we got together and we read it first just together and then I mean I had read the play before we got into the rehearsal room and I had ideas about what really struck me first was the way that it's written and you guys don't get to see it on the page but it's very poetic and there are line breaks constantly it's like a very long poem and so I wondered what that did with the rhythm and the syncopation and it felt very much like there was a specific style which I think you could see kind of in the reading with just a certain kind of punctuation and so when we got in the room we just talked to the actors about how the characters were there we looked at the characters and what they were doing and what they were going through but it was definitely a different process than I would take with a play without a chorus yeah I was going to ask about the chorus and and the role of the chorus for you how did you did you come to the idea of having the chorus for this specific play I mean there was for this play there were a lot of preference to Medea and this play like a contemporary version of Medea Medea in English so do you want to speak of the chorus? in fact I never wanted to ask the question of Medea in fact she was never thinking about Medea as a reference ok it's recorded what interested me was to find a form that is not a form that puts someone at a distance who would never have come to the theatre she was looking for the structure that would not put not put the character at a distance and this character being someone who would not normally be in a piece of theatre and what interested me was to find how we finally renew with a theatre and also a theatre that tells stories and transmits experiences renew to return to a theatre she's looking for a way to come back towards a theatre that that tells stories and tells people's experiences a few years ago in French theatre it still seemed a kind of radical to make a theatre that actually told people's stories and she feels like a radical writer could you speak a little bit more about this what your reference why do you say that from a historical point of view yeah since the 90's in French theatre there's been a movement that's been going on since the 90's in French theatre there's been a movement to write like fragmented theatre like fragmented yeah so writers weren't at that point really looking at developing story and I notice that if you want to convey an experience then you have to tell stories and she feels that in order to transmit an experience that you must tell a story and she feels militantly about this and sometimes what interests me is how women can make a story how a woman can tell her own story and what is particularly interesting to her is how a woman can tell her own story which is why her characters are often very conscious of their own social condition and it's something that conscience of their social condition was something that was difficult for the actors in the production at the gate theatre and wonders if it was the same for you guys yeah the actors do you have anything to share about this sorry I've been just writing down notes I didn't quite catch the end there she wants the actress that the characters know about their social position which is unusual that they kind of and it wasn't a complication for the gate theatre in London how would it feel for you as an American actor definitely we had such a swift process with this I mean there's so much to explore in this piece I think that this was one of several sort of fun things to figure out but it's definitely that element of it feels like the fuel that drives this we were talking in rehearsal about how well and Han says at one point this could all be so easy if you could just go with this machine it's the tension of her wanting to go against it like the pendulum wanting and being aware of that that maddens her that seems to be what this is about and we only had a couple days we only scratched the surface but it's so exciting to explore I would agree with that I think it's a little bit of a difficulty because we did talk about a lot what their condition is and how aware they are of the machine that they're in and I think that was a discovery at some point that she is aware of what she's fighting against I don't know if that's true for you but it seemed like it was a discovery that she's aware of what she's fighting against but we had a discussion about that and I think it was a little hard at first to figure out what that thing she's pushing against is and how aware she was of it I don't know, is that accurate for you? Yeah, or even if she can't put a word to it she feels the sensation of it seems to be like what we were trying to find Yeah, the conversation that we had at the very beginning I think it was like the first thing that came up organically was just kind of something that we have to address in almost every room that I'm in which is privilege just every room that I'm in and leading a rehearsal process it just kind of has to be something that I'm aware of constantly and we're seeing the question of whether or not the characters in this are aware of their social status and their lack of privilege or recognizing this greater systemization of women in culture or in the world and kind of where we as actors and directors and people in the theater are also in that and storytellers like what our own role in that means so yeah, we got pretty deep pretty quickly and then had to kind of back it up again did you guys want to say something about just that I remember us talking about why doesn't she say out loud I don't want to have any children or something and I think we sort of talked about correct me if I'm wrong but that almost that the idea isn't a possibility or that I'm not aware that there are other options or lacking the resources I think you said a one point star in the education the ability to be able to put words to or formalize a thought like that and to feel that you want something different but be unable to actualize it did you have something more you wanted to say just a second along those lines I think I did say that she lacked the resources or maybe the words for her feelings of wanting to push up against it or a lack of knowledge that there's something more but we also talked about oh man, my thoughts are jumbled we talked about the fact that she didn't have words to put to it but also instead of knowing what she wanted she only knew what she didn't want but nobody wanted anything no one knew what they really wanted so they were fighting against something but not sure what they were fighting for what's the goal what's the ambition what's the thing they actually want because they state a lot what they don't want but never what they do and Susie says nobody's ever asked me in the interview I'm not used to being asked what I think I'm not used to being asked what I think maybe is there any question from the audience I sort of got the feeling that they're in this machine there's whirlwind and they're caught and they can't get out but what bothered me is she never as you said she never takes a positive step she doesn't say no she doesn't resist I don't think she was conscious that she was getting in it in some way and I think she had a small consciousness of anything I think she was like a leaf blowing in the wind her whole life I think because you didn't really find a lot of resistance anywhere I mean go here do this do that do this and there's very little where she makes any and where she shows any resistance she says many times that she's exhausted exhausted isn't resistance she doesn't have strengths anymore you'll find an excuse for it I'm saying something else I'm not saying she wasn't tired or anything I don't think she was aware of resistance I think that's a great point I think that part of what comes out of that and what we were playing with also in this process was the idea that she's stuck in something that she can't get out of and that maybe the play is actually highlighting that there may not be options that you're aware of you don't know that you can say no to something that is systematically set up for you to just fall into and then at a point at which maybe she wants a job or recognizes that this is something that maybe she has two choices and one is not greater than the other you know there really are no options it's kind of a system that we're stuck in and I think part of the privilege conversation is we are all very privileged to be sitting in this room right now and not everybody has that kind of opportunity and may not even be able to recognize that there are things that you can do other than go to work and come home and raise children and that's just what your parents have done and their parents have done and it's a long way to get to town you know what I mean? I think that's something that struck us anyway, is that fair? I just have a really more of a comment, I really liked the play very much but I liked especially where I'm just hearing these comments and discussing the play that it felt like she was stuck in some sort of like cultural matrix where you know she either the option was to be the mother to have the kids or to work in a mother baby store so she couldn't even break out of that so there really was this idea of emancipation really struck me in the play that you know, does it really exist? It felt like the answer was no, even if she was aware of it, she didn't have any of those options and I just thought that was a really I liked how you highlighted that so it's really a comment I wanted to pick up on the discussion that you were having but first I also wanted to congratulate the writer I wanted to say in particular I thought the language was very, very beautiful even without seeing it on the page I didn't need to see it on the page it's clearly a very poetic intelligence that's behind this play and I also thought your direction, the actors it was really, really very powerful so I wanted to say that first to pick up on this question if I remember correctly our main character says at the end near the very end, I didn't have the courage I thought she said that yes you said that that then tells so this would be my question what's in the mind of our writer if she didn't have the courage to say no, I don't want to do this that would imply she did have an awareness and could have said no but she's faulting herself for not doing it as opposed to she actually was just mechanically going through the motions and it wasn't even a question of having the courage to say no so that would be my question yes it was the difference because she said at the end I didn't have the courage was she really aware that she had other options or was she unconscious that she had other options we turn around to this question since a little moment in what was said by Madame because Sarah said this is a question that we've been kind of circling around a lot in this conversation I don't know if she knows that she had other options I can't answer because it's the moment where the character is sometimes smarter than the one who writes she's not sure whether she was aware of it or not because this is a case in which the character is smarter than the person who created her but to give her an answer sometimes we're not happy in her job so just to respond sometimes we're not happy in our job and we should leave and so we stay Magalie, I just wanted to ask a little bit about your process I'm just interested in your writing process does it take you a really long time to write a play and with the poetic structure do you read your words out loud so that you can hear the rhythm of them or do they live in your head and is it really important to you like how the words sit on the page if you understand about my writing process in any case it's a piece that I put quite a long time to write I started in 2011 and it was finished in 2013 and there are other versions and it's existed in multiple versions short ones that were three monologues shorter ones this is the known version because she thinks this is the most interesting version what is primarily interesting to her is the question of rhythm and the question of breath and how can we create an image for the person who is listening without scenery or background or other sensation of heat or smell and she thinks that Chris Campbell's work in translating it was wonderful I was going to ask you about the translation it's the right moment do you feel between what you wrote in French and with the English translation did it by American actors do you feel this rhythm, the breath the voice of this woman is there a difference between the French your writing and the English words this is going to make you laugh but there is no French version because this text was never performed in French because in France they don't really want to hear about this text I didn't know the theater that refused to produce it in French is actually going to produce it in English next year French people can watch this play subtitled in French in France


Okay, we are at 230 on the dot so I assume we're good to go. We are good to go. Oh, hey, there's the sign begin Hello everyone. Thank you so much for coming. I'm very excited to be here today with Zebunek as well Talking about Kata, which is the real-time and serverless scaling solution for Kubernetes a CNCF Incubations project. We'll jump right into it We only have half an hour plus a little bit and we want to leave plenty of time for Q&A Thank you to all of you who might be joining virtually. Hello to you as well I can feel your strength through that little camera in the back Can you feel it too? Oh, all right. Well, maybe after we get through intros so very quickly Who are we and why are we so excited about Kata? So I'm Jeff Holland I am a director of product right now with snowflake the data cloud company and Prior to snowflake though I worked at Microsoft for about 10 years and part of my time at Microsoft involved a partnership with red hats When we created and founded Kata is a project. This would have been I don't know three or four years ago at this point You can find me on the socials that Twitter or LinkedIn if you have any questions or just want to connect I'm more than happy to chat with you there that Microsoft I was working on a bunch of the serverless tech like Azure functions as your container apps and so scale was a key Part of that which is part of what inspires to be like, oh, how could we make scale better in kubernetes all up? Yeah, thanks Jeff. Hello everyone again. I'm very happy to be here on stage Jeff. He's great and to talk about Kata So my name is been a grow barric. I'm based in burnachic Republic, which is in central Europe in case you don't know I'm software engineer working on red hat and as Jeff mentioned. We are quite cooperating on Kata for some time So I'm kind of maintainer and also active in a community. I'm part of the TOC board and my main focus Is kinetic functions is a cool project. So you should check it out. Definitely, but now let's talk about yeah Great and it's crazy that you flew halfway around the world and are facing jet lag But you were here plenty of time in advance for the session I flew from Seattle and I ran in here five minutes ago. So credit to you. I guess you did a great job So yeah Yes You can imagine how good of a PM. I am if I can't even show up fight like what if what is a PM? If not somebody who creates slides and speaking of slides will jump right into it So we're gonna talk a little bit about what Kata is We're gonna show a demo fairly early on and then we're gonna show you a little bit of behind the scenes of how Kata works And we've got some really exciting stuff to share of terms of what the community is building moving forward As I mentioned, we'll have questions at the end. So if you can hang on to them there We'll answer questions then so starting with framing Kata I like to use this analogy, which is let's compare two two scaling stories and here's the task Let's say that I have so my my task right now is there's a cube con party happening tonight If you're not invited to one come reach out to me I'll give you an invite. There's like seven of them happening probably more and here's the goal You need to provide enough pizza to feed as many people to show up at a cube con party Now you have two strategies here one is you show up with one pizza to start with and you put it down on the table And then you just look at that pizza and you wait until that pizza box is empty when the pizza box is empty You're like, okay.  You know, yeah, it would have left you would have been like I'm going to the other party. I'm going to the AWS Kubernetes party down the road or whatever when you're going to now Here's strategy number two. This is what a product manager would hopefully do I'm gonna find out how many people are projected to come to this party And then I'm going to make an informed decision based on how many pizzas I think I need based on that so if there's a hundred people I bet okay ten pizzas is maybe enough Maybe I'll go with twelve to be safe And so I'll show up to the party with twelve boxes of pizza And if there's a thousand people I'll show up with a hundred and twenty boxes of pizza now If you were in charge of creating pizza for a party, which strategy you're gonna go with I think everyone's gonna go with strategy number two But the funny thing is when it comes to scaling our applications We so often go with strategy number one We deploy an application and then we just watch the CPU in the memory And we wait for all the CPU in the memory to get eaten up and then we're like, okay Well, I guess we need some more and so we'll give it a little bit more and then we just sit there and watch And it is not an efficient way to do things So I am pleased to share that Kata is the better pizza way to scale your containers because Kata Yeah, thank you. It's a beautiful analogy. It makes me very hungry. I love pizza So Kata makes it so that your Kubernetes cluster is much smarter at Thinking about how to scale things because it will scale based on the events What is causing the consumption in the CPU and memory? So it integrates with over 55 different event sources from information from Prometheus Event sources like RabbitMQ, Kafka, AWS SQS, Azure Event Hubs, GCP Pub Sub, Postgres You can go to kata.sh and see a massive list of scalers and that list grows two or three every single time we do a Kata release So this is a really useful pattern because it makes it so you can scale your workloads based on the events The cause of the consumption and not the reactive way that we've been trained to scale so long before And what I love about Kata is just how seamlessly you can pop it into any architecture in any Kubernetes cluster So let's show you this in action before Zibionek walks through some of the architecture So we're gonna do a quick demo here. This is my hello Kata demo. I wanted to make it as simple as possible We have a RabbitMQ queue. There's a lot of fantastic queuing You could swap this out with Kafka or whatever you want I'm just using RabbitMQ because it's the easiest for me to install on a cluster and I'm gonna deploy a container Which is just consuming messages from that queue fairly simple Now what we're going to do is we're going to add Kata to the mix and Kata is gonna do two things One it's going to go ask RabbitMQ. How many events do you have that need to be processed? How many people are waiting in line to get into this party and then based on that information? Kata is going to scale our application based on those events and it does that scaling Through the horizontal parato scaler the HPA that we all know and love It's not doing its own magical scaling thing behind the scenes We'll talk about that in the architecture. So you'll see how Kata will scale this one thing I want to call out here right before I show the demo The application has no idea that Kata exists just like in Kubernetes It's not aware that it's running in Kubernetes or if it's in a laptop It just wakes up and says start giving me messages. So Kata is able to pop right in there I didn't change my code in any way, but it's able to enrich the scaling logic based on knowing in this case How many messages are on that queue? So let's see it in action This is the deployment manifest that I'm using beautiful beautiful YAML. You can see I just have a very simple Container here. It's complaining because I'm not requesting any cores or memory. That's the squiggly yellow lines here but I'm just deploying a container and What Kata is having me define is this custom object next to it Which is this Kata scaled object and this is where I tell tell Kata About the event source and what I want it to scale So I say I want you to scale this rabbit MQ container And I'm going to scale it based on events coming from rabbit MQ and I mentioned There's like 60 of these that I could choose to scale it on I'm telling it to kind of target about five messages per container That's like saying how many pizzas per people. So I'm saying every container go for about like five messages I tell it the queue to listen to and I can even describe an authentication parameter So that it Kata knows how to securely ask rabbit MQ. How many people are in line? Okay? So this is what I've already deployed in my cluster. So let's see that here So I can now at this point my queue is empty. I'm going to go ahead and say sorry. Let me zoom in here I don't know you can see the last time I ran this which has spoilers. Okay, so right now My container is running one beautiful thing It's scaled all the way to zero this container is actually not consuming any CPU in my cluster Because Kata is smart enough that it's looking at that rabbit MQ thing and it's saying there's no messages here Why waste the CPU cycles? So Kata has helped this scale all the way down to zero now What I'm going to do here is I'm going to add a Quick job, which is going to publish. I can't remember a thousand ten thousand messages Onto this rabbit MQ queue So now let's watch this in real time and you'll notice even before I finished talking Kata now sees. Oh shoot. There's actually a lot of stuff going on here There's a lot of people who need some CPU so very quickly before the first CPU cycle even got hit Kata has already helped me scale up to you can see I now have four Instances of this container up and running and even before I finished that sentence now It's gone to eight and it will continue to scale and scale and scale because I told it Hey, if there's a thousand messages in the queue, I want you to target about five five messages per container So it's now helping get to that state where it's able to handle the workload as I described it So you can see very very quickly. I've been able to horizontally scale my services Now what I want to do quickly here as well To show you what happens if something goes wrong So I have to find one more piece here, which is some fallback logic that says if the connection to rabbit MQ fails What do I want to do does it now scale all the way to zero and my application blows up? Well, I I wrote this fallback logic to say, you know, if something goes wrong just run it for run it for replicas That's a pretty safe spot to be so let's make something go wrong. Let's uninstall rabbit MQ From this cluster that we've been talking to and so you can see here my rabbit MQ just got terminated in as soon as it got terminated Kato realized, oh, I can't I'm trying to ask rabbit MQ. How many messages it has I'm not getting any answer back Who knows why it might have failed in my case it failed because of user error But what you'll see here is I finished talking is that it's going to end up in that fallback mode Hopefully it will well the containers are now unhappy because they also can't talk to rabbit MQ But you can see here if I I'll switch to a view where you don't have to look at all of the errors It's now trying to run with four instances So it's even Kato's help this fall back into a state where it's like, okay, something went wrong I can fall back now. I won't walk through this now But if I just add rabbit MQ back into the mix everything will go back into a healthy state It'll go back to consuming whatever messages might still be there and and going there So hopefully that made sense. I had a simple container I told Kato scale this container based on events from rabbit MQ It very very rapidly got to the right amount of containers I needed to consume all those messages and then I even have some nice features here like fallback to make sure if something goes wrong My whole application isn't just floundering because this doesn't know what to do So I think at this point we might even be at a healthy state. We'll get there soon enough. So that's a quick Hello world demo very very kind of simple to see any container can now point to Kata So with that sitting I can walk us through a little bit of the architecture. Thank you Jeff. That was great awesome demo So I hope that by now you have some understanding how Kata works or what it does actually so we can take a look at Architecture so Kata is built on top of Kubernetes So we are trying to use as much components and concept from Kubernetes So to not so to not do the you know the stuff that Things that already exist. Yeah, so And the main component is scaled object or a scale job This is the main resource very defined the metadata for scaring us in that in the demo So let's say that if we go back to a demo What happened if I create a scaled object in in my cluster? There are two main components of Kata. The first one is Kata operator or controller This is this box and the second main component is Kata metrics adapter or a Kata metric server So once Jeff created the scaled object The Kata operator spotted this resource and based on the metadata definition It creates HPA with the be the proper metadata with the proper scaling, etc And then it it checks the skill object again and see what kind of scalar has been used for 40 skill objects So in this case it was rabid MQ. So it creates a scalar object Which is basically an adapter that talks to the external service and queries for for the metrics So it it creates a scalar talks to the external service and post the metrics and finally Because as Jeff mentioned we rely on HPA for the auto scaling but HPA cannot scale down to zero It is not able to do that. So we need to do that from the from the Kata site. So Kata operator Does the scaling from zero to one? We call this phase an activation phase and you can even specify a specific threshold for this So in in a moment that there is like a the threshold in on the on the queue It will scale up in this case when we are on one replica of our target application Then the second main component kicks in and basically it's a it's a metrics adapter That's registered on Kubernetes endpoint and it feeds the external metrics from the scalar to the horizontal pod auto scalar So there is a horizontal pod auto scalar control in Kubernetes and it asks for metrics And we are providing them through the through this interface again It's a standard Kubernetes stuff. So we are trying to to be transparent in this So I think that that's the that's the main logic quite simple And the one thing just to call out and I know I mentioned this a few times I love about Kata is you can pop in that operator without impacting anything else So you might have already 50 containers running in a cluster You go in and saw the Kata operator at first nothing's going to change and maybe now two of those 50 You're like yeah scale these based on events those two are still going to be scaled by the HPA as if I mentioned But now they're going to be enriched with all this extra data from Kata So this makes it a really nice design to Incrementally adopt as you want without worrying about like oh shoot Do I have to now have like a Kata flavored Kubernetes cluster? It doesn't work like that It's it's very much just doing its thing on the side you pull it in when you need and you ignore it when you don't yeah So there are two main resources to define the scaling so the first one is skilled object Basically with skilled object you can target any deployment state for set or any custom resource that's implements this specific sub resource It's called scale so we can target target it here and Second main part of the skilled object is basically the trigger section. So in this case it is a Kafka trigger section So it says okay. Let's let's scale this deployment based on the messages in this Kafka topic. We can have multiple triggers in this in this trigger section and in this case We are sending all the matrix from from this particular trigger So it could be Kafka with MQ Prometheus all targeting the same deployment And we are sending the metrics over to HPA and HPA does the decision on on the scaling itself So it basically at the moment it selects the highest value from from all the from all the metrics The second component is called scale job This one is is very good for for long-running processes So basically it does not scale an application or deployment But it but it's schedule a Kubernetes job based on based on the events happening in the external system So it's the very same trigger section. So again the the Kafka topic with the threshold and instead of specifying a target we can put plain Kubernetes job definition and it will it will create the Kubernetes jobs based on that this is very important aspect because if you have some long-running application that It process some data from the external system at it takes hours to process the actual stuff if you use the HPA approach The HPA may actually kill your application during the processing because the metrics are already gone But the application needs more time to process the stuff So in this case you should use scale jobs and to spawn spawn the scale jobs base based on that metrics This is just an example because What we are trying to achieve with Keda is is simplicity is you is simplicity from the user perspective So as a user, I don't want to deal with you know configuring all the stuff on Kubernetes I just want to plug it in create scaled object under the scaling So this is example on the left hand side. You can see a scaled object on the right hand side You can see basically the HPA with with some custom metrics So you can you can actually implement this on your own You can target those very same and point and point in Kubernetes But you will do you will need to do all the all the stuff that you don't want to do So we are trying to to make this very simple Yeah, and let's talk about some advanced features. So you have already seen the fallback in the demo. It's cool Also, what is what is nice? This is HPA scaling behavior. This is upstream Kubernetes upstream HPA stuff It's it's very important because sometimes the metrics may go up and down up and down So the replica number may be may be flocking as well So you you would like to you know avoid this situation. So in the scale behavior, you can specify a window Which will be used for selecting the target target replica number Other cool feature is pausing of auto scaling So imagine that you have your deployments your replications is scaling everything is perfect But you would like to do some maintenance and you don't want to remove the skilled object from your cluster What you can do you can just annotate the skilled object with the annotation and pause the auto scaling for for the time for the for the outage or forever We also think that Auto scaling is nice. It's fun if you have it in a cluster But if you have many many many skilled objects in your cluster, it's hard, you know to get Beyond the picture what's happening in the cluster actually so observability is very important for us So at the moment can I expose some prometheus metrics about what is happening? What it's what it does how it does the scaling but we are still trying to improve improve on this area and Yeah, and the last thing I would like to highlight is that As you have mentioned we have like 50 plus different scalers But if if those cameras are not right for you, you can implement your own And you can use it's called external scale interface It's basically a g rpc interface and if you implement this interface you can implement your own scalar with your own logic and just plug into Kedah and Kedah is written in go if you don't like go you can write if dot net Java whatever and just use g rpc to To talk to Kedah to do the scaling for you if you want to know more about the spec this is the link for to the recommendation and Last but not least is the authentication It's important right so because if you if you if you need to talk to some external services And you need to store the credentials somehow and most likely you don't want to store them directly in scale object in the Amazon So you would like to have some reference so there was a reference on the trigger authentication object So it basically can hold references to secrets walls. You can even use what identity and It's namespace base So you can have a one trigger object try to go authentication object in a namespace and reference it in multiple scale objects Or you can use cluster wide to go authentication and this is useful You for example, you are admin on the on the cluster you can set up the cluster to get authentication object in one namespace with all the credentials and the users that will do the actual Scaling that will create the skill objects can just reference to this cluster to go authentication object without even knowing what are the credentials So you are not exposing the data to more more users than necessary Okay, so that's the current state. That's the what what we have with Kedah. It works. It's awesome But what's next? So the first point I would like to highlight is that at the moment We are just feeding the metrics to HPA. So if you recall that was the two main components Kedah operator and Kedah metric server So we are just sending the metrics over to H to HPA for the metric server Every time that HPA asks But this might not be the best case if you have tons of skilled objects in our cluster and Maybe all of them are targeting the same external service. So for example the same from it your server So there could be there could be like a very high load on this on the server So once we are able to cash cash the metric values in the in the metrics adapter We are able to tell Kedah not to ask for metrics every time But you know store them and give give some give some value later The other cool stuff that we can do with the caching is we can do some magic with the actual number So once we have but once we know what are the actual metrics coming in the in some period of time We can do some maybe the some smoothing some some AI ML models, etc Yeah, on the for custom logic with evaluating multiple triggers So in my example my container just had a single trigger listed in that list Which was rabbit MQ you can actually provide multiple of those you could say like rabbit MQ and CPU and memory and This cron task or something else now the challenge with that is when it creates it behind the scenes And it actually goes in registers all that with the Kubernetes autoscaler the HPA It's going to be publishing all those metrics and we leave it up to the HPA To decide when to whether or not to make a scaling decision and usually today I think Zimnick was mentioning it just goes whatever number is the biggest That's the one it's going to prioritize and so moving forward. We also have some asked to say okay Can I have some more customized logic here? Maybe I want to take the average of a few different Sources, maybe I want to prioritize one over the other and so doing more of that logic on the cataside That we can give the HPA just the info that it needs to make the scaling decision on the cloud events I've been mentioned these last two are actually related to the aspect, you know We integrate very cleanly with Prometheus today both from a emitting Prometheus metrics for you to operate but also Scaling based on a Prometheus time series query We also want to integrate with cloud events so that if you Kata itself can emit cloud events so when something happens KTM its cloud events But also there's an issue of understanding. Hey, how could we scale things based on cloud events that might be coming from other systems? Similar story with open telemetry having that same There's an open telemetry scalar being worked on right now So you can make scaling decisions based on telemetry from open telemetry in deeper integration with that And then finally this open interface for predictive auto scaling. Yeah, that's another cool feature Basically because we have we are getting the metrics from the external system So we can we can try to do something with them So we are thinking about Introducing some interface that we can plug some AI of a model for example and based on the incoming metrics We can predict the actual actual state so we can say that we would like to auto scale the application You know every Monday because of the of the prediction at the moment We have one one one one scalar that is doing this stuff But it is like a talking to some external service, but we would like to do it like an open way and Another important thing is environmental impact. I know these days It's very important stuff as we know all the situation is happening around the world So we are actually cooperating with this CNCF environmental sustainability group that's trying to solve issues related to this to this to this problem So we have done a POC actually that Will integrate with a co emission intensity or power consumption or similar data and use the data to Actually modify the cadascaling decision. So in this in this in this specific POC, what we have done is that? based on the carbon impact We can we can cap the actual maximum replica numbers that we will we will auto scale to so basically if If the if the if the if the carbon stuff is is looking very bad So let's not scale to 100 replicas, but just you know to two for example ten Ninety replicas or something like that. So this is the POC that we have done It is not this approach It is like a separate controller But we would like to see in the future something like this directly in the in the scaled object You can check the the POC here There are links and links and recordings and there are also some Some talks that keep going about about this stuff. So you can you can check them in the schedule Yeah, and all the slides that I'm showing here are uploaded to to schedule as well So you can click the links if you want. This is something I really love This is something that has been I I've spent a lot of time in the serverless space And I know a long-time ask has been hey, I love the elastic scale of my serverless Compute I would love to be able to control that scale so that I'm Utilizing energy efficiently Maybe if the data center is under heavy load or there's a lot of carbon emission Delay like don't schedule my jobs right now this notion of being able to have scale rules Not just based on the events themselves, but the environmental impact in the environmental environment that those are running in I Is super important. So all of these things that we've talked about in terms of what's next all of these are great opportunities for contributors Huge thanks to the community. I've been blown away if you go to kda.sh And you just start scrolling about halfway through you'll just hit a wall of logos of just like all of the amazing Companies and people and organizations who've been involved in helping make kda great So for those of you who are here who are a part of that community already They've been contributing opening issues providing feedback huge Thank you from Zibunek myself and the rest of the maintainers who can't be here And for those of you who are interested this is a really great project to go collaborate with because it really is it just Does one thing it's not a full-fledged serverless platform. It's not doing tls termination and of it like that's great There's a space for that go contribute to those as well, but kda. It's like I'm just going to do scaling I'm going to do it really really well I'm going to make sure you show up to the party with the right amount of pizzas and everyone is happy So thanks everyone so much for your help and and with this and I think at that point Yes, before we go to questions Please submit your feedback on the session So if you want to snap the QR code and let us know What you thought hopefully they'll invite us back for more cube cons in the future We can share some of the more exciting features or let us know if there's things you'd like to see done differently Yeah, thank you very much and I do have any questions We'll go right here in the front. I don't see any Mike So just speak up and then I'll repeat it so that everybody can hear. Oh, oh, yeah Or if Zibunek even wants to run around Actually, I have a question. Yeah, my name is Sun and I have a question like what is the interval that you set for the Prometheus server for like scrapping the metric because Usually I use like 15 seconds and is that impact scaling? Sorry, not the questions about like k-native. How does it compare to k-native? Sure. So all Zibunek, you can answer Yes, go for it. So The polling interval that's that's there that's for the activation phase only that's only for the operator So this is for the initial initial scaling. So this for the 0 to 1 then it is up to HPA to ask for for this interval And HPA the default value is finally taken 15 seconds But what we are trying to do we are with the with the cache We would like to also also create like this interval for for the HPA also So we will like send the metrics only in the specific time, but at the moment it is just for the For the initial 0 to 1. Yeah, and you can see like here for my demo I said ask every five seconds to rabbit MQ you can configure this to 15 seconds 30 seconds 60 seconds But to Zibunek's point once it goes to 1 then the HPA will just ask on some period Like what's the latest metric and Kata will go in fetch it and bring it back for the HPA? Yeah, and the other question. Yeah, it was like it was the k-native and Kata. Yeah, that's a good question I quite often get this question It could be a long talk, but I'm trying to do it in a short way So basically I don't see k-native and Kata as a as a like competitors, but it's more like a complementary tool So because in a messaging systems, there could be like two ways how to deliver data It could be pull-based approach or push-based approach So the pull-based approach is basically that the application needs to handle the connection to the external source So let's say we have application that talks to the rabbit MQ So in my application, I need to open the connection and manage all the data delivery to the application This is the pull-based approach. So this is where Kata works On the other hand, the push-based approach is that the application doesn't need to care about like opening the connection And etc. It is just waiting for incoming requests So both approaches as like pros and cons, you know, it depends on the on the use case that you have So for example, if you would like to autoscale your application based on incoming HTTP requests Because HTTP requests by its nature are push-based It's very hard to achieve it with with with with HPA and with Kata with this approach So in this case, I would I would choose k-native But also k-native and Kata, they are like Kata is it's just autoscaling We are trying to do the autoscaling that simple With with Kata, it's more like a serverless platform So you can do more stuff you can do like separate configuration eventing stuff So really depends on the on the use case. It's a complementary tools Excellent I think yeah back here like the third or fourth. I think was the second hand up at least when we ask for questions Thanks. I I have a question about what's the suitable workflow type that is Kata is most appropriate for because I assume those events in the event queue Should be homogeneous, but what if they are not what if they are heterogeneous jobs? And in your example There was like four jobs or four events handled by each pod, but what if it's not that even Yeah, so on this one it is like the the the ideal scenario for kata is where You can have horizontal scale. They're not Like they're not having to Depend on each other. They're kind of independently horizontally scalable and I would even say Especially for scaled objects if processing a single message can happen within some Reasonable amount of time. I don't know what the number you'd put on it like two to three minutes or something Kata is great when you have longer jobs Like let's say you want to transcode a video and that transcoding job might take three hours That's though where you want to use the scaled jobs pattern where you're spinning up one job Per video in this example and spinning it up. So if you do have a scenario that might be a little bit more Uh heterogeneous as you mentioned like there's exceptions here and there I guess the only other one I would mention too and this came up Recently on our slack channel shameless plug to code of the slack channel somebody was like oh Can I scale based on the content of the message? So it's not just that I want to know are there a thousand messages to be processed But I want to know are there a thousand messages and based on the content to your point like Maybe one of those message takes three hours and the other messages only take three seconds Kata today isn't going to know the the intricacies of that gesture. You're you're going to need to put something else in the middle I know k k native has this is basically the use case for k native I would say a k native event thing because you need to know the the specific what's inside the data actually because k data By nature doesn't know about the data. It doesn't care about data. It doesn't handle the data delivery So I would use some different systems like k native eventing or any other eventing solution that requires more complex logic Yeah, so some variance is okay, but if it's like two hours for one message in 30 seconds for the next Kata's gonna have a hard time figuring out the right stuff today today Okay, I think we have time for one maybe two more questions.  Ah, yes You don't scale The scaler needs no scale. Yeah Yeah, this is this is issue because we are relying on kubernetes API and unfortunately there could be only one and one like let's say Thing that connects to the to this endpoint that providing it's providing the the data You know, so there could be one only one metric server per cluster So we can have multiple replicas of the very same very same metric server, but you cannot plug any other tool So you can you can scale up the number of metric servers, but Kubernetes by default always ask the one, you know, so it's We are trying to we are trying to do the scale like the scale internally. So basically we are spawning more processes, etc But I don't see any big reason for for the for the like actual scaling of kata Yeah, the primary bottleneck though is that custom metrics adapter. You can only have one And so kata it's kata even if we spent multiple processes. That's still uh Yeah, this is a usual ask that I would like to have multiple kata installations in my cluster That's not possible because of this limitation that you can only one metric server So even if I have like multiple installations, they will share the very same metric server We are trying to solve this those upstream so so to have some kind of Proxy in in between like between the endpoint, but this still still stuff that we need to figure out how to do that So if anyone here has context with the custom metrics adapter team Um, yes, I know we've talked with them in the past but so do that one more it has got to be a short one Before we get kicked out Yeah, is there a time you've switched to using gcp's cloud functions or aws lambdas Oh, so it's this is just an opinion piece at this point because neither of these necessarily would relate directly to kata Gcp cloud functions or aws lambdas, you know what? I used to be the the product lead for azure functions So I would have said neither azure functions now i'm in a multi cloud snowflake world and I say they're all beautiful They're great. I would say I would say choose the function provider where most of your other stuff is So if you're already using gcp for a bunch of other stuff Go use the gcp function thing if you're using aws go use the aws thing if you're not sure Try to get it to work on snowflake. That's all I'll say We don't have some cloud functions, but just do it anyway. Thank you. Thanks so much everyone. We'll be around They'll probably kick us out. So if you see zibionek or myself around let us know, but thank you again so much for coming