Five, four, three, two, one, and we are live. Welcome, everybody, back to the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center here at the Graduate Center CUNY in New York, in Manhattan, midtown. And it's another day on planet Earth. It's the day after July 4th. And what a strange July 4th it was. People stayed at home, were advised to stay at home. People had to wear masks. Most fireworks, which normally is there to celebrate the independence from the UK, from England, were not allowed so people couldn't gather. Of course, the discussions on Independence Day also went on as Independence Day for everyone or is it for most of the majority of the white people who are celebrating it, but they really shared all the independence with everybody. As you all know, the significance event that have become the Black Lives Matter movement, most probably in numbers, the largest, most significant, and why this civil rights movement has ever happened in the history of the United States. We just experience it and we all hope and think that this will be part of change. We see so many flags and posters out everywhere and we encourage everybody also to do that, but still the situation is complicated. New York had over 400,000 infections up till now, just New York City alone with 25,000 people who died, 25,000 almost a small town. Numbers are up 85% in the US and 130,000 infections since July 1st only. So it is really hard, 250,000 new cases in July and most New Yorkers now excuse the buses, they don't even take the subways anymore. Meanwhile, our president does not seem to understand that science is real, that this is a critical moment we are in and he does not wear a mask. He one some point even suggested that people just should inject disinfectant in their own plan. He put out a support right now that he liked the Confederate flag that they're racing cars even so most states now have said this is a symbol of slavery. It's a symbol of the past. It's a symbol of everything that was wrong when we are a shock. So we all hope this will be a summer where no bad things will happen. Violence is up. Alcohol consumption is up. People are at home in Chicago alone since June 1st, eight young kids under the age of 10 died by drive-by shooting. 340 people killed in Chicago all year till July. Signed of strange numbers and of course COVID high unemployment, no trust in the government, no trust in the workplace and domestic problems are fueling that situation and killings that happened like this George Ford other match to really inflate all of it and we hope it will be good. People left New York City there most ever had a country houses they are poor people are in front of soup kitchens here but life has started again. Businesses have opened some of the outside restaurants have opened and you'll see where the artists are and will be Broadway is close till the end of the year most probably till spring all the companies the small often off are working everybody is out of the job musicians actors lighting designers technicians and we don't really know what will happen the United Kingdom UK just put $2 billion towards the arts theaters galleries museums and places for performances. So I wonder what the US government will do, especially a city like New York City. And Mayor Bloomberg the former one did understand that right that this is now has become a city of lifestyle where people go because of the cultural offerings. Where are the offerings that are so desperately needed to support what makes the city of the city what makes life life so. But all around the world and we have talked to so many people it's now week 15 close to 100 artists from all the continents and all the places experiencing this serious moment of Corona where we ask existential questions and today we go back to Africa we had many talks already from Cameroon, from Burkina Faso South Africa and other places and today we go to the great country of Kenya. And we are here and we have three representatives from a Kenyan theater scene, which also looks to the United States, most countries actually in the world don't look as much anymore as they should be but they are strong connections. And it comes to music dance ideas of musical and. And so we have with us here Karishma Pagani who's a director producer a drama tour and a scholar. She studied at NYU and is a graduate of the sketch of the tish arts and she has been expanding the arts in East Africa. And she's a fellow at the Georgetown lab at the moment. Also with us and more is a Kenyan feminist writer any wave to us and and she fills the world with stories for and from African women to feel them to see them to hear them and to get a closer look at it. She's also a novelist and the editor of Shalala Africa. And with us also is the great sativa number yeah, she's an award winning Kenyan poet playwright and performer. And she's known for her unique dramatized poetry performances combining poetry and traditional Kenyan music she was part of the Sundance leader lab the East Africa the great Sundance leader that we also had a couple of sessions. And with the West African East African Sundance lab that Philip and everyone it was a great, great, great work and sit down also works with the United Nations, and holds a degree in botany and zoology and environmental studies and also played tennis and hockey in her use. Incredible, incredible artists. We have today, and I apologize for talking so much but you know it's a great place on earth Kenya we have to know what is going on globally. So, let's maybe start with sit down where are you. What time is it. Okay, so I'm in Nairobi. I'm in Nairobi, Kenya. And it's after seven o'clock. It's in the, it's evening it's after seven o'clock in the evening. Yeah, what's your neighborhood where are you at. I live in a place. Some people may know it. It's, it's sort of in between Lavington and kill a leisure and and Kilimani and Valley arcade so there's so it's a very central place. It's somewhere I've moved recently I've never been so central I'm usually, you know, at least half an hour 45 minutes away from everything. So it's so shocking to just be, you know, six minutes. It's extraordinary for me to be living here. And and where are you right now. Oh, I am in Nakuru County in Joro. So I'm a rural. Yeah, I'm fast. So far today. I am. Yeah. So I'm in my more rural area. I came here a few months ago, because my mom stays up country and I wanted to be with her once things started, just because you know she's in the vulnerable population was like in case anything she'd be here. And you know, the country kept locking down and I haven't had a chance to go back. Yeah, Nairobi was a lockdown you couldn't travel in and out of that county. So I'm in a completely different country more rural. It's been great to not be just being a family. It's birthing season for all the goats. So there's lots of baby goats running around it is adorable. So it's really nice. How far is it? But lovely. How far away for five hour drive depending on traffic. Yeah, that is that is fun. And Karishma, where are you? I'm calling from Mombasa, Kenya, which is so we're really, really representing all of Kenya on this call today. I live in the old part of Mombasa in Ganjani, right near the tasks, which is a very big monument tourist attraction site here. But it's also the main road and takes you to sort of central business district in the country in the city. So that's where I'm calling in from. That's amazing. And if I understand right, you were one of the New Yorkers who left. Tell us a little bit. Yeah, yeah. It was it was quite a journey. Actually, you know, I am working as an apprentice in the education department at the roundabout data company for this last few months.   And I was listening to the press statement that our cabinet secretary and Mutai Kaguya gave of Kenya's borders being shut down by the Wednesday of that week. So I called the airline and I found that the next flight out was the last flight out was Monday morning. So I had six hours. I packed up my life for five years and six hours and carried the essentials and got to Nairobi. I booked a direct flight to Mombasa, but I got to Nairobi and they didn't let me travel further. So had to be quarantined there for 14 days. And so it had been it has been a bit of a grueling traumatizing experience, but I'm so grateful to be back home and back in the motherland with with my family, my grandparents, my parents, so, and my artistic community.  Yeah, yeah, I had to had to let go of a lot of things really just packed the essentials, which basically comprised of my clothes and my books tells you a lot about me as a person but yeah, my clothes and my books. It's almost like it's like wartime and see how I where were you when it when it all started tell us a little bit. How was the situation in Kenya. So I, I was in Nairobi when the when everything changed when the lockdown started, and it was really extraordinary you know you could see it was like a storm you could see it coming. And my children school closed. So I have a child in boarding school so he came, and then my daughter is in a day school so so that school closed, and you know now we were at home.  And so I went and I bought tin food and I bought dried, you know, beans and maze, you know dried food. You know, and then we didn't it turned out to be okay and it's been a very surreal situation. Every, you know, I think the first lockdown was 21 days, and then it became 30 days and then an additional 30 days and we had then we had curfew.  So people have to find ways of eating and you know feeding themselves. So there is a sense of we're just all surviving you know I feel like I'm part of the whole world. And my job right now is to survive. That's it. When did it start in Kenya? When did you have to stay in your apartment? It was March 13th. I think it was March 13th, right? When the lockdown started in Kenya. Yeah, I think it was March 13th. It's been 110 days since they announced it, 117 days because I've been tweeting and keeping track and then they did the lockdown about two weeks after that. So I think you're right, it must have been around the 13th of March. And where were you when it started before you went to see your family? I was in Nairobi as well. I think my experience was a little different in that I have family who are in a different country and I was about to have a brand new, well now I have a brand new nephew and the hope was to go visit them. And so our family has been tracking corona since maybe January because once we saw before it arrived in Kenya, the feeling was I need to be a-quarantined safely. When can I travel? If I can travel, can I go and visit a heavily pregnant woman and God forbid I catch it in the flights. So this is before a lot of international lockdowns and quarantine procedures were put in place. I'd already kind of isolated myself from the space on the hopes that if I could get a ticket and get enough money and it seemed safe I would be able to go to be with my nephew when he was born and support my sister-in-law and my brother. But then in about two in the span of a week everything just changed. So the international borders were locked and then a few days later Kenya's cases are starting to spike up and then a couple of days later it looks like the city is going to be locked down. And so there was a lot of kind of very panicked decision making in that moment. And like Karishma said, those kind of moments that force you to really consider what's actually the most important thing to me and how can I do it.  And the only reason I was able to make that choice was I had already been locked away in my house for about two and a half weeks and I was calling everybody I knew medical doctors and journalists just to confirm. Does this make sense? Can I go? Am I going to kill her? And you're constantly making, I think that's what's been most stressful about this situation for everyone. And mine was an incredibly privileged choice that I had to make, but I think for every single person you're constantly making this stress based life or death decision for going out to buy bread, you know, and that's been exhausting. That I can't lie has really, really been draining and I'd say that for everyone. What are the numbers in Kenya? How are the statistics? I think, okay, right now we have 8,000 infections, 2,287 recovered under 161 deaths. Those are the official figures today. It seems at least to our ears so low if you think that only in July 130,000 cases in the last four or five days in the US. Right. New York City. So is your government doing something right? Is everybody listening? How come the numbers are so low? People will say something as well. This is something I think has been, everybody's, everybody, the West is I think surprised about Africa's numbers. And, you know, there are all sorts of reasons have been given for it. In some countries, you know, like say, for example, Uganda, Uganda's used to have, you know, has had Ebola. And I know that and I watched them react and shut it down really quickly, like they're really good at having epidemics, right? So they've got a lot of practice with it. And so they don't mess around, right? You know, Nigeria is another country. If you read about what they did again with Ebola, they shut it down and really move quickly and very, you know, really well. And, you know, the jury's out, maybe early days, but right now this is the situation, you know, for whatever reason, this is the situation. But maybe Anne and Karishma have got something to add.  You know, one of them is that we have a very young population across the board. And this seems to be something that is affecting the, you know, more vulnerable, older population. Not that young people cannot be affected. But, you know, that's definitely one of the factors. But I think for us, I think in Kenya people, the government really did a good job, in my opinion, of shutting things down early. And I think our president and the entire government was faced with this dual struggle of like, we have a lot of debt and we have a lot of loans. How do we keep the economy alive and then also keep people safe. So I think both those considerations from my analysis and perspective were taken, you know, into consideration when they made their decision to shut things down early. And I'm actually a bit nervous about what's going to happen after today because there was a new press statement with our president announcing that there's no longer a cessation of movement between counties meaning we can go from Basat in Nairobi and that that's now open. So, yeah, today actually as of 12pm, I believe. 4am tomorrow. Ah, sorry. Thank you. Yeah, 4am tomorrow. Yeah. So it's, you know, wonder if that's going to mean that the second wave is really, really going to hit us harder than we thought. But I think it's just a matter of us waiting and watching now. How does it all feel? You talk about Ebola, you know, but malaria, something you live with and of uncertainty and now something happens in Europe and North America and the world comes to a stop. What are your feelings about this? I mean, I think it's almost impossible to look at COVID. Let me be more specific. I think the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how deeply interconnected all these power systems are. And what that means is what Titao said of the kind of racist perspective that was looking at Africa, Africa wondering why we weren't dying as quickly as we should. There was simultaneously in built systems where something that from my perspective as a Kenyan looking at American news I'm always surprised by is people resisting the idea of like washing your hands regularly and wearing masks as a public good. I don't think that needed as much uptake here. The idea of doing basic work for the public good wasn't even outside of having gone through pandemics and viruses. It's just not, that wasn't a thing that needed to be educated into people. And simultaneously, there's a lack of real information because we don't even have enough testing kits. I'm not sure if those numbers are 100% accurate simply because you're not been testing as frequently as we should. And simultaneously, there's been a lot of police brutality that was happening because of the curfews that were quite possibly have made a positive impact, but have led to a lot of violent deaths. More people I believe last month died from the police than from COVID. So I don't think it's possible to look at it from because I have I understand X, therefore I understand why I think what COVID has revealed is because of ABCD all the way through to X therefore I can begin to process why. And I think that's what people here are grappling with and perhaps uniquely ready to face because it's never been simple and I don't think anyone expected it to be simple. And I just I just want to add a little bit on what Mora has said. One of the things that's really was has really surprised me is the American response.  Who just got fed up just like I can't be bothered.  Okay, so you guys are in trouble.  It hasn't happened. So all this time and I'm calling my friends and asking how your kids doing how's your family doing. And, and I think washing hands is proving to be something that is really an effective thing and then, and then they're not hanging out with their friends. You know where they get all these diseases that they pass pass on calls and so throats to each other. And so that's I'm not kidding you it's so shocking it hasn't happened. Right. You know so I think we need to really revisit. You know some of the simple things that we've been doing that actually protect us. Yeah, you know, I mean, I think it's so yeah you're so right you're it's so interesting to see the interconnectedness and like how all of these, how, how this one thing that we're changing our lives or paying more attention to is affecting all of these are the health conditions and all of these other things that are usual for us to fall sick with you know. But I just want to add I think, you know from an economic perspective, being moving from a very stable market in the US to an emerging market in the Kenyan and the African perspective at large. I really think this is our moment I think this will be our moment to bounce back as an emerging emerging economy and arguably the post COVID recovery will be less, less brutal on us because there's this sense of like we're used to the sense of being used to the the emerging nature of our economy versus in the States which is very stable and all of a sudden you know the main you know minting more money money is being is being printed and so you know that will really affect the exchange rates and stuff so I think we're we're in for a very interesting economic time post COVID where as an emerging market is going to be a very, I think it'll be a moment to you know these are incredible times the Kenyan government is doing better than the United States government and is right now if you wear a mask you are against Trump you don't wear a mask you are for Trump in Washington so this is talking disrespectful to science it's against common sense and the basic idea is to protect people to help people to make our lives better that there's less suffering in the world and America will have to surface all and we all hope that the upcoming election will change things you guys all work in theater so tell us a little bit about how is the situation in Kenya in theater is it stopped is it open the stuff outside and what what kind of theater do you do. Okay, I'll begin. Okay, I'll begin. So, I used to work in in development. And working with the United Nations World Bank, etc. And the 13 years ago actually I embarked on. I got the courage to do the thing I really wanted to do which is to become a writer. I became a poet, and then that that was a one step away from becoming a play right and so I, you know, I became a writer, you know, started writing plays, etc. And it was, it was also it was an interesting time because it was a few years after the end of our dictatorship. So, I, when I was the age of and and charisma, I was living in a dictatorship. And the impact of that dictatorship was was on on so much and on your mind because you knew the cost of putting one foot wrong, saying the wrong thing could cost you your life. And so it had a it had you self you therefore self censored a lot. And I wasn't one of those extremely brave people, you know, so I self censored and then soon, you know, shortly after the dictatorship ended, all of a sudden there was this flowering and this this this thing that I wanted to do and I decided to do it.  So that's been really exciting and it's, it's been growing, you know, and you can see and and charisma, the younger ones, you know, so. Yeah, you are the young ones. So, you know, and you know I just I created whatever it was I wanted to create wrote what I wanted to write which was amazing a lot of times the kind of work that I do is very political. And, you know, people would say but won't you get arrested.  So there's been the growth there's been a growing and then and then also the infrastructure the frame that the the other things that you need as a theater maker.  And this partnership is phenomenal because we're going to, you know, we're going to produce 12 musicals like this. Real impact if anybody about what impact does art have what impact of university. One can take a look at this. Tell us about your poetry readings. Where do you do them. What audience comes and so we can imagine how does it look like. What I do is I write poetry, you know, on any topic that I feel like. And then what I discovered when I when I first started in 2008 is I realized that I discovered that I write for performance. So then, you know, as these things happen one accident led to another, and I put, we put them together me and a group of other people put them together.  And then I, and then I, I always had a dream apparently to use traditional Kenyan music and musical instruments and musicians. So we put them all these things together and hired a theater and tried something and got the most amazing response. And by the second show, we were, I had taken it to our had been invited to take you to the hey festival. So in the next year 2009 where the hey festival and performed in in the UK. And the first performance is called cut of my tongue. And, and it's really about, you know, the things that make the things that make us the challenges that we have as Kenyans. You know, ethnicity, our we've got a we've got a deep love of land and property.  Yeah, maybe and tell us a little bit about since us. You're the next generation. What are you, what are you doing? Yeah, so it's, it's just interesting. So when you're talking about cut of my tongue it is flashback to like the first time I saw you perform. I keep people, when you find the time, and when you can afford her because she should be charging like $500 a ticket. You need to see a sit-out show. It's insane. I have never seen a performer who can hold silence in the way that sit-out does. I learned that very specifically how to use silence to hold an audience until you're ready to let them breathe again. And I can't deal with you. Anyway, I just needed to say that because you made me flashback into that space. For myself, it's, I'd say my first, my first darling love is writing, like, and like many, many artists in Kenya. It's very difficult. And whether it's because it's a luxury to be a specialist or because we just African art forms have always been interdisciplinary. It's very difficult to just do the one thing and to say I'm a playwright or I'm a poet or this. I'd say more than anything. It's just kind of storytelling and the root art for me I'd say for that is writing. So my first kind of performance started as a spoken word show.  From that, just kind of, I kind of moved in different writing spaces. And I'd always, I love, I love performing and I love the stage, but it always feels like a second, like a mistress. It's the, it's a thing that after a year, I'm like, oh my God, I have to, I've missed the stage, I need to go back. And it kind of always pulls me back and even when I step away for a while. So the most recent, I'd say is years ago, a couple of years ago, me, Lea Casam and Laurie Kumbo wrote and co-produced a show called Brazen, which was basically the telling of the stories of six incredible Kenyan women from Kenyan's history. It was co-produced by another group, culturally from birds, and we put to stage this, I don't know, sit down, maybe I'll describe you better than me, but just a mixed media of dance and performance and fictional narrative storytelling combined with this arc, just kind of on stage celebrating Kenyan women. And the three of us since then from the company, the Lamb Sisterhood, and the entire purpose of which, thankfully to our founder purpose, is that in whatever medium or whatever format, including theater, which is all our loves, to just create stories that make people like us, African women like us feel really seen, heard and really love it, to tell things that, to create content and stories for them and about them. And so even right now, we're kind of figuring out, okay, we have a script sitting about periods. I worked in menstrual health for many years. I'm very obsessed with menstruation. And we have a script sitting that's called periods period that were just about to produce and we pulled back on it because we had so many other things that tried to forgot you tried to make a living. And now the COVID has happened, we're thinking, oh, what would happen if we translate it to a Zoom medium. And it actually fits really well. And I know Alaya is working with Sita on a production that's going to be staged online. So I think I was kind of a ramble. I'd say my theater practice is just rooted in the why of the story and more the what of it. And I'd say that probably applies to most of the practitioners here, I know, even the work we're doing with MTI, it's telling the story of Field Marshall Mudoni Wakilema, one of the Field Marshalls, a.k.a. top two people in the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army who's still alive, who deserves to be honored, and who has obviously given us permission to tell her story. And so we're so excited to work with Wanja Wahora, a brilliant musician, to find a way to honor this woman. So I think all my theater making is going to be rooted in finding ways to honor African women. I don't think there's enough of that in the world. Beautiful. Yeah, I started off on the stage, you know, trained in classical Indian dance and ballet. So we started dancing when I was two and that's what my first sort of entry point into performance was that I realized, you know, as I was growing up that it really became the space where I could just be me without the judgment of society and expectations and I could just be who I was and I was loved and accepted in whatever way. So that went on for a while. And then I went to school at NYU and realized that actually I'm more interested in the mechanics of how work is made and the behind the scenes stuff. And I always went abroad with the intention and the desire to come back. I knew that I was not going to create a career there. I knew I was going there so I could come back, you know, to give back to the root and develop my practice here. So more and more now my practice has really moved into the producerial dramaturgical directorial aspects of creating new work, specifically on the African continent for an African audience and then a global markets as well. So, you know, I know Sitawa and I have the pleasure and honor of knowing them through the Nairobi musical theater initiative, which, as Sitawa mentioned, was co-founded by Shiba First, Eric Wainaina and Roberta Levito. And it's sort of an incubation space. Yeah, the great. Yes, the great, the great, a big mentor and a very large influence in my life personally as well. So it's an incubation space that supports the development of new musical work by and for African audiences. So increasingly, you know, I've been spending my time on the producing side of things, really thinking along with our producing team about what it means to create work during this time. And I think it's a very interesting space to be in because we're a development initiative at this moment. So we're thinking a lot about how do we support the development and creation of work because at the moment it's not necessarily based on production. In some ways it makes our work easier but also more challenging because we have to think about the logistical implications of being on Zoom and trying to write and develop new work when we're not in the same physical space and energy. So that's that's been a lot of what we've been doing at the musical theater initiative. Personally, I've just been really interested in writing and researching more into what African dramaturgy is what it was what it looks like and how it's evolved over the years. And, you know, as Mora and Sitawa have said, to call oneself just a specific thing an actor or a poet or a storyteller is so it doesn't encompass of the spirit of African performance in the same way. I like to say that in other parts of the world it may be that performance is a way of presenting for us it's a way of life. And so I've really been looking into an interested and fascinated by how it has manifested in in our lives in the past in our ancestry in our political landscape and what that looks and how that will shape our our performative future. How are you as a person or tell us if you can. How was it personal for you what are you thinking about in these 110 days 115 days. What's what do you feel is essential what did you learn what surprise you tell us a little bit about how you experience this moment. It's been it's been such an interesting time. I, I've got to two personalities I'm an extra I'm an introverted extrovert extroverted introvert. So, I love to be by myself. I'd love to be sitting writing, but I also love to be out there I just get a lot of energy out of interacting with people. So, so I switched on my introvert hat and I'm actually I've actually been really enjoying, you know, this this downtime. And then there was a moment, you know, probably like a week or two into into the first lockdown and and something lifted I just I just realized, oh my goodness, I've been competing with the whole world. I don't know where what I've been competing so well, you know, you didn't know it but I was competing with you and it was really like a release like everybody's nobody's doing anything we're not going anywhere so it's okay. So it was a very it was it was like relaxed breathe. And it then it's then given me time to think about myself and to interact with my children and and and to do some of the things that I that that I've been too busy to do so I've been reading a lot. You know, I've read, I've read, you know, lots of books because I've got a whole pile of books that I'm one of those people who buys books and you know if I go to a bookshop I'm buying them and say I'm going to read this I'm going to read that. And then of course, and then of course again I've been watching there's so much to watch.  It's also been it's also been an amazing time to watch the world. So I've been watching the world. And you know we're so lucky that that we have the ability to watch each other. You know, watching the flowering the growing of the black, black lives matter movement, and then also watching what's going on in Kenya like Moraz said about the the violence the police violence which is so similar. You know, so the things that the happening to African Americans in America, you know, and then the things that will happen here to, and in our case if you're poor you're just in trouble, you know if you're caught on the wrong side of the law. You know, and and but then but then also I feel watching a global consciousness, a raising of global consciousness. So, you know, as a, as an African as a black person, of course, we I gain a lot from from what goes on in America.  I didn't have to leave Kenya to experience racism I started experiencing racism you know you meant we mentioned I played tennis. When I started playing tennis it was soon after independence it was it was a white sport, you know the white colonial sport. And so we were the generation that was was desegregating. We were going to schools and we were, we were clunked into this space without the language.  And, and, you know, we'd go back home and our parents wouldn't understand what what what what was happening because they were giving us the best they were sending us to the best schools which are white schools. It's been such an interesting. It's been so I've written I've actually written a lot and I'm really thrilled that I'm able to do that. You were able to write a lot. Yes, I'm able to write I'm writing. I'm writing a lot. I'm, I have a show on on Thursday. I'm going to talk a little bit about the, you know, one of the things you'll notice about about the theater scene in Kenya is we do a lot of collaboration, particularly the women have realized right so. And I am a layer charisma, we, you know, there's there's a lot of collaboration. So they wrote a play called brazen in 2017, and I was, I was given the starring part you know I you know I was very thrilled. So there's a lot of a lot of collaboration yeah. And the performance will be on zoom or on. Yes, it's going to be it's a zoom, it's a zoom performance. You're going to be at home. Yes, it's called the narratives are being crafted now. And again it it it it celebrates African women heroes basically but also references this moment references what's going on in the world in this in this time as well. So you will be my little excitement. So you will be in your living room, in your living room with papers in your hand or on the table and you will, and the camera will be on you. So we're going to it's going to be very much like this. So, we're going to do, you know, some of some of the things yes we will have we do have some props I don't want to say the props because they kind of fun. We're going to have some props we're also going to ask the audience to participate in going to give the audience instructions to do so that they create the atmosphere in their home, wherever they are. I'm here, I'm here in my living room and my my and a layer is about 1010 1015 kilometers away from me in Nairobi. So, so we do it through zoom but you know globally as well. Yeah. It's a nice idea. So you go to instruct it so it's instruction based art people have to participate in putting something on it. I haven't heard that that's good. So both of you others what are you how are you experience this moment how deep did this go. How, how what. Yeah, yeah, I say that again for an encouragement like what you said with how are they experiencing and encouragement how are you experiencing the moment how deep did this confinement or the lockdown go. I mean my okay my my children are having a very hard time because I have teenagers, but otherwise they're fine. But okay, so it was it was more. Yeah. So, it's, yeah, I, it's not been easy I can't lie for me. And it mostly because I think the first kind of month after it happened was, there's a lot of people's even outside of covert happening my personal life health. It was, it was one of those, you're like is, I don't know is mercury having Lucas it again like what's going on like, is it.  That one was in retrograde, whatever. I'm making those things. But anyway, like it was every single facet of my life was having its own upheaval. And so it was very, it kind of drew a lot I wasn't even able to read I was playing video games just in something I do that often civilization five like kind of brought me back just playing ruling world and creating settling and creating civilizations was somehow the measure of control that I needed to kind of get back out of that space. And then I think about a month after that. In terms, I mean, I'm very, very, very introverted, like by any metric, I would, I go on my friends know they see me out of the house maybe four times a year. It was just the deal. So, so that part of it wasn't a big stretch for me as like I get to stay in the house. Again, like I always do. Cool. But it was, it was more how everything else was up was up here shifted. It was figuring out economically like where are we going to make an income we spent a whole beginning of the year with the company making a fantastically gorgeous business plan and strategy. And then you can't leave the house. We had planned a beautiful theater theater show mecca to lily and other stars telling the story of mecca to lily of men's track from Kili fee to kiss my over 1000 kilometers at over 70 years old, set inside a planet area. And it was going to have the stars of her night of the night that she was walking at that time was brilliant. And then obviously there's a lockdown and you can't be in groups and theater spaces are closed, you know. So it was such an upheaval of everything that it took a while for me to recalibrate. It took a while for me to find energy again. And I think what's happening now is there's been a kind of shift even meant I'm trying to shift mentally even for myself. From being very kind of big output driven in Kenya, especially I'd say because the economics of creating a theater show aren't great. It's not like there's a lot of money and support. So there's a way we've learned to produce pretty quickly, pretty effectively and put it out in order to get money back in, because you can't sustain it just out of pocket. But that doesn't work anymore, not in this context. So learning how to shift into the new context, learning how to become driven a little bit more by process and output, and kind of falling back in love with the craft of it, falling back in love with writing and reading texts right now I'm reading Octavia Butler because she's a goddess and falling back in love with the words and how things are framed and we do a thing with the lamb sisterhood. You can subscribe called lamb letters and once a month we just send a letter out sharing the things that are going through our minds, creatively, and it's just a free writing exercise. Yeah, you can subscribe. Go to www.lambsisterhood.com, click the bell and subscribe. And then you get a letter. You get a letter once a month and it's a free writing creative exercise and we just share what we are feeling in that moment. And that's helped me kind of fall back in love with you just write a thing and whatever comes out is what comes out and it goes out into the world. And you're not concerned about will it make money in that moment, will it win an award because an award might get you the prestige that you need, will it get me the room and so on. So it's just about creation and putting work out and that's been such a delight. So falling back in love with process, I think has been my challenge for this period. I'm not sure I'm in love yet. I think we are at best texting, but as a fellow subscriber, enthusiast and biggest fan of both Moraz and Sitawa's work, those newsletters, just the lamb letters. Oh my God, I read the one last that was sent last and it was all the feelings all in one moment and I had not felt that way in a very long time. And I was part of the tech rehearsal. I had the honor to be a part of the tech rehearsal for the piece that Sitawa and Aleya were working on a few days ago. And it's not just instructive, like bringing people together and it's something else. It's just something else. It's just, oh, everything, everything. Again, all in one moment. Yeah. And I do want to say, sorry, I just want to say thank you to you, Kirishman, MTI for this. I think the best, the single greatest thing about the Nairobi and Kenyan theater scene is that you get to work with people you stand for. I have been a fan of Sitawa, like a fan. Like, oh my God, I can't believe she's here. I can't even breathe. And the musicians, you're like, oh my God, that's Eri Koinaina and he's in the same room and he's listening to me. I got to sing with Eri Koinaina. Me, who has no notes, who does not know what a key is. And yet I was singing with Eri Koinaina.  I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just wanted to say that the credit to you, Kirishma, because the work you do with MTI. No, that's, that's so real, honestly. I mean, it's Mugambi, another colleague and one of the one of the participants of the musical theater initiative the other day said to me, Kirishma, you slid into our DMs, you slid into the musical theater initiative DMs, like one minute you're an observer and the other minute, what just happened. I have to, I have to agree with you, I think the, the level of community and the level of just, you know, I can pick up the phone and call anybody in the scene because I will get that response is just so real. I've never felt it in the same way and it's, it's so humbling to be in the same space and there's always so much to learn from everyone around you and I really miss that I really do. And that's what I'd like to say is in Nairobi with with everybody there at the moment. Because that is to me the most valuable part of our engagements that we are building relationships that will last beyond whatever projects we're working on in this moment. And that really has been my personal focus in this moment just the first part of this lockdown was very traumatizing and I didn't come to terms with that for myself because I tend to usually just bury myself in the work and know that it would be fine because the work is always going to be there for me. So I really, I found a lot of solace and a lot of sense of community after coming back and being able to engage on a much more personal level with everybody that I work with. And then most importantly my family. And it's just been so lovely to be with my grandparents and my parents after five years of, you know, sporadic visits, because it's reminded me of where I started from where I came from and what not to forget. And, you know, I, the other day my mom brought home passports this is just a moment that I will keep in my heart. Passports that belong to my great grandfather, when he, and they were the British Indian East African community passports that were given for travelers, you know, and settlers from from India to East Africa and of course during post colon, you know post post independence you could claim British citizenship if you wanted to. But that to me was just. That's why I'm here. That's why I do the work I do. That's why I think about and reflect and write and research into what it means to be here in this moment and in the now and that moment for me was why I'm an artist. So, that's what I've been spending a lot of my time doing just reflecting thinking, building relationships and and trying to be a better person. Yeah, why, since you are rethinking it again the attention, why do you guys do theater what is it for you. Well, I do, I do theater, because I have to, because I mean for me it's an incredible honor. I started this journey of going into into this, this, this phase of my life. In my 40s I had always wanted to be a writer, and when I was about 10 years old I wrote a story and shared it with the teacher. My father thought it was beautiful he was like this is fantastic so I took it to school and I shared it with the teachers and the other kids in my, my, my class, and they said you couldn't have written it. And I thought, and I quit. I thought, well nobody's ever going to believe me so why, why bother. And, and so it was always in the back of my mind, I'm, but I am one of those people who loves to do very many things so when. So, being an environmentalist is also something I really wanted to do. You know, so, and I did it I worked as an environmentalist with the United Nations for for several years. But then to do this and when I, when I got when I got back when I got on stage. When and when I get on stage it's like going back home it's it's it's just a phenomenal feeling. And, and, and also to create for others. And to create so that you know you can see that the you there's a direct interaction with the audience, because when somebody's reading your something you've written you know they're reading it you don't know what happened they liked it how they responded, unless they come up and tell you but when you're, when you're watching. When I'm on stage I'm also watching I'm also interacting with the audience and I'm watching them, and I'm like, my goodness it's direct it's visceral, it's immediate. And I just, I just, I just love that. Yeah. So I had to move because real life is like one socket in the room and my computer. But why data. So like I said before I think I double a lot in different mediums and I'm really interested in different media and I though hopefully the better I'm guessing I know if it's better maybe it's just older. The older I'm getting in the craft. I, I am beginning to get a deeper instinct as to what it's going to sound. I always feel like ideas come from outside. And there's a universe that's just filled with ideas and one decides that you're the one to do it. And you don't have a choice. And so you just have to make it happen. And I'm becoming better discerning when an idea is for what medium. And when I was trying to cross understand that for myself I realized the thing about theater that's so exciting to me is I don't think there's any medium where the audience comes in with such a suspension of disbelief. Like by definition, you are sitting there looking at some wood blocks and they're like this is ancient blah blah blah and this is a mountain and it's a castle. It is really not clearly to everybody's eyes. Yet you're there and the audience is there with you and that's total by the nature of the form that completes a sense of disbelief means you have a range. I don't think even a novel or a film or a TV show can do because the audience gives you a really specific permission to create anything you want in their own mind. And that's kind of, it's kind of nuts.  It's there's something about the space that an audience has for story that theater has that I don't think can be replicated in any other medium, which is why some stories must begin on the stage, because maybe, maybe in the content maybe in the form maybe in the idea behind or the meaning. The thing that it needs the most is for the audience to already believe before you even began and theater gives you that. Which is why some of the most revolutionary work can happen on stage. It's my brazen about six revolutionary women had to begin on a stage it wouldn't have been believed as easily on film, or read as well as a textbook or even as a novel. It had to be on stage it had to be with 300 people sitting there being like I believe you tell me. And that's it's that's the gift that theater gives that I don't think I found in other mediums, and each medium has its own gift but theater is theater's audience and the relationship with audience is so powerful and unique that I know I'll always find myself going back to that space. Yeah, it's there's so much trust right there's so much trust and faith that is blindly put on a theater maker, and it's profound it's very profound and it bestows us with so much responsibility. And it's a very large undertaking, and there's a big sense of, I have to do this because these many people trust me. It's an all giving feeling for sure and, and, and, as I said a huge responsibility for me. Why theater, because in my religion, we have soul to soul connections, and there's very many gestures, and even through classical Indian dance many hand gestures that suggests that one is giving their soul, or showing you a part of their soul in some way shape or form. To be able to do that in a human form, without disrespecting whoever's up there watching us is only found on stage in this, not stage but in the theatrical space for me. It is so liberating. And it is so change making I think it really is the tool will change the world. Every revolution started with culture. And, you know, the face of the world that we see in this moment means culture makers. You know, and I, and, you know, I've also been thinking a lot about what it means to be a woman in, in, in this field and this society and, and, you know, stereotypically but appropriately in some way shapes or forms. And, you know, men are, are seen as the culture keepers and families, the ones that will raise the children with culture. And that's what it feels like in the theater world also as a woman, you know, it's, we are culture keepers. And that's what changes policy that's what changes the minds of presidents, the minds of powerful people because everyone is equal when it comes when you come to the space, you know, people seem to be attracted to the idea of the musical theater is that you feel this is the strongest connection to a contemporary form of performance from your history or from your background or your interest. I mean, I just love musical theater. I have loved it. When I speak of suspension of disbelief musical theater specifically is actually insane that everybody happens to know the number in harmony and is dancing to a rhythm. It's crazy. I love it. It's so good. And the tradition we've come from music and theater we're not separate things. I wouldn't, I don't think they're separate distinct. It's hard for me to imagine them as separate things. And there's, there's ways which we've learned through the mentorship at MCI, there's ways in which a note will do so much more for you than all the words I could ever imagine writing, working with someone as talented as one of our horror.  She's also a co creator and writer on the project and will write a whole section and it's brilliant and beautiful and she'll go away and come back with a chord progression. And it's like that's everything we're trying to say for the past four pages. So there's no point to that. Thank you. Yeah, I don't think it's, it's, I think for me it's just comes from a deep, deep love of the form. And this is not just the American form but like just the form of music and story told together from our history and others. And then the ability to work in a form that that music, that music does a thing that words can't and speech can't and it's beautiful to work with people who know how to utilize that in storytelling. And I, I absolutely agree with the moral because, you know, the truth out in our traditions, they're not separate, separated the words, the music movement dance, it's all, all part of story to how you tell a story. And I think one of the things I love about this, this course is the, that this program that we're on is, is how committed the NYU, Deborah and Carl and, and, and Roberta are to supporting us to create our own voice. We're not following, we're not copying anything American, you know, so, so it is, it is really just giving us tools that that we can then use to explore and create our own in our own way, you know, so empowering me to create in my own way. And if you look at the projects, they're all so different. You know, my, my project is, is called escape and it is. It's actually based on a story I was listening to, we have an FM radio station called ghetto FM, and I was listening to a story about a true story about a young man who escapes from prison, but ends up in the prison warders home, the chief prison warders home, and then is hidden under the bed by the prison warders wife, very young. I mean, I've, okay, there's some basic things that are true but that apparently happened but then of course I've recreated it. I use my co creator is called. She's a she's a very well known hip hop. And she's a poet herself. And she is my, my composer. And, and, and so she, so the, the, the musical is in Sheng, which is a language, a very a youth language among young people in Nairobi, certain parts of Nairobi. It's hip hop. It uses traditional musical instruments like I always they always following me, as well as Western instruments. So it's in, it's also in Kiswahili. So it's combining all these things that, that, that, that, that are creating something different or something new, and I've gotten incredible support from for it and courage, you know, to mix all these weird genres together from the, from the program. Yeah. Yeah, really, I really like what our mentors say about tools and not rules, but particularly for this reason, I personally come from an experimental dance based background. And the, that influencing the creation of work feels so inherent, just because that's the way we tell stories here.  And, and delivering that in some way or form and it's a very community based tradition, you know. And so that's been that's been really, really, for me, the way I see musical theater as the form. It's interpreted in so many different ways all over the world, I think every tradition has its own version and this sort of cross cultural exchange within the musical theater context. From an outside from an observer perspective and then also from an insider perspective has been really interesting in bringing out what that means to us in our context. What's musical theater for us, and being able to have that space, whilst also respecting the age old traditions and forms that are present everywhere else around the world has been really profound. It really shapes our understanding of our own self and our own form, and places it in the global theater canon in an interesting way. What musicals do you look up to? What musicals do you like? The ones we might know. Okay, my actual favorite musical is an animated film. It's that I met before Christmas. I can't, it's not even like the fanciest or whatever that movie makes me weak every time. It's just, I don't know what it does to me, but every time he's just like, but I want to be Christmas, I'm like, but you're Halloween and I just get really like emotional every single time. Maybe now that I'm learning, because of MTI, I might be able to crack the formula that it hits. But I don't know why that's the first time that came into my head that I can't let go of. How about you guys? I'll think of smarter answers after, but that's actually my favorite one. Oh, it's the Tim Burton movie? Yeah. Yeah, the Tim Burton reproduced it. Yeah, it's, it's so good. It's so good.  It's insane. And again, I guess maybe if I was a theorist, I'd be really thinking deeply about the suspension of this beef, because it's not just a musical. It's an animation also about Halloween. It's, there's nothing about it makes any sense. And here I am like weeping at my age without fail every single time it's beautiful. I'm kind of stuck between two, one for more sentimental value than the other. It was my childhood dream to watch Lion King on Broadway. And New York was never a thing in like this life plan of mine. And so when I went to New York for the first time, I was lucky enough to watch that on Broadway with my mother. And I went through the Lion King on Broadway. I wept like a little baby having seen theater for the first time because it just, it just did something to me, you know, to hear, to just, yeah, it just did something to me viscerally. And then also learning about, you know, Teymur's practice and how she used mask work and how her practice was really informed by research in mask work from Asia. That and then the other one I would say more, more from a aesthetic perspective would be Fiddler on the Roof. And I watched it in Yiddish with super titles. And one of the American classics, of course, but just the tradition, just what a wonderful opening. The Jerome Robbins version you saw the original or? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so for me this this several. I think one of the ones that I really enjoyed way way back was one is I think it's called once upon an island. I'm searching the Caribbean, I think that I just, I just some friends of mine produced it in Nairobi and it was just delicious. And I really enjoyed that. Sara Fina, of course. Yeah. I was just about to say, oh my God, Sara Fina. Yes. So good. So good. And then, and then, and then Evita that I really loved and also, of course Jesus Christ superstar because for some reason Kenyans are constantly producing that I mean I think I saw it when. Yeah. My, my, my kid sister was in it. And you know she was, you know, I think she was in high school or something like that. Yeah, so, so those are the ones that I remember for now. Jesus Christ is a superstar in Kenya. You know, it's always been produced in Nairobi. They produced it last year, the year before it's very popular. And what an interesting moment, I think, and normally traditionally as I would say, you know, people try very hard to get on Broadway and to get a company and to be part of that commercial machine but you said no I go back and with some help and we do our own creations. So it's a decentralization of theatrical productions and ways of production and also, as you all say, but as I hear it right to the telling the stories of the Kenyan women telling your own stories. And even so in a way one could argue you say it's not the American movies American musicals, but it's the American dream which actually encourage you do your own thing, you know, trust in yourself. So it's still that but it's a good I think it's a good it's a good impulse and inspiring. I just want to throw in there, you know, I think as as we've been thinking about the performative landscape this is idea of, we don't get to see enough of us on the stage. And that's a very big thing globally right we talk about what means to be a person of color in the States and how we don't get to see ourselves represented in the space as much. But I think also for us here in Kenya it's, it's not only not being able to see our own stories on stage, but also just the access of having to make that happen is much harder than to say put on grease. And that's a code that I'm still I'm still thinking about this and thinking about how do we crack that exactly because it's not only our stories and our representation and seeing more of ourselves on stage. But it's also how do we make that possible for our audiences first. And then how do we think globally, because work from the region can easily be picked up by Americans by Europeans and that's really important because our voice and our stories need to be told on a global platform. But I think the miss the middle steps before that global thinking is really how do we get our fellow Africans to see it. You know how what festivals are then the region. What stages what touring structures what what other resources do we have to see our own work. I think that's a different kind of empowerment of all my fellow African did this, so I can do it too. I feel that the kind of covert time the corona time will create a new form or something coming out that might be or you're thinking about things that would be different than before or do you think you really use the time to finally do. I think it's, I think it's got to be like a kind of mix of both.  And you have to be because it is, it is an emerging industry, it's a growing industry that definitely is better than it even was five or 10 years ago, but certainly is nowhere near does not have the infrastructure that is required for anybody to very confidently state what I do is play writing. It's like, mm hmm. And so how do you make money, like those become two separate questions. And so, yeah. So it's just the fact of it and so I think what's happening is, there is going to be for those privileged enough where you have enough social security housing shelter food water, such that you have the privileged pause. I think it's going to give those people a lot of space to revisit old work and make it stronger. It's going to give people a lot of space to make new and innovative forms of theater like what's it how I'm going to do on Thursday. It's, there is going to be a little bit of both but I'm, I'm also interested in this is an entrepreneur I'm really interested in the space in that way. Because the need for innovation is not just about creative innovation, it's literal material survival innovation. If people who are not who are privileged and who do have access to calls like this who have internet and electricity at 730pm on a Monday in their comfort of their house. If people like that don't find ways to make economic sense of the situation and provide and create economical infrastructure in a country that many times feels designed against creative economics. Then we're not going to survive enough or long enough to make the work that needs to happen. Like it's just not going to happen. So the challenge. It's the, this is the joy and difficulty of working in this space is that it is not enough to be creative. It doesn't matter how gifted or incredibly talented you may be, and how hard you work in that space. You must also interpret or you must also find funding you must find a way to sell you must find a way to make it make an income for people. And that forces you to be incredibly innovative, like insanely ideas will come from anywhere because you have to. And because if you don't. You can barely survive and if the industry doesn't shift and you have a position where you can create an industry shift, then thousands of people won't survive. The burden is really different, I would say in that way not from individual practitioners but just on a scale of what it means to practice in a country that does not have a social safety net if you do not survive. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely agree with that. I hardly think that there is much. I mean, I, one of the things that happened at the beginning of the lockdown is the musicians that I work with needed support.  And so one of the things we did is that we had a show on Instagram to raise some money so that they could send their families up country away from the city so that they can, they can survive. Right.  We may be privileged but we're actually supporting. We are the infrastructure that supports a whole lot of other artists. Yeah, right. So, you know, I literally, I'm constantly always looking and saying, Oh, great, there is, there is a lamb sisterhood. So the lamb sisterhood for me are really important, because there's another center of creativity, and there's another center of creativity. So how can we then support each other to continue this journey. Even as we are interacting, you know, so that within the region, we have, you know, Uganda Uganda has a theater festival. I know that charisma you're involved in that as well. So it has a theater festival and it's been incredibly useful for me, because I've written plays and then taken them to Uganda to an audience that doesn't know me. And so, can judge what the play that I performed and say something about it. And then help me develop as an artist so you're getting out of your comfort zone out of your comfort country and into into the region I've also last year I was in Zimbabwe which was fantastic. You know, and I'm hopefully going to continue with that kind of interaction with them Zimbabwe. Yeah, so really the growth and expansion. I couldn't, I couldn't agree more. I think, you know, there's a lot of good things that have come out of this time in, as we think about shaping the sector in that, you know, we're all of a sudden able to be on these zoom calls and have online engagement from various, parts of the world. And I think the question will become how we can preserve that going forward when things get back to normal without losing sort of authenticity the soul to soul connection that exists within the actual theatrical space, and within you you know, regional travel where people can go to different festivals, and the musical theater initiative took four pieces of works in progress to the compiler International Theater Festival last year to do exactly what Sitao was speaking about with one of her pieces, you know, get that feedback be be exposed to an audience that the piece is not the pieces foreign to, you know. The fashion will really become how we can maintain both and in many ways theater companies and organizations, I believe will be taking on more media based roles, entertainment based roles versus just solely doing theater, which if we think about it is very much in line with what we're talking about as being Kenyan performance, we do everything a little bit of everything because that's how we are. And our last point, philanthropy investment philanthropy investment philanthropy investment, I think it's so, so important for our Africans to invest in African culture, because we're lucky enough at the moment to be getting funding externally but we I mean I really, I really hope that this moment increases the corporate world's eyes or show opens the corporate world's eyes and the philanthropic world's eyes to the in the power of their investment in the cultural sectors of their respective countries, and governments as well. I need to, I need to, I need to say something about investment charisma. There, that is happening. There is, there's, for example, a fund called the have a fund, have an investment fund. These are extraordinary people. Spent us as last few years testing on themselves and a small group of people, whether, whether it is possible to make a living through their art. And then, and then now they've expanded I'm one of the beneficiaries of the of their investment in my theater company. And of course now this is quite unfortunate because it was supposed to all happen this year, because you know I got, I got the investment last, last, the end of last year. And but fortunately they they are very understanding. Yeah. And so, I'm so I got a loan I'm supposed to pay back because I was supposed to have, you know, I had various performances lined up. You know, but, but, but it is happening and I just find that really extraordinary. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think heavy is actually a really great model by which a lot of other you know there's he was so many other organizations save source in Uganda. And that are kind of starting up on that path and are already there and have established that infrastructure. So the more the better, you know, yeah. And it is the truth that societies that work that functions have great art, great theater you want to see how great a democracy works, how great a society, how great a community is look at the theater. And I'm reporting it to people go out do they enjoy it. So it's important to support because it represents. So it's the very best and the surplus of energy and some money and how to use it that's why life is living and I think in that symbolic space that imaginary space which is also real it represents something and to hear that from Kenya speaks. So greatly that's Kenya something is happening also politically that they are able to fight this crisis they have young artists and established artists collaborating so it's a fantastic news. We hear out there so we're coming to a close and since we have three guests normally often we have one but we thought it's to give a little bit of the variety of that kaleidoscope of Kenyan work by women. I thought it would be better to have all of you but what what advice do you have for young theater makers what advice do you have our audience. How should they use this time of Corona. Maybe we start with on and then charisma and then sit down with me. Wow. No advice. No. I'd say in general general advice would be let just make art you believe in even if it's commercial even if it's it's forget like about those that those kind of contract constructs like if you believe in it like really untruly like that's something that you believe in, then everything else will be figured out. Because there's so much that's beyond our control. You should study you should practice whatever but ultimately if you don't believe in the thing you're putting out. Somebody else will feel it so just make art you believe in I guess is the only thing I can say, and about this time specifically, I'd say just get through it. I called me and was like and you're surviving is a day job right now. It's a pandemic and I constantly have to remind myself, we're in a global pandemic. It's not. It's not an incidental thing this is an unusual time. If you if all you can do is survive. That is, wow, well done. And if you can read a little every day you can watch a little bit of something that helps you you can make a little bit of something and it gives you joy. That's great. You're making the greatest tome of all time. That's also fantastic. Like release yourself from the idea that you have to be or do a certain thing other than survive in this moment and make art you believe in. Yeah, have to agree I think your health, your family well being really comes fast and I couldn't emphasize that more I think you know, in order to be the best version of yourself. Personally, in order to be the best version of yourself, you got to make sure you're okay, whatever that means mentally physically emotionally spiritually all of it you know, for those that are religious pray that brings you closer to any sort of self, you know, care. And I think care for the people around you. You know, I think that's a really big part of this because we really are a village and the self will not be okay if the people around us are not. So, you know, reach out to reach out to people. And I think that applies professionally also, you know, I think this time, you should be focused on building relationships. I will still remember a week ago it's a tower just called me and it was the best conversation we had, just because we talked and talked and we just, it was so great. And, and it's those moments that I think will stay in my heart and in the hearts of those that you reach out to. So, if it were to be like an assignment, reach out to someone you haven't spoken to in a while. You make just, you might just make their day in a different way. Yeah. So for me, I would say several things. Number one, this is a time to rest. It's actually resting. You've got permission to take afternoon naps for real. You, it's surprising how much, how much you hold in your body is it actually is very, very surprising.  I think the other thing is that observe, I would say observe, pay attention, because, although we're, although we're in a global pandemic, there are certain things that have stopped. There's also a huge uprising and, and, and you can see that like, like, like for me one of the things that I'm seeing is just the, how fragile our systems are, our economic systems are so fragile.  Pay attention to that because that's the source of writing. That's the source of creativity. I remember during the post election violence. I did my best writing and actually in, in, in times of upheaval. That's, that's the greatest that is the time that is the most productive when it comes to creativity. The reason we're able to, it's like a scale that lifted off your eyes, and you're able to see, and then, and therefore this is actually the time for artists, it's the time for being creative. But meanwhile, in addition to the creativity, rest. Yeah. It's really, really significant and great advice and, and it's very encouraging to hear that also from you and also to notice to the other world where we live in here to see that the way how you are dealing with it and that you are creating new forms and that you are charging the existing networks existing ideas to create something new that you're using a different old tradition but perhaps this technology create a form that hasn't been there before with music. People haven't heard before with words, people haven't heard before and so great to hear you know also that going back to the Sundance East Africa project you know how how much that had and it's fantastic to see Philip Christopher Roberto did and then the NYU workshops with Eric that there is something that lives on that they say if like in science, physics you give impulses and the energy in a way stays in how great of Robert Redford who created a film festival but also saw theater is important and then, you know, decades decades later something happened he had no idea about people might not even know his name anymore but they might know the Sundance Festival or the Sundance Theatre Institute so it is stunning and I really would like to thank you for sharing the moment sharing it together and it was beautiful to hear you all speak and the sisterhood you represent and and can't wait to come to Kenya one day and see your work or you're in the U.S. So, at the sea we will go around the world again this week and stay with us tomorrow we have Emily Monet and Greg Hill both of them are from Canada they're indigenous artists. Emily Monet a playwright and also director Greg Hill is the curator at the Museum of indigenous art the National Museum and we're going to hear from them how is that going in Canada how is that covert crisis the corona crisis and the time of corona impacting artistic lives the life of the country the cities and what is changing there we hear from Japan from Tokyo from the Satoko Ishihara young emerging playwright a brilliant mind very original authentic work. Still emerging but someone who observes as you as you all said you know that's it. David said this is what we should be doing and put it into a form on Thursday Nigel Smith runs the flea theater and took it over and and is now in the middle of the covert and corona storms and upheaval and black life matter and is navigating the ship his own in his life but also this office this theater and we will hear from him how does that feel like and all the forces and on Friday, a veteran, significant artist, Jean-Glut van Italy, a playwright who wrote in the 60s. People, a lot of you say the most significant anti Vietnam war play done at La Mama coming out of there was done by Jean-Glut van Italy, who went on to write many other significant plays and also has a retreat now and upstate in New York where he seems we also have to focus on on meditation and back to a spiritual side of theater. So his whole journey of life we will go back over and I'm really interested to hear what he thinks about this also unprecedented time of corona so thanks for our audiences for listening and now we went a little bit over time today but I think it was well worth it already should be much more time and we should listen more and and but I think we were able to get an idea for an idea and congratulations on all your work and yeah thank you go out there do your thank you do your work and the world is listening and interested and this is important and also to keep in mind that it is affordable Broadway in New York the family with three kids wants to go and they take subways or taxi and then they eat there out of a thousand dollars it's unavoidable people can do it anymore so so something also has happened here that is against the basic idea of participation the access to arts healthcare and education basic human rights forms aren't working and we all hope that this crisis also will push us to find better ways and better homes as we do so thank you all thanks for howl round again for hosting another week of Segal talks at Emerson College I think they had no idea that we would go on for so long and the survey cannot say no it's too late and Vijay and Sian Sanjang and Andy my Segal team thank you all and to the really to the listeners thank you for taking your time this is so important that Karisha and Sitava and Anne Mora they know they are people interested people are listening and perhaps also there's something in the sighted that might change your life and after all this is what this is all about that we all as citizens as part of the community that we change that we do an authentic change in artists really can help us and what they said to us to observe to be authentic and to to to connect and get through a day by day nothing lasts forever not the good things but also not the bad things so one day this will be over and I hope we all will be ready for a better better way of spending our time on planet Earth thank you all and to our audience you stay safe thank you wear a mask and thank you


A new report in anesthesiology suggests that personalization is key to protecting lung function during surgery and to reducing the chance of post-operative lung collapse. Lung protective ventilation has long been linked with better outcomes for certain patients undergoing general anesthesia, but one ventilatory parameter still in need of optimization is positive end expiratory pressure, or PEEP. There's been a general lack of agreement regarding whether low or moderate levels of PEEP are more protective during surgery. The new study suggests that this lack of consensus occurs, at least in part, because PEEP isn't usually tailored to a patient's individual physiology. This conclusion was based on a randomized trial of 40 patients with healthy lungs who underwent abdominal surgery. All patients were initially anesthesized and ventilated with a PEEP of 4 cm H2O. Then they were randomized to either maintain this level of pressure or to receive a personally tailored PEEP determined through a titration protocol. In the protocol, PEEP was incrementally decreased while keeping other ventilatory parameters constant. Electrical impedance tomography signals were recorded at baseline and throughout the titration. At the end of the procedure, the recording equipment automatically calculated the percentage of over-distended and collapsed lung units for each level of pressure. The PEEP nearest the crossing of the curves representing these parameters was chosen as the optimal value. In this way, the team conducting the trial achieved a mechanical compromise where both of these outcomes were minimized. The researchers found that the optimal PEEP varied widely among patients, but determining this value did improve outcomes. Those ventilated with an individually tailored PEEP showed better intraoperative oxygenation, lower driving pressure, and a reduced incidence and severity of postoperative lung collapse. And these benefits came with minimal side effects as varying the PEEP did not cause intraoperative hemodynamic instability or a need for additional vasoactive drugs or fluids. Overall, these findings suggest the use of a standardized PEEP in patients with normal lungs may not offer the best protection against postoperative lung complications. Although larger trials are still needed to follow long-term measures of lung function, the study lays an important foundation to help enhance the safety of intraoperative ventilation.


Coming to my talk, I work on a project called OPUS. It's a search interface that people use to find data and images from NASA space probe missions to the outer solar system. It's built on Django and I'm going to talk a little bit about why we built it and some of the ways people are using it and I'll demo it as well. So I work at SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and it started in 1984 as a NASA project to use radio observatories to listen for signals from other star systems that might indicate signs of intelligent life. And so today, 30 years later, SETI runs its own radio observatory and the SETI project is still going strong but it's also a larger research center where it's the base of operations for over 60 scientists and their students and staff who study many areas of planetary science such as planetary geology, asteroid research, planetary dynamics, exoplanets. So basically anything related to the study of life and habitability in the universe. So our group at SETI is a NASA funded data archive and our scientific leadership are experts in planetary ring moon systems. So many people are aware that Saturn has these epic beautiful rings but a lot of people don't realize that Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus actually have rings as well and these are some pictures of them. And so we at the rings node archive data from missions to these planets and we support researchers in this field. So we built opus. In fine NASA tradition we gave it an acronym. Opus stands for Outer Planets Unified Search and idea is that when you've, sorry, we've got several missions into one single interface so like we've unified them. So I'll jump right into demoing it for you. So this is the landing page and ironically it's sort of my least favorite page of the interface because it's just a little bit complicated when you first land on it. We serve primarily the scientific research community and it has a lot of features and options and it has a lot of specialized features so it can be rather complicated. My sort of bad joke is that it looks like a DMV form. But the idea is this. You start with a lot of results that you can access, our entire database. So that blue bar at the top, there's a number if you can see that. That's telling you that there are 1.2 million results that you can access right now. And that is a count of everything in the database. So for this tool we archive the complete set of remote sensing observations for several NASA missions, both Voyager probes, Cassini, Galileo, New Horizons and there's some Hubble data in here as well. And so the idea is that you want to narrow down your result count to find the data that you're looking for or what you want to learn about. And the interface gives you feedback as you sort of drill down into the data. And on the left side there's this monster list of parameters. And if you click one of those, it brings in a search widget. There are now two search widgets shown by default in the center. So it'll bring in a search widget based on any number of parameters. And you can use those to constrain your search. So I'll show you what I mean. I'll go ahead and click Jupiter. And the first thing you might notice is that a list opens below where I clicked. So that is actually a list of Jupiter's moons. So when you click one of the planets, a list of its targets or its moons or rain features will open and it lets you sort of drill down further. And the other thing that happened is that the number in the top got a lot smaller because you're basically saying, show me only results tagged Jupiter. And so clicking browse results to see what we get and you get this gallery of space images that is forever infinite scrolling. So the default ordering of this interface is ascending time. So what we're actually seeing here are the earliest observations in our database. And this is Voyager 1 as it first opens its camera shutter and images the planet Voyager on its approach to Voyager. So the Voyager mission is actually two spacecraft, they're identical. They were launched a few months apart in the late 70s. And they both had an original mission of just going to Jupiter and Saturn. But they've both extended their mission far beyond that. Voyager 2 has actually gone on to Uranus and Neptune. And Voyager 1, the spacecraft that took these images, has actually left the solar system, becoming humanity's first interstellar probe. So you can definitely infinitely scroll here, but you can also jump to pages. So there's a little input at the top. And I jumped here about 125 pages forward and also forward in time. So now Voyager 1 is much closer to Jupiter. And it's taking these close-up images of Jupiter's atmosphere and the very strange textures of its storms and its turbulent atmosphere. So I should say a little bit about these gallery thumbnails. Because if you can pick up the color here, they're actually green and purple and blue. So space imaging cameras are actually black and white cameras most often. You can collect a lot more information at every pixel with a black and white camera. And each of these cameras has color filters that they use. They have filter wheels, so they can drop in a filter in front of the camera. And that way they pick up light at different wavelengths or different colors. But when we get the images back on the ground, without any special processing, they are actually grayscale or black and white images. So for this gallery, we actually added a false color tinting just as an indicator to the user of what filter was used in that observation as a quick way to see it. And I'll tell you a little bit later about why that's helpful. So this is a different search. I've done nothing but click Saturn instead of Jupiter. And I skipped to page 700, just to get forward in time a little bit here. And the thing you might notice is that the number is much larger that the result count is much larger than it was for Jupiter. And that's because most of the images in our database are actually of Saturn. And that's because of the Cassini mission. So the Cassini mission, the Cassini spacecraft launched 20 years after the voyagers left Earth. And unlike the voyagers, which are flyby missions, Cassini is actually an orbiter. So it went into orbit around Saturn. And today, it's completed over 220 orbits. And it does these crazy orbits. So this is a diagram of the orbital path of Cassini. And you can see it swings way close to the planet and way far out. And what it's doing is it's trying to image the ring system because it's a very vast system. And also, Saturn has over 60 moons. And so they plan these orbits to fly very close to some of the moons and get close up images of moons. And then come in very close to the planet to get images of the atmosphere and close up views of the rings. So one thing I love about Cassini in terms of this interface is it's a very stable platform for imaging cameras. So when Cassini focuses on a thing, it's very good at keeping that thing in the center of the frame. And so as you browse Cassini images, you can see that many of them kind of look like frames of a movie. And so this is a sequence where Cassini is looking at the tiny moon atlas in the center there. And in this interface, you can click and see a larger image. And if you kind of just, if you have a good internet connection and you hold down the right arrow key, you can kind of get this like frame animation movie effect. And there's many, many frames like this where there's just interesting movie sequences that you can check out. And people are using this, they're making frame animation movies, they're adding music beds and they've gotten really creative. They're gluing them together and making these videos without having to do any extra processing work to stabilize the scene in the frame. And I should mention this is a jQuery plugin called Colobox that does a really nice job of pre-loading the next image. So I'm gonna go back to the interface and I'll show you a really common use case which is to search by instrument.  So what I'm gonna do here is bringing the instrument name Widget and I've picked New Horizons there because there's something interesting I can show you here. New Horizons went to Jupiter and I'm gonna pick the moon Io from the list. And here's a bunch of pictures of Io. And so, sorry, got a little lost here. So this interface is actually a shopping cart. So you can sort of pick images you want and then you can do things with them. You can download a CSV, you can create a zip file. And so this is sort of the view of what's in your cart. And you can interact with the images here as you sort of would in the gallery. And so one thing about this sequence of images. So a lot of people are aware of New Horizons because it just went to Pluto and I got our first close up images of Pluto. We never knew what Pluto looked like before. But it also had a really interesting encounter at Jupiter. Lots of things happened. So we have all the Jupiter images and when the Pluto images come back down and our release to the public, we'll have all of those too. So if you can see this moon here where there's a little bump on the top. It looks kind of like a fountain, it's kind of bright. That's actually a volcano exploding just as New Horizons was taking pictures of it. Nobody knew this would be happening. They had planned these pictures to take pictures of Io and here it was a volcano exploding at that moment. So from that sequence, we get our first and only existing frame animation movie of a volcano erupting on another world. So I know, right? So that's a little bit closer. That is a 200 mile high plume. The volcano's name is Tavastar. It's actually over the horizon a little bit. So you're just seeing the edge of it or the top of it. So why did we do this? Why did we build opus? The challenge was that people researching outer planets and especially people studying ring systems were having to do a lot of extra work in order to get the data that they needed. And this relates to the fact that space missions are enormous collaborations. If you think about a spacecraft, we attach a lot of instruments to every spacecraft that goes into space. Here's an example of the Cassini spacecraft. So there's very specialized instruments, cameras, telescopes, spectrometers. And each instrument has its own team of people that work just on that instrument. They build the instrument and they get the data back and they shepherd the data back to Earth and they release it on their own websites. And NASA has a standard for how the data is formatted. And the teams mostly follow that. But what we are seeing is that people had to do a lot of different searching around different websites and knowing a lot about instruments in order to work with the data. And this caused frustration. So we wanted to address this pain point. We wanted to create a single interface that would serve a larger swath of researchers and we tried to make it easy to use. So who uses it? Scientists use it. There's many ways in which it saves them time. And I'll give you just one example of a parameter that people who study ring moon systems are particularly interested in. And which Opus makes easier to explore. And that is phase angle. So phase angle is just a way of quantifying the angle of light in a photograph.   So right here you see two pictures of Saturn. They're both of Saturn. The top image is at high phase angle, Saturn is backlit. And the bottom image, Saturn is a low phase angle image. So the light is coming from behind the camera. And this is sort of the bottom view is more what we're used to seeing from ground based telescopes where the sun is behind the camera. And as you can see the rings look very, very different at different lighting angles. So just by changing the lighting angle, you can change what you pick up in the rings. And this sort of research allows people to learn a lot more about their rings by looking at them at different lighting angles. And I'm not sure if you can tell in the top image, there's like a super wide, really faint, cloudy sort of diffuse ring that doesn't even appear at all in the bottom image. And that is actually the E ring. And Cassini discovered this enormous ring that's not part of the main rings. And here's a close up of the brightest part of that ring. And there's a tiny moon there, Enceladus. And what Cassini found is that Enceladus is actually venting water ice from its south polar region and feeding this giant diffuse ring. So how do you do a phase angle search? I'm gonna do one, I'm just gonna do one against Saturn. So I pick out Saturn and then go into the monster menu. And under lighting geometry, there's a phase angle widget. And each of the widgets tell you sort of a hinting of what are valid values. So you don't have to know what are valid values. So right here I'm just gonna pick some high numbers, 165 to 180. And the result that you get is some very pretty glowy images of Saturn with rings that are backlit. And in several of these, you can actually see the E ring, whereas you couldn't see it in other images. So if you scroll down a little bit here, there's some very bright, oops, sorry, there's some very bright pictures of the E ring and the tiny dot in there is Enceladus. So not only do scientists use it, science journalists occasionally use it. So at the website planetary.org, you can find collections of these complete composite images created by senior editor of the Planetary Society, Emily Loctawalla.  And she creates these composite images that show various planetary bodies in the same image to show scale comparisons, to teach and raise awareness about our solar system. So she uses opus when looking for images of specific bodies, at specific resolutions, and specific phase angles. And she tells me that making composite images like this would be ten times harder without this tool. Another community that uses it, there's a thriving community of people who create color versions of space probe images. So space probe cameras are black and white cameras, and they have different color filters. And so if you can find three images of the same scene taken with the red, green and blue filter with some photoshop skills and some artistry, you can make color versions of these spacecraft images.  So people like opus because our gallery thumbnails are tinted, making it easier just to find those RGB sets. So related to image processing and frame animations, there's a large format IMAX movie coming out. It's in production right now. It's called In Saturn's Rings, and it's made exclusively from real photographs taken by spacecraft and telescopes. So they're not using any CGI for this movie. There's no 3D rendering at all. Instead, they're processing over 7.5 million photographs taken from various spacecraft and telescopes. So I'll play you a clip from their late summer teaser that they released last year. So during production, they used opus to find suitable image sets to stitch together into large scale panoramas that they then animate to create the effect of flying through space around Saturn. So this movie is due out later this year. So now I'm gonna switch gears a little and talk about my favorite part of the interface, which is new interface. Opus has a completely open JSON API. You can make requests over HTTP and get a JSON response back. So any research that can be performed in the opus interface can also be performed via an API call. The URL structures are the same. So what this means is that all the data and all the images that you can access using the interface, you can also access from your own scripts, from the shell, from Python, anything you want via URL endpoints. So I'll show you an example. Here's one of our endpoints. For this one, I am asking for data and I want to inform at JSON. And I want to do this query, planet equals Saturn, target equals Hyperion. That's a moon of Saturn. And you get this nice, well-formatted JSON response. And in this case, you can also change the .json in the URL to .csv if you wanted to do that. Here's another one. Let's say you want images. So here I'm asking for images, size medium. And I want an HTML response this time, just so I can show you the pretty pictures in the browser. And it's the same query except I've added an imaging camera just to make sure we get actual images back. And so you get a big list of Saturn's weird, spongy moon Hyperion. If you go to the URL and change that .html to .json, you get the same list in JSON and only now it's a list of direct links to all those images. So to find the API, you go to the moon search interface. There's a link at the bottom and that gets you to our API documentation where we've documented how to use it and shown several examples about how to use it.  And I know, I had to, okay. So Django is making it possible for us to accomplish a lot with very limited resources. And I have to say the awesome icing on the cake is that I've experienced the Django community to be such a supportive community and welcoming to beginners because not so long ago I was also a beginner. So thank you, awesome Django community for being who you are. And thank you to Django maintainers because we're making space images more accessible to scientists, journalists, artists, developers and everyone. And you make this possible. Thank you. So I can take questions if there's any. All right, cool. So I noticed on the main page you sort of talked about how you didn't like that page very much because it's kind of a bit of a monster. In designing this site, were you designing it specifically with sort of the scientist in mind or were you trying to design it as sort of an open public interface or was that sort of something that came along later where you realized that more people might want to use this than just for research? So we're funded to serve scientific research community. But my secret agenda the whole entire time is that I think anybody should be able to use it. So I actually do work to make it easy to use although that's, you know, I have to weigh different issues. But yeah, it's always been open and public and anybody can use it. So I always thought also that scientists deserve the same quality of tools as everyone else. Like they're not better at figuring out bad interactions than other people. And so why not like try? So we try. Thanks for the talk. So you have a lot of images and I was curious, how do you handle sort of the some meaning and storage and all that kind of that scale of image content with Django? Because like I've often found that when you get to, you know, the many hundreds of thousands of images Django starts to, especially the built-in media stuff starts falling down. So is there anything special you're doing there? No. Oh, just normal? No, it's like the database is like a little over a million. So no. Okay. That's right. Fantastic. Thank you. I was curious, you were talking about how there's a community of people who will put the RG and be together. Is there any way that you could do that automated since you are doing the tent? Or is it just a matter of like getting the proper registration marks so that, you know, that you have control points and you're actually layering the images right? Maybe they're not referenced in such a way that you can do that. I don't know. I think there's some of that. I think there's also some judgment calls in how much of each color you bring in. So sometimes you see colorized images and they're kind of false color. They're not really what your eye would see technically. And that's subjective anyway. So yeah, as I understand it, there's a lot of judgment involved in that. But I think a lot of things can be automated. So who knows? I thought of an answer to your question over there. We actually do use a memcache layer to do these queries. But the images, yeah, they're just coming from our server. Yeah. Do you guys self-host? Or do you use some kind of cloud provider to host all the content? We self-host. Cool. Yeah, it's Jango, MySQL, jQuery on the front end, Apache, and memcache layer. OK. All right, thank you very much. Thank you.