Welcome everybody back here to the HowlRound 12-hour session, New York Theatre Artist for Ukraine. We have our first six hours behind us and we had remarkable contributions, I think throughout the day. We started out with Pan America, with translators. We had here ArtCenter, who worked with us on their new work play. They are working on with 15 actors, some of them from shelters. In the Ukraine, PS21 shared us readings and music. Bam, the Brooklyn Academy of Music was here. Watermill Center, Robert Wilson read for us, Sanctons Warehouse, the Public Theatre Tone Page, the Park Avenue Armory with Bill T. Jones. The Ibrons ArtCenter, who was just before us with Aaron Lenzman. And now we come to our next session, which is the HowlRound Theatre Commons and the Alimita Theatre Company. HowlRound is actually our host, our digital host here. It's a significant and very important institution here in America. So we would like to welcome Thea Rogers with us, who is working for HowlRound, but also an artist, which we like when theater artists are involved in running institutions and also making decisions. What will be shown and also we have with us members of the Alimita Collective and Offshoot of the Living Theatre. And it is Cyprus Atlas and Philip Santas, and they will join us and read hopefully a bit of the work of the great Judith Melina. I think her, was it her birthday or two days ago? We can hear you. It was the anniversary of when she passed. When she passed away. So we feel very strongly connected to her. She came so often to our programs. But maybe let's start first with HowlRound. Thea, thank you. Thank you for joining us. I know you're in Los Angeles and you helped us out so very, very often also in our Segal talks. It's good to see you also as part of our programs. Tell us a little bit about HowlRound. Not everybody knows who you are and what you do. Yeah, it's good to see you again, Frank. Good to be back. HowlRound is a center for theater commons is created with the idea of decentralizing the theater conversation. So anyone with access to the internet can share what they're working on conversations that are happening in their community and have access to conversations happening outside of their community. We can get very, you know, wrapped up in our own local things, which is really wonderful. But if you don't, for example, live in the heart of New York City, you want to be able to have the same access to conversations that are happening there, or maybe people in New York get access to conversations happening outside of New York. We have an idea. We have a journal and a blog. People can write about what's happening and what kind of conversations they're having about art and politics and everything in the theater community. We also have a live stream channel, which many of you are watching this on our live stream channel now. Hopefully you've been able to refresh and stay with us today. So anyone can reach out and just say, Hey, like we are going to have a conversation. We think it would be useful to the greater theater community. We think people should be able to see it and how around can walk you through how to how to share that with the world. Click over to our participate page after this event to learn more. Yeah, it is quite stunning every day their discussions, readings, forum symposia nationally, internationally. And I think it has brought us all closer together and it proved so valuable, especially in the time of Corona when we couldn't leave our houses and we also joined today by Anachtkritik, which is a very important German site for online engagement with theater, a fantastic curated pitch. It also serves kind of as a American theater magazine, kind of the German online theater magazine and how around helped us also to connect to them. And so this is carried over to Germany, so we'll say thank you for Anachtkritik for a successful to make that happen. And, and we welcome all our listeners there so in a way this brought the New York theater community together I don't know if there ever was an event where in one day or 24 New York theater organizations joined in an effort to stand up for something to show a flag in this race kind of the Ukrainian flag that we do care and that we are outraged of what happened again the initial idea was going to be learned about the bombing of a theater in Mariupol 300 people who sought refuge in a space that is died and so many others were wounded. And we think about them our heart goes out to them. It's on our mind Ukraine is our mind and we care we feel deep sadness helpless in a way, but we wanted to voice our outrage and you don't have lots of arguments for everything against and before but you do not bomb theaters with people inside for shutters it's a barbaric act. And today is the day where we all come together to voice that so see you have prepared a reading for us. I have and thank you so much for sharing. I'll be reading from a play called my dad inferno, which Frank shared with me by a Ukrainian playwright. And there was a passage in it that really captivated me. It is currently being translated Frank please correct me if I'm wrong, or translated into English by Sam book. Yes. Cherry Arts project upstate New York. Yes. Great space. A play originally by made on this done centered in the 2013 uprisings in the Ukraine and this this passage really caught me in terms of what we're talking about right now and just the internationality of any kind of diaspora and cultures. sequence 11 on logs for in play a character named on Mia truthfully I can't really say what my country is.  It seems even Roma, but I was born in Ukraine. This is my land. And it seems to me that language isn't just an accident. The language is the code of a land of a people, once at an exhibition of triptilian culture, I saw a jug with a pattern on it, exactly like on the one my grandmother had the jug was 5000 years old. I don't even know what the symbols meant, but it's important that we hang on to the things that hold us together. Same thing with language. Yeah, it's, it's like being able to hear what your ancestors are saying to you it's like a, like a radio station from God in Ukraine, the broadcast is in Ukrainian. The Russian station is further away it's not our station the signal isn't clear it's full of static and noise. There's a fashionable word now, bilinguals, but almost all of us are that on the one hand it's great, like consciousness is a dialogue capable of understanding otherness, but there's another side to it. The languages go to war for how you think for your soul for your heart your children. You have to choose which language to speak to your child. About God. Did he make a choice to which language to speak to us. Do we choose on our own inside this war there's an unfinished battle that's lasted for centuries. I cried when I learned the history. I've been arrested, tortured, killed in order to keep this land Ukrainian. 400 years our language has been banned 134 times. If you choose to speak Russian does it mean those sacrifices worth or not worth for nothing. And the conquerors one.  That's quite something a band 134 times. Yeah, I had to go look that up to find the history but That's incredible. Yeah, we also had today with us. Natalia Kulyada from the free theater of Belarus and the free freedom freedom of Belarus also says you know they are if they perform in Belarusian language they are risking in going into jail. Well because performing in their own language in their own country and they are very own president is the one who puts such laws into into place it's an outrage to shocking about it what they do also is an incredible incredible fight and it also does show what theater can do the she said today, more theater artists are in jail than even journalists or political activists it just shows that theater seems to be something that drives so authoritarian leaders mad so it means it's does have an effect of it don't know let's switch over to I'll leave me to and I would like to welcome again Cyprus and Philip Philip tell us a little bit about your company are I can start Cyprus you can jump in. We've been working together for forever and we perhaps will continue to. We're all over the world at this point. We, during the past couple of years have been doing a project that has had multiple iterations has engaged artists. Truly everywhere and bringing people together to interpret each other's interpretations of each other each other's interpretations of a set of guiding questions. We did a live performance inspired by that text over the summer, as well as doing workshops. We also do. Oh, I'm not sure what else, but a whole lot and. Yeah, we are guided by Judith Bellina I would say still in a very large way and also by a lot of other practices that are emerging that don't exist yet that exist only in our dreams, and that's part of what it's exciting about it to. Cyprus. Yeah, many of us met as part of the Living Theater in the last years of Judith's life. And we just have not been able to stop working together. We just keep doing it like no matter if there's a pandemic, or, or what we worked through the pandemic on on digital performances as well which has been in person performance recently. So we're very happy to be here today. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you so much. So let us, let's hear what you have prepared for us and then we can talk perhaps a little bit more. Or should I start fill out. Okay, comfortable doing so. Sure. Great. So thank you everyone. I'm going to read the letter on revolution that Judith Molina wrote to Carl Einhorn dated Saturday, March 28, 1970. My dear Carl, just returning this minute from London. And really, the first minute I've had to write to you. I'm going to get all the chores out of the way and start the real work. I have not yet read the mimeograph track to you said was important though I've looked at it. I will study it carefully but till then I know that while this is the direction our people are taking. We cannot rest. We cannot stop. We cannot speak of anything but changing the situation. We must bring hope and concrete plans and useful proposals for feeding the people that do not entail the enslavement of the people by small clicks with guns and bombs. Draw up now your most practical proposals and order them into a readable form. We must get together our most constructive ideas. And if we have none, then we must begin with the reality that we have none. It's not enough to set up communications between revolutionaries who have no revolutionary proposals except the road to the same old authoritarian world. We have to bring sensible alternatives to people. Of course we will work with what there is and we will also create what there isn't yet. There has never been. The old formulas are dead and stale and what is relevant. But it's only relevant if it leads to something more human for the people and the proletariat than to dream of becoming dictators as in the dictatorship of the proletariat. We must bring everyone and ask what they think can be done and everyone comes up against the same wall and draws a blank. A useful plan to which people can turn with hope which will bring energy. I am convinced that this is the only valid work. We must raise a standard that can show the way. It must be economically sound, humanly practical, taking into account human failings and human behavior. It cannot be a utopian dream, but must be explicable step by step. You said that in the old American and French revolutions, no one had a platform, but look what happened. The American revolution led to America and the French to Napoleon's coronation as emperor. And the Russian which planned for the interim socialist step that you have such faith in led to Stalin. Let us speak of Cuba and China, but let us speak of what will happen after Castro and Mao. Is there a system that can survive the death of the great philosopher King? That ideal platonic ruler which these two men and their wisdom and talent represent? We can make excuses for history or say things have changed, but we can't dismiss all its lessons. As Patrick Henry would say, Jesus had his Paul and Lenin had his Stalin and Mao and Castro can profit by their example. Make the best of it. We need a new form. There are better people than me to find it, but they are not doing the job and it must be done. Hello. And if not I, who? And if not now, when? And if I am not for myself, who shall be for me? I will follow anyone who makes the destination clear, but if no one does it, I will ask them to listen to me and I will make it clear. Or else I will expose the weaknesses of every ideology now going. We'll destroy the illusions and leave only what is real, human, meaningful, practical, and beautiful.  What side are you on? I'm on the side of those who believe when you say one plus two or two plus one. One, stop all the killing. Two, feed all the people.  The pacifists are right on the first part, but don't know how to accomplish either part effectively. And if you switch causes or the order of the causes as you want to, my dear Carl, you don't really solve, you put off. And maybe that's the best you think you can do. But I'm on the side that can do better. Find a way to make it work. A comradely embraced and sisterly love, all power to the people. To arm is to harm. There are stronger forces than guns to make a new world. Find them. Love, Judah. Hercetia's brilliant yellow behind the house, a cherry tree blossoms across the road, but Brecht said, we live in an age when to speak of trees is almost a crime. Love. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so, so powerful and true. Philip. And thank you. It really is beautiful to hear those words for context for the folks at home. The Living Theater's Passover was historically for years, I'd say, sort of a hot event. I think internally was also an important one. And so, at this time of year, close to when Judith passed and also around Passover. It's really moving to hear that. I'm going to read from Julian Beck's diaries. He was Judith's partner and an art and life and co creator of the Living Theater. And this is a series of questions that are written in Julian's diaries. I love questions and I think that they are a good foundation for an artistic practice. And so I'm going to read these out and if there's anything that you think I'm going to keep thinking about that then I think that's good. This was written in 1963. I end with questions, because I have no answers. Of three broadcasts on the life of the theater delivered over station WBA I New York City. This was the third. What is the difference between questions and answers. Is Hamlet questioning his glory, or his tragedy. Why do you go to the theater. Is it important to go to the theater. Is it important to read. Do people who go to the theater differ from people who don't go to the theater.  When you leave the theater, have you changed that is of course you are changed by each moment of experience so three hours later, you are naturally different but I mean, have you changed actively. Do you want to change actively. Are you content. Is it good to change. Is anything sufficient unchanged. What am I talking about. Do you go to the theater for answers. Do you have any questions. How long is a lifetime. Does it matter what happens. Does it matter how long we live. Does it matter how we live. Why do I ask these simple questions that everyone must be asking all the time is it because I think you don't ask these questions. What is happening to us. What happens in the theater. Do you go to the theater to find out about life. Is it easier to observe life in the theater, or in the street. Have you experienced joy in the theater. Have you experienced joy in the street. What do you enjoy. Do you go to the theater for intellectual exercises. Do you go to the theater to find out if it has figured out what is going on. Do you go to the theater because it might be telling the truth. Is anything that is the truth. Do you go to the theater to see how well an actor can disguise himself as somebody else. Do you think that actors should try to personify excellent being. What is excellent being. Can an actor show you excellent being. Can an actor show excellent being. Can an actor show you excellent being. Can an actor show excellent being only when playing foust. What is insight. Do you use your insight. Is it easy to ask questions. What did Aristotle say about catharsis. Do you go to the theater for a purge. Do you ever remember being purged in the theater. Do you go to the theater with expectancy and hope is the theater a way of learning things you do not know. What is learning for are you certain of any answers are all things equal. Does anything have value. What is the difference between an elephant and a handkerchief. Should you put people in jail. Do you lie. Does it matter if you lie. How many times a day do you lie. Do you find that you have to lie to get along in this world. Are you content I ask again. Are you content with anything. Do you know how to love. Do you love. Are you loved. Do you know how to hate. And do you. Why do I prefer a disturbing theater to a pleasing theater though I like to please. Who are we where have we come from where we go and go gone. Who are the kings with diamonds in their eyes moping and mowing among our private shows. Barker must we love one another or die odd and what is the question Shakespeare Stein. Do you know that I have reached into my entrails and strewn them about the stage in the form of a question. Do you know that I do not know what else to do. Do you know that I need you.  What is useful. What is a good question. What is a way to find answers. What will knock down the prison walls. What is the way. What is the relationship between the actor and the spectator. What is speech. What is the important inquiry. Do we have time to ask all the questions which ones do you want to ask. Will you ask them now. What do we need. How can we get it. How can we touch one another. How can we make it happen. How can we make a theater which makes love love now. How can we make a theater which is worthy of the life of its spectators. How can we make a theater when we do not know any answers but only have vague hints about how to ask questions. I end with questions because I have no answers but what I want is answers. And in 1968. How do we feed all the people. How do we stop all the wars. How do we open the doors of all the jails. How do we disintegrate the violence. How do we obliterate racism. How do we get rid of money. How do we undo early death. How do we end militarism. How do we put an end to authoritarian systems. How do we end the class system thing. How do we find the answers to these questions. How do we do it now. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. These are a lot of questions and if theater is good for something it is actually good to ask questions and. Yes, I think someone said I think it was Bob Wilson who said he once was a substitute teacher and he wrote questions. The blackboard in his school but then he realized he wrote the answers and not the questions everybody laughed, you know, so it's cool. That's what you do. And that's also hopefully what we do is thank you all for participating. This is so kind and generous of you. Thank you all for jumping on Philip and see if I'm around and really, really thanks to how around for supporting this very long 12 hour event as you have suggested always supported us for our seagull talks and the 24 hour howl round event for India so this is so meaningful and important to us and we move over now to a very important. New York theater company part of the fabric of New York theater what makes New York theater New York theater it's the my theater company Ralph Pena is with us and his group, and I hope they are all with us can you all hear me. Yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic fantastic so welcome and we are already in the second half of our event the New York actors for Ukraine, expressing that your crisis in Ukraine the war is in our mind. And I would like to really thank you for helping us right away Ralph was the first who answered actually when I sent out the inquiry said of course and I think he wrote how can anyone say no to to participate so Ralph tell us a little bit about your company for all those who do not know about it and why is that so close to your heart. Well, my theater company is now in its 33rd season in New York were New York based but our mission has been to develop promote and produce new new plays and performance works written by Asian American playwrights. So we have centered Asian American lives in our company for since we began and now in the pandemic we've sort of reorganized and reassessed what who we are and what we need to do and in the midst of anti Asian violence that is on the rise in New York. One of the realizations we've had, we're talking to our communities that's been facilitated by Nancy this past year. Theater is not what our community needs at the moment, which they're very concerned about safety. And I think our role as artists is to respond to that and maybe not through theater, but to direct service. And that for us resonates with what's needed in Ukraine. Theater serves one thing, but it doesn't have to be just that we can become other things for our communities in times of crises. And I think that's what's happening now and we want to talk about that with Ken Leung and Jacob and Jesse and Nancy of how a cultural organization can change when the needs of the communities change and how you reprioritize your mission where artists still there but right now what's needed from us is to make sure that our people aren't getting hurt. And what's happening in Ukraine resonates with us. I also come from the Philippines and we'll talk about this later where militarization has been in place since the Marcos's regime in the 1980s and today that's still very much in place and there are indigenous tribes that have been subject to militarization and bombings and salvageings meaning people are killed. So what we've done we have a poem written by a student from one of these tribes, an open letter to students in Ukraine. And yes, so that's what that's what we're going to start with, Martin. Okay. Thank you. Should we, to everybody want to please introduce themselves first Nancy. Yeah. Hi, I'm Nancy below lock how and I am the community outreach liaison for my theater. And I worked with them on their plus this this past show at the public theater, the Chinese lady. Jesse. Hi there my name is Jesse Jay who and I'm an associate with my theater company it's so great to be with you here today. Jacob. Hi my name is Jacob Carter they then pronouns and I am very excited to be on this panel to discuss this today. Associate producer with my theater company and I'll pass this along to Ken. I'm a young and I'm an actor I've known I've been associated with my East since the mid 90s. So I'm a longtime friend of the theater company. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for taking time on this holiday weekend actually so really thank you. We're going to start with this poem and this poem again was written by a poet in the Philippines from the Philippines. It is a letter. I'm going to read it first in Filipino and then Ken will read it later in English. Okay, I'm going to read it first in Filipino and then Ken will read it later in English. I'm going to read it first in Filipino and then Ken will read it later in English. My dear fellow students, I see your picture. One is opening a book. Another is clipping paper. Someone else is using crayons. I see you putting stickers on paper. We are students in the midst of war. I am very impressed by how prepared you are for anything that might happen at any minute. Three short bursts of sirens means there is a fire. The long continuous peeling of church bells means a bomb is on its way. These are worthy lessons to memorize. They are reminders of imminent danger. They also mean the difference between life and death. These are the lessons my tribe learned when they burned our homes and killed our teachers. We understood that violence is the favorite language of governments, especially against native peoples protesting against the mining operations of foreign corporations. In the wars of the world's most powerful, we are the small, dispensable cons trapped in the middle. So don't wonder why the lessons carved into our hearts are those of rising up and defending our rights. It might spell death, but we will fight until it equals freedom. Thank you, Ken. And thank you, Joy, for that poem. As we were preparing for this, we wanted to take a conversation that is sort of pressing for our communities here, because I think that's what we can talk about. I think one of the things that we immediately said to ourselves that there's no way for us to sort of try to imagine what it's like for the people in Ukraine at the moment. I mean, we're in our living rooms and safe. So what we thought we would do was to talk about what's happening here and maybe find a way to relate to what's happening there. They're not equal, but it does involve sort of artists responding to what's happening in their communities and the crisis. We're not at war here like they are over there. No bombs are falling on us, but our people are in danger. Our communities are in danger. So we wanted to talk about that. And the jumping off point, I think, first of all, that poem was written based on that photograph that appeared, I think in a newspaper from Ukraine showing school children trying to study in the middle of all the bombs falling on them. And that's the response of another student from another country. But we had just finished production of The Chinese Lady at the public, which is sort of an account of the first woman, don't hold, go back. There's a first woman Chinese first female to land in the United States in 1834. And then the subsequent things that she saw and experienced all the way to the end of the century. And a lot of that included the Anti-Chinese Exclusion Act and violence against the Chinese community. And so part of what we did was we convened public forums and invited the Asian American communities to come and attend these things to talk about how they're feeling given the current moment. As you know, in the United States, even in New York, the violence against Asians has been on the rise, specifically unleashed by our great President Donald Trump when he attributed the virus to the Chinese and to Asian peoples. That unleashed a torrent of violence against Asians in the United States. And it has just grown exponentially, actually. And recently, another communities of color in Sunset Park were attacked. All of this is sort of compounded, but I think Nancy, for example, was key in organizing these community forums and bringing consultants and experts to help our audiences sort of react to that. But yeah, I'm going to ask Nancy to talk about those forums and what they, what they've meant. Yeah, Ralph brought me on to the Chinese lady to help reach out to our community. And as he said, right now, you know, specifically in New York City, there's like a 300% increase in violence against Asian Americans, Asian American Pacific Islanders. And our community feels very scared and very unheard and alone. And there is a sense of hopelessness for the AAPI community in New York City right now. And when Ralph brought me on, he said that he really wanted to create, not a talk back for the shows, but a space and a forum. And he was very clear several times that he didn't want hosts or moderators to come in and tell people how they should feel. He didn't want it to be prescriptive. He wanted us to create a space that was safe for people to share how they're feeling. And so, you know, we did that and we brought great hosts in who are on the ground doing the work, doing trainings and de-escalation and situational awareness and who are working directly with communities impacted. And so we were able to do four forums and we were very moved by the fact that we were actually able to make that space where the audience was talking to us and the audience was using the opportunity to say how scared they were and how alone they felt and saying things that maybe they weren't saying to their friends and family. And it was really an honor for us to be able to create that. And, you know, I've said to Ralph that, so Ralph has, Maiyee has created a standalone series separate from the shows to do these forums in other spaces across the city to help other theaters serve their AAPI constituents. And we also want to try to help other fields reach out and make safe spaces. And, you know, we were kind of debriefing and talking about the future. And I, you know, it's kind of obvious, but I felt that the reason that the forums were successful was not even because of how we formatted it, but because of the Chinese lady, because of the work, because of the way the work made people feel. And it, you know, it was really the perfect segue for people to understand their connection to history and how that connects to the moment that we're in now. And it was really, you know, a confluence of factors that that helped us touch the community and for the community to touch us as well. I'm going to ask you a little bit to tell me what happened with Dash, your son and what he said, arts function. Yes. So my son is six. And because I wear it because of how things are, he has had to come with me to the forums in the evening, he's attended all the forums. He's seen the Chinese lady, and he's also here so he might say something when he hears me saying this. But, you know, there was, there was a shooting as Ralph mentioned on the subway recently in Sunset Park, and the shooter he shot 33 bullets he injured 10 people. And so Dash will school is close to the stuff in proximity to the stop and so his school was in a soft lockdown. And, and we had to talk to the kids later about it, because we knew they were going to hear it from older kids. And, you know, I told Dash, and he said, Okay, well, what happens if we see him on the street and I said, Well, we'll have to call the police and he said, Well, what if he sees us call the police and I said, Well, we're going to move and then call the police and so he had practical, very pragmatic questions, despite the violence that we were discussing. And, you know, we went to bed and we woke up the next morning, and I was making him breakfast getting him ready for school, and he was laying down on the couch and I could hear him crying. And I asked him, you know what, what was wrong, what happened. And he told me that he was just thinking about. He was just thinking about an episode of his favorite show larva, and I asked him to describe the show to me that what he would the scene that he was talking about. And he said that all the friends, please. All the friends got into boats, and they were on the water. And no, but can I tell it the way I heard it. All the friends got into separate boats. Yes, all of the friends got into separate boats, and they fell asleep. And they drifted apart. And when they woke up, they drifted apart. And when they looked behind them, they saw this beautiful son.  And I told him, you know, that's what art is. That is what art is for. Art helps us access feelings that we don't have the ability to really directly connect to. And I thought that, you know, it was, we've taken him to museums and shows and galleries his whole life and I've always wondered, you know, how to make him understand what art is for. And, and, you know, it was a Netflix show about maggots. But really, I'm going to mute myself. Frank, can you have anything to say? Yeah, well, to piggyback off that, I think not only the receivers of art, but we as artists, you know, we often, we make art to express what we can't by other means. And I think at a time like this, when, you know, even make it making it to the theater safe and sound is uncertain, that it, it takes real bravery to keep doing that to keep making our art. And as far as the question of what our role is, I think we, we stay in it, while not knowing stuff, you know, not knowing how to help, how to respond just because in making our art we're saying, okay, we're here, we're still here. We don't know what we're doing. We can't assume we know how you feel, but we're here. And I think that's when art is, you know, serves, serves its highest purpose. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jacob. Absolutely. And I think that, you know, when we are looking to create art as artists, and when we find any sort of external stimulus that is maybe blocking us from giving our art to the people that we want. The people that we want to reach out to, we do have other options. And, and that as artists is reaching out to the community. That as artists is reaching out to our neighbors and saying, you know, checking in on our neighbors for whatever purpose or reaching out with our art to our other neighbors and really cultivating that community. And as, as we have done with our community but universally to check in and say, are you okay? Do you need water? Do you need food? What is it that you needed? How can I help to provide that? And I think that, like what Ken was saying, we have our art to create based on our experiences at a given time. And there is a time, there will be a time when sometimes you're not going to have the availability to profess that art or showcase that art and showcase the universal experience that we're feeling. And then that time that's when community driven experiences or community outreach is the next step to make sure that we as a community are being heard and being seen and being universally attributed to what is going on in the world. No, really, really, thank you. And I, and I would like to point out again how, how what a radical statement in the way it is what Ralph said and he really means it, you know, said our community, the first thing they need now is not theater. And this has come from a theater company that works together for 30 years, but they to think what is our meaning, what is our purpose, how can we help best. And I just recently also meant to talk of Claire Bishop, a great art historian who looks at the history of us with theater who said yes once bright showed the conflict on stage of mother courage and you learn something but just not doing what she did. And people did activism on the street and said let's organize communities as artists, but Black Lives Matter taught us people can organize they don't need artists. And she said what perhaps is the most significant things people can do now also in the visual art was is to give care. What you said to take care to check in how are you, you know, and, and to provide and to create safe spaces and yes, also do the art but perhaps go back to a side of what art can provide that has been not neglected but was not in the center of it and practically has shifted and actually your work is in it. A question to Ralph, Ralph, you said, I'm going to talk about the Philippines later. Tell us a little bit what parallels do you see between what's happening in Ukraine and your experience. Well, during the martial law years, Mark was really cracked down on any on all the dissidents in tandem with US forces who were visiting. He was basically propped up by the United States so he had military support, and they were bombing villages in the south, because they wanted them to submit to government rule there was a succession movement in the south saying we didn't want to be part of the Philippines.  And at the time I was a young student in theater. And again the question was, what kind of theater do we do when all of this is happening in the country. At the university we were they wanted to do Shakespeare and check off but that didn't make sense to me and to my colleague so what we did was we went to the streets and to the villages and we performed plays and skits that we wrote specifically about their conditions. And you know we use the Bawal technique meaning they could intervene they could they could shape how the story went. And it was in tandem with getting them supplies and all of that stuff but that to me, that to me underscored the theater and art has to be useful. We have to be of use to people and sometimes just performing doesn't cut it, especially when they're running away from bullets or hiding from bombs which is what's happening in Ukraine. Clearly there are people there but there are also artists there that affected by this and you know in times of calamity and in times of crisis and adversity artists somehow rise to the occasion that this feeds the artist's imagination they always come up with something that's relevant and I know that's going to happen in Ukraine. It's probably already happening if it wasn't happening maybe even before all of this started. But it's something that we want to support in any way we can obviously coming from here, and if anyone is listening there and want to want to reach out to us we're absolutely open to finding ways of helping with what we can. I think that's what we want to say with the art 30 minutes is that we want to be useful.  I think everybody who tells you this is right and this is wrong that these black and white people are lying to you the world is complex and one of the big things we are asked for is to live with contradictions to you know keep balance of things like in a dance, but really be on the side of justice progressive justice and to be on the right side of history and I think artists always have been what are what are plans what is coming up on the, we have a minute or two left what what is my planning. Well, Nancy is doing a series of anti Asian violence forms between now and December and we're actually partnering with multiple theaters off Broadway to host these things. And then we are going to launch a new play in August about the Korean war and the legacy of colonialism and violence, but it's told through Korean fables and children's stories. That's going to be at La Mama. And then we have other plants in the fall, but we're not ready to announce but we're back to live theater and digital programming but also really much half of all of our activities will be focused on taking care of our communities. And making space for them to feel safe and going to those communities you know because not everybody can come to Manhattan so we have to go to those places. I think that's part of that's part of our responsibility. Yeah, what a radical actor easy to say but to say you know what we now take care of our communities. We go to them and just just the place might not be in the center but we see that as part of our vision as our presumed cons work of doing art is actually to to do that we just so we come to the end of our set really would like to to thank you for responding so very, very early for taking this so seriously we had also some correspondence of what to do for bringing your team on and I think what you do is something every theater company that is presenting work and just a scrambling scrambling to get back and hopefully we can show the Michael Jackson video and then it's a renaissance to go back and set up what perhaps is kind of a revolution or something turning around doing something different and you guys do so thank you and I hope and thank you for organizing this thing this is such a really important thing for our community to get behind and come together and say you know we support Ukraine. Yeah, it is an important one so we're going to move over now to another company that you know also has like my he has a laughter, it's, it's traces it's footprint that's vision, it's mission on New York City, the big theater they are a part of the landscape, and we have the National Black Theater here with us and we would like to welcome national black and Jonathan is also a wonderful way we always try to make a transition so today and Jonathan thank you for being with us and I don't know if you had time to listen in a little bit to you know what your what your colleagues said, so what's going through your minds now in this situation. So they maybe we start with you yeah. I'm not sure if your sound is on is two years into the pandemic and I still forget to unmute. Thank you for having us Frank. And it is imperative that artists lend their voices New York theater artists lend their voices for Ukraine and you know what's on my heart right now is so much of the wisdom of our ancestors and our artists that have given us. Sorry, this is the lonely as he breaks in often. You know, none of us are free until we're all free my Angela said so that's what's on my heart right now but want to introduce ourselves. I'm Shade, I'm the CEO of Dr Barbara and tears National Black Theater in Harlem, and I am always privileged to be joined by. Hi my name is Jonathan Macquarie I'm the executive artist the director of National Black Theater. And so when you asked us if we would join and lend National Black Theater's voice to this urgent conversation of course we said yes and so Jonathan and I has been over the last two years that we've been navigating the pandemic and all of the different layers of pandemic we've been, you know, leaning in and listening to artists and so we've brought some of those voices here today in the form of quotes in the form of writers in the form of our pedagogy around art from the heart and service of healing. Fantastic. Tell a little bit about because we also have listeners from Europe from other countries, they might not all know about you. What is the National Black Theater, all about. Jonathan, you go. So National Black Theater, National Black Theater was founded in 1968 by a visionary leader by the name of Dr Barbara and tier. Also should be known as Shade's mom. She was the forebearer of the black arts movement for mother of the black arts movement and a really powerful black woman who really took the in the roots of upheaval and the roots of a lot of and the 1968 we think about that historically in American society, there's a lot happening and in the in the brink of that in the on the heels of that here comes a woman from East St. Louis who was actually taking on the reins of trying to figure out how to center the healing of black folk by telling their own story inside their own community. So, founded on Fifth Avenue 125th Street, National Black Theater since at the intersection of really trying to look at what you in the service of black liberation, how to create the conditions for human transformation. The equation, our theory of change is that black liberation plus place making plus art equals the conditions for human transformation so we're in the we're in the business of creating a container for all of us to be seen.  And so I think that I mean we have over we have a large track record of producing multiple different productions and large track record of workshops productions traveling around the world. We have a breath and a dexterity of actually training so many folks to give them an opportunity to actually propel. I like to say that we are like a launching pad for for for cultural for for cultural visionaries, to be able to have a fortified space, a foundation to be able to excel and exceed and go to their highest height so that's a little crash course and mbt Shade I don't know there's more that you want to add but that's that's a crash course. And that's a really wonderful crash course, I would also just say, my mother, Dr Barbara and tier. In founding the National Black Theater what she wanted to do was to create a home away from home. And that for us is so resonant in this moment of why we're gathering here for this 12 hours zoom of artistic expression is that we understand the power of having a home. And for black folks in this country in particular, who have been ripped from their home of Africa, and through migration forced migration, voluntary migration and immigration the colors of our story, all demand that in order for us to be able to seat our liberation, we are able to plant roots or acknowledge or recognize something as a home that when we are in the world doing what we do we can only do it. If we know that there's safe space that's holding space for our own creativity and liberation and so in BT was created to be a home away from home for black artists, no matter where they are at what point they are in their career, that there's a safe space and that there's a space calibrated for their liberation and energetically spiritually and emotionally holding space for them to rise and fly and I would just add that to the crash course of what in who in BT is we are hyper local in Harlem, but we're also global as the diaspora calls our space home. And this is important that you point out the loss of home or Heimat as the Germans say, you know two or three million people have left that country, you know, mostly women, young children, men are left elderly people couldn't leave. And so, yes, this is something to everyone here who thinks about our creates that is so close to our thoughts. I think to your mind as a response you see you guys that we selected some voices we brought something what what what were you thinking about. It's it's made it's mainly a roll call of quotes from various by Poc visionaries who kind of lean into the curiosity of discomfort, I'm laying to the curiosity of also what is radical liberation look like. And I were just going to read those quotes and then hopefully just having a discourse and dialogue with you Frank around what stems from it. What does it mean to embody these quotes was it mean to actually have these quotes live inside of this context, and also utilizing this IP as a way as a potentially a North Star to think about how do we create a sad in this moment knowing that it will probably take generations in order to find healing. However, it is all possible in our lifetime, and that there is potential in allowing for the lessons of this moment to show up and not necessarily the trauma. How do we get there and not saying that has happened right now not saying that it has to happen three days from now, but it's understanding that in order for civilization to have the echoes of hope, the echoes of faith, the echoes of a new dawn, there has to be a conversation around how do we how do we learn from from what we what the tragedies that are ahead of us, so that we can find the common ground that allows for the bleeding not to happen but the healing to happen. So, without further ado, we're just interested in reading quotes and sharing sharing some wisdom that spans a lot of time and a morium. So you'll hear some elders in the room and you hear some contemporaries in the room. And you mentioned BIPOC, not everybody might know it if you can just very shortly explain listeners from Europe. BIPOC is an anachronism that can be controversial, we'll say that, but it stands for black, indigenous people of color. It's an umbrella that many folks, not all folks use to speak about black, indigenous and people of color, the umbrella of folks of color. I'm going to start with the bowl of this moment and read Tony Morrison, who says, in times of crisis, this is in times of crisis, this is precisely the time when artists go to work. There's no time for despair, no place for self pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilization heals. And then this time we are called as artists to lend our voice to ensure that civilization heals. What we fear is happening has happened for centuries. And no one has stated it better than Frederick Douglass, when he says, where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them. Neither reason nor property will be safe. And so, as Maya Angelou always says, the truth is none of us are free until everyone is free. This is the struggle that, you know, black identified bodies have had for centuries. This is a unifying, rallying call for liberation for folks across the world in all of our histories, but poignantly in the black experience. And lastly, before Jonathan goes into a seminal quote from Adrian Marie Brown, I would just read this quote from James Baldwin. It says, ignorance, allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. Jonathan. And so I'm going to read a quote from Adrian Marie Brown's Emergent Strategy. Many folks out there who are listening might know the book. It's a book that really looks at how nature and how the world can help shift how we think about policymaking and how we think about how we flock, how we think about movement building. And she pens in the book. P.S. if there happens to be a multitude of grease upon you, individual or collective or fast or slow or small or large, at equal parts of these considerations, that the broken heart can cover more territory that perhaps love can only be as large as grief demands that grief is the growing up of the heart that birth boundaries like an old skin or finished life. That grief is gratitude that water seek scale that even your tears seek the recognition of community that the heart is at the front line, and the fight is to feel in a world of distractions that death might be the only freedom that your grief is a worthwhile use of your time, and your body will feel only as much as it is able to that the ones that you grieve may be grieving you that the sacred comes from the limitations that you are excellent at loving in all ways, and even in the spirit of people coming for this 12 hour marathon, and all ways of you staying on for all 12 hours spring, and all ways of the people who are listening to this on a consistent basis. There are always for anyone who was grieving in this moment that the echoes of that grief stems from a power that is that is unfathomably transformative which is love. That is because we love each other so deeply that is because we feel the law so epically that we are generated at that we are reminded in that action that we are excellent at loving. I want to end with this beautiful quote by Alice Walker which is healing begins where the where the where the wound was made that if we don't start talking about the spaces where wounds were made that we don't if we don't start having a conversations where the wounds were made. I think we ever have a reconciliation at the same time. So, that's really the quotes that we brought to be present with this conversation, knowing the epic tragedy of what, of what is the premise of making this marathon happen as practitioners who work in and making profound courageous safe gathering spaces for us to for us to stand in tow with our other fellow colleagues for in the New York City area, saying that we really we stand we stand with we stand beside we stand in concert with the many with the many many other voices who are working as purveyors of a very sacred act, which is to gather, which is to allow for the hearts and minds of individuals to be transformed Shade talks about that all the time. And how if we are to be able to allow for art to be the healing elixir that Shade talked about from that Tony Morrison uplifted, we have to allow for ourselves, not only to allow for this love passion of grief or this love passion that shows up to sustain us. We have to lean into the curiosity of truly truly truly leaning on each other and creating profound safe spaces yet again. Well, this is a very, very impressive and one can feel that almost generations, you know, stand behind you, you know, who speak to us through you and an experience actually lived experience as you said also of the black body. And today, you know, we heard also in some some of the Ukrainian artists over centuries, their country has been invaded, even so it was once part of the Greek Empire actually in some theorists say that's why they are different, you know, they are not used to kind of the image of the one person about that there are, you know, traces of that kind of older European idea of pluralistic and voices their language has been forbidden 142 times in like 200 years to be spoken even very often came from Russia but I like very much what you said I also like the Tony Morrison quote if there's a time of crisis it's time to go to work. Yeah, yeah, that's what they said what it means yeah. Yeah. You know, artists are the greatest tool in the translation of the human experience. The ability to be able to be a storyteller is the power of the pen. It is how we create bridges of understanding it is how we translate culture through time, it is what unites us, it is what grounds us in our humanity. And in times of crisis, that is when the artists go to work. So, often, we are paralyzed through the through our trauma through all of what we're experiencing. The idea of how to make sense of the senseless is the space in which the artist creates an alchemy by which there is a possibility for healing for transcending for transformation that all is not lost if the artist is in the room. And so as the most incredible and generational translators right when all generations come and they go when the artists come and go, what is left is art. And so the artist becomes the most important purveyor of how we have endured, but how we will ascend and transcend and so I think when Tony Morrison says there is no time for fear. In times of crisis, this is when we go to work, we use language, all the things that folks take for granted as a part of how we communicate are actually weapons in the artists arsenal in order for us to show up to be represented to feel seen, safe and sacred. And so that for me is what the Tony Morrison quote means and Jonathan, I don't know if you have some reflections on the quote. I mean, I was just the what was starting to come up for me was this was this notion of when when impact happens and it shifts the breath and what is the response after that breath is made. What after after you take in that breath after that exhale what is what is that what do you do with every breath afterwards like like on so on so many levels. I've been sitting with this idea of how does, how does courage and the etymology of courage which I which I got from Shade, which means the heart to be living in the space of the heart versus bravery which is live in the space of the muscle. Live inside the space of the heart and live in the space of the courage and breathe inside of that. What do artists get to do and how do artists then get to utilize that that courage space to then actually shift and change the molecular structure of their blood memory. That is the blood memory that is that that is being that's being etched right now and also blood memory that's being reminded right now. There's a there there there is something that is happening that is oozing out of our system that is causing us to react, and also to be reactionary. And, and how we and how we respond to it is the is it is it is the promissory note that we will not repeat the sins of our past, or the promissory note that we will evolve past it. And I think that there is there there is a beautiful inside of all inside of all tragic moments, there is a beautiful love note that can be found amongst all of the tragedy. And if we are able to lean into the beauty, the beauty that can be housed inside of it, we can then begin to etch a new fertile ground, a volcano teaches us so much. It destroys in its path, but it also fertilizes the ground in which it stands. And so, not to say that we need to rush to getting to fertile, not to say we need to rush to making to making beautiful art yet again. But it is a it is a note that nature teaches us that that in this time of tyranny, like slate like I mean black folks and African American tradition can talk about it slavery being one of those right. The promissory note was not held inside the bodies of black and brown of my ancestors when they were on on whatever cotton field sugar cane field, whatever it was, they didn't have the promissory note of joy, or the promissory note of a future, inside of their body, my existence would not be present for you to interact with today. We wouldn't have such things as light bulbs or as peanut butter or even a machine to help us try clean our clothes, the mathematic wisdom to take us to the moon would not have shown the promissory note that comes from the devastation is the fertilization of a new dawn a new day, and that the wisdom that life teaches us that we look at history from its cake from its complicated space, but also it's loving space, and we don't water it down to be semantic with kind of how we want to the appetite, and which we kind of like one things popcorn style really quickly, that we actually live in the complications of it, we will find that there is there is there is there is something to be housed in in moments like this, that it creates the cocoon for new possibilities to be transformed and trans morphed so that we can become the butterfly, we can transform into becoming something that we did not know but was always laid inside of us to be more human, and not to be conditioned by the constant POV. No, this is, it's a powerful message and I think it's a message, you know, and the lesson over centuries, you know, when it seemed hopeless but that art has to be on the side of life. Bob Wilson also talked about today is that you know we have to be hopeful, our art is to be hopeful, and it brings communities together. I like what you said about the wound, you know, and that healing actually starts there is that German artist Joseph Boyce always said show your wound, you know, that for art as an artist but also as a country or as people and I had a conversation with Victoria Kopsinetsky who was working for Voice of America, you know, they might cover this, and she said what do you think? How come this happened again? She said I'm Russian, we said war should never happen again. Stalinistic times should never happen again.  And perhaps an answer is that the killings of the Stalinism, you know, the 60 million people some say died, you know, of famine, of cleansing, of political repression. It was never talked about. On the contrary, he was taken away. Yeah, no, can I just say this is this this that is the wound, right? It's the wound, as you have described it with Stalinism, it is the wound of apartheid, it is the wound of transatlantic slavery and without truth and reconciliation, without, you know, shining a blinding light into the cracks, there cannot be a change day. And I, and what we want to say is the National Black Theater is that we stand in solidarity and we stand on the front line, as we have always stood on the front line. And the important part of this moment in time is that we are gathering, and we're using technology to find new and innovative ways to gather together because, as Audrey Lord has said, as Maya Angelou has said, until if I am not free, then none of us are free. And so for all of the viewers that are in Europe, for all of the viewers that are around the world for Black American folks, African American folks, for Black diaspora folks across the globe that are listening today, we stand in solidarity. We all have our story of how we have persevered, of how we have been tried to be extinguished. And each and every one of us are artists, as artists, are seeds. They tried to, what's the beautiful quote, they tried to extinguish us, but they didn't know we were seeds. And so we are planting today in all ways the seeds of hope, the seeds of healing, the seeds of creativity, which ultimately will root and be the fruit by which we all, you know, see a day in which we can be truly free, where liberation is our birthright each and every one of us. And so we have to find ways to be more human and to connect. And so we're grateful to be here, to be invited by you, Frank, to just meditate on what's happening in Europe, but also to bring the present pulse realities of what's happening here in the United States and what has for over 400 years. And that we stand in solidarity. Yeah, yeah, and that hopefully that kind of engagement was the truth. The word is real, you know, that people do listen to what you, your stories, the things you present, you know, and, and what you work about and that this is actually a significant contribution, you know, towards also the healing here in this country that hopefully will prevent developments, you know, that at the moment, hopefully unthinkable, but we do not know the ice of civilization is slim. That's what everybody says, you know, who lived long enough. And it's just, it's because, and I just have to say it's the power of convenings like this that bring intersectional voices together that that are not are outside of that that they stretch outside of silo and live inside of the nuance of what does it mean to be human. And the quest of stretching outside of the silo is the elixir and the SAV, because we are so conditioned through the multiple different ways we have defined ourselves and lived ourselves as a society, a global society a local society, an American society to start to silo and to generate from a space of solitude, instead of actually going across the line and understanding that the line was never there we actually put the line there, and then we have the opportunity to erase it with every breath that we take, and every step that we make and every action that we have. And if we can, and that doesn't mean to lose culture and lose the cultural nuance and dexterity that makes us unique and special and powerful. What it does mean is that it understands my cultural nuance is not predicated on my imperialistic notion of yours, or my denigration of yours. It actually lives in its abundance when I start to understand the space of your of the beauty of how you show up in the world with the beauty of how I show up in the world, and that there is enough space for all of us. There is enough space for all of us. And I would just say it as our timelines down. I think the thing that's really key in this. And this is the work of the National Black Theater and so many of our colleagues we just saw my theater right before we came is the degree in which history wants to not to erase our humanity is the relationship to how our ability to exist so if there is one thing that we chant and that we you know that we pour into all of our work is how do we find more ways to create the conditions where you see us as human that these are not headline stories these are human beings when the forefathers of the United States pinned black people into the Constitution as three fifths of a man, they did that intentionally to be able to continue to erase us or to use us as each channel as animal. And if we were seen that way then we could be a race, we could have violence done against our bodies and it not seen as anything different than you would do to a dog. As we traverse this as we lean into the alchemy of what it is to be an artist what it is to be an artist is to, you know, put on a pedestal, the ideals of our humanity, and that we each and every one of us deserve to be seen and to experience what we are experiencing through the heart, mind and spirits of a human experience, a soulful experience that is rooted in our humanity. So I see our colleagues are coming on. Come on Kate say hello and Nicole and to your to your colleagues from the National Black Theater. Hello. Hi. Good to see you. Well Frank, I just want to say I hope you're drinking lots and lots of water. I hope you're drinking lots of water. This is a beautiful marathon. It is so beautiful to see our next the next company that's coming in with so much light and love and really thank you for orchestrating I know that takes a lot of weight to do this. And there's so much wisdom being shared that I think I think there's a transformation upon foot of what you have started and hopefully it becomes not a tradition because of the incident, a tradition because it's necessary. And that we don't need the incident in order to make this happen as a necessary precipice, we just need to love to want to be in space with one another again, and to transmute and again take away the line the line was never there. There's so much craft to it. So what does it mean to erase. And these events help to erase it just a little bit more. So thank you so much. Thank you that means a lot to me and thank you both for taking the time I know how busy you are how much you work and it is a holiday weekend. Thank you. Thank you guys and I hope maybe you later. So the play company which is I think one of the great companies in New York like the National Black Theater like my ego we had before and others, because it is a company that said we work and show and present global work, as we now say planetary work stuff from the planet, and not just you know, in our neighborhood of the well made British play. So welcome everybody Kate and Stacy Nadine and Nicole Kate maybe a few words about the play the play company we know there's a players club but you are the play company. Yeah, we are not the players club. So, so yeah, may I may I go into what I prepared to say before we start. Okay. Thank you. So, hello, hello everybody. I'm Kate law walled. I'm the founding producer of play co in New York. And we're honored to be here alongside so many colleagues from the New York theater community, and to be sharing our readings with everyone joining today and front thank you so much for inviting us to be part of this play co is dedicated to producing an international program of new work for the theater. We explore the work of artists from around the world to uplift curiosity about each other as human beings to open channels of communication and understanding and to expand the cultures and lived experience represented on the American stage. The courage and the perseverance of the Ukrainian people is a light for the world. There are many artists taking up arms there now to defend their country. It is deeply humbling to be here today, offering words, but we see that words do have power, because there is so much effort to silence them. So we offer them in the spirit of solidarity and hope. Today are the actors Nadine Malouf, Nicole Shaloub and Stacy Yan, beloved members of our play co community. Nadine is joining us from backstage at the public theater where she's currently performing Nicole from Oklahoma city where she's filming a project and Stacy from Indiana where she's currently teaching. So we're tuning in from around the United States. This group came together when Playco produced a play called Intractable Woman, a theatrical memo on Anna Polatkovskaya by the Italian playwright Stefano Mussini translated by Paula Wing in the fall of 2018. She produced the play to share the story of the journalist Anna Polatkovskaya, a fierce protector of truth, who was murdered in 2006 as she entered her apartment building in Moscow. And to draw attention to threats to journalists and free speech, while the Trump presidency was degrading the values our country is supposed to uphold. Today, which focused on Anna's accounts of Russia's second war in Chechnya has been echoing in our minds again since this Russian war against Ukraine began. For today's presentation, we've worked with the director and a designer from that production, Lee Sunday Evans and Masha Simring, to put together readings that we'd like to share today. I also want to thank Charlene Aviambo from Playco for her contribution. Lee has put this together in the style of our production, where Nadine, Nicole and Stacey together played the voice of Anna Polatkovskaya. They're together again today as three voices and one voice. So now I will turn it over to Nicole, Stacey and Nadine. We are a group of actors. A few years ago, we did a play about the journalist Anna Polatkovskaya. By the way, Anna was born in New York City to Ukrainian parents. Her parents were Soviet diplomats posted to the UN by the Soviet government. Play was written by Stefano Messini and it was an important project for all of us. It was important because Anna was such a dedicated reporter committed to telling the truth about the Second Chechen War and Putin's abuses of power there. It was also important because Anna was killed and telling her story, even though it ended in such a brutal act of needless violence, was a way that we could celebrate her and learn from her and grieve the loss of her life, her voice, her passion, her writing and honor, her courage, her dedication to truth telling in the face of unfathomable opposition. Today, we want to read some pieces of text inspired by the style of the play that we did. A tribute to the theater of Maria Pol. A poem, part of a new play by a Ukrainian writer. An excerpt from one of Anna's books. Part of a Facebook post from a young Russian journalist we met while making the play. A way to send our love to everyone in Ukraine, everyone who is fighting to survive and resist in the face of the senseless war. Playwright Stefano Messini wrote, this was the theater of Maria Pol. It was hit by an artillery strike with a thousand refugees inside. The theater is a place always in which human beings show the best of themselves. A place of words, of verses, of beauty, of bodies, of visions, of sets sculpted and painted, of costumes drawn and sewn, a place of questions and of memories. In sum, the best that humanity can express. Tonight, the Maria Pol drama theater was destroyed. It no longer exists. It lies in ruin. And they are excavating to save the survivors of the crowd of people who found in a theater this time a physical refuge, not just a symbolic one against the evil of the world. The theater welcomed them, as theaters always have throughout the history of the world, theaters that were created for the good of all who enter them. This is why the tragedy of the theater of Mary Pol is a catastrophe that cannot pass in silence in theaters around the world. As a man of the theater, I am struck and pained as I have never been. Therefore, I will try to launch to all those who make theater a simple proposal. Each theater this weekend will display a large M on their front door. It will be like all the theaters are the theater of Maria Pol, and as such, in part, will also be struck. That social media post was written by playwright Stefano Massini on March 16th. We want you to know, all of those who are listening, that many theaters, including some in New York City, did post an M on the doors. So that audiences saw when they walked in, tonight, this is the theater of Maria Pol. Today, Maria Pol endures in the face of continued violence and destruction. Now we are going to read a poem by the Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky. This is from the book Dancing in Odessa, published by Tupelo Press. The poem is titled, Author's Prayer. If I speak for the dead, I must leave this animal of my body. I must write the same poem over and over, for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender. If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge of myself. I must live as a blind man who runs through rooms without touching the furniture. Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking, what year is it?  Even sleep is a prayer. Lord. I will praise your madness, in a language not mine, speak of music that wakes us. Music in which we move, for whatever I say, is a kind of petition, and the darkest days must I praise. Next, we are going to read part of a Facebook post. It was written by the journalist and activist, Elena Kotchuchenko, who was vowed to be a professional witness to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We met her in New York City. She was a fellow at Columbia University when we were doing the play about Anna Politkovskaya, intractable woman. She was living in and out of a kind of temporary exile, because... She did an interview in 2015 about Russia's military presence in Ukraine, which put her in danger. Also, Elena works at the Russian independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, which is where Anna worked. Novaya Gazeta has been forced to stop operating now, but Elena continues to post from the Ukraine. We thank Masha Simring for this translation of her words. I want to thank the Ukrainians who helped me from the moment when I, without money, cards blocked, and without connection, no roaming with the aggressor country. But with a Russian passport at night, ended up behind a border checkpoint in the village of Shakhini. From this moment on, you, your love of your country, your courage and faith, not me and my readers in the Russians, made my work possible. Thank you. I thank the decoders who followed me through the sounds of morgues, hospitals, destroyed houses. This is one hell of a job. Half of you refused to take money for the work or asked to transfer your payment to a human rights project. I thank my dear editorial office who sent me to war, believed in me, protected me and waited for my texts in my return. Beloved, I have no words, and there's no one closer to me. I have things to be finished before I can, before I could be imprisoned in my homeland under new criminal charges. Now I have a few months of work and sleeping in a safe place ahead of me. It will take time to finish what I started. This is a poem that Elena posted on Instagram a few weeks ago. We thank Masha Simring for sharing it and translating it for us. It's cold. The Metro has become strange by Fyodor Svarkovsky. Svarovsky. The Metro has become strange. Passengers are disappearing. At first we did not notice. But the number gone is growing. The station has leaked into the papers. Relatives are complaining. They are writing reports to the police. The rumors. After midnight, not long before the Metro's closing hour, on certain lines, new stations are appearing. Station seashore. Thunder by the river. Mountain meadows and meadows. Dark night in the woods. Open space. Station, ship. Station, dusk. The doors open carefully. You have half a minute to think. Beyond the doors, the shores of an island in the ocean. Clouds on a cliff. Pines, palms. The smell of oak and maple. Firm feathers crunch on the feet and porcupines. They say the stations are quantum. Unreal, but many still leave. This is an excerpt from a new play by the Ukrainian writer Irina Garrett, a founder of the playwright's theater in Kiev. It was translated by John Friedman and Natalia Brados and commissioned by the Center for International Theater Development. Which reached out to Ukrainian writers to give them work, if possible, during this time. Here's an excerpt of the play. Dwarf breeds of apple trees. They take up less space and they match my height. They bloom and smell wonderful in the spring when I can approach them and smell their blossoms without climbing up on a ladder. In the fall, I will collect their sweet fruits. Sources on the internet say the trees will bear fruit in the third year after the seedlings are planted. I'll wait. The main thing is to talk with my neighbor. He has a tractor and we have abandoned overgrown land. We recently bought a house with land in the village. We threw all of our efforts into remodeling the house, but never touched the land. We spent a long time thinking about what would grow here. One needs love and humanity in these days of rage and hatred. My youngest daughter is pregnant and terribly frightened. He called to tell me there was an air raid alarm and because she was on the street and did not know where to hide, my arms and legs began to tremble. But it's no big deal. No big deal. I repeat to myself constantly. It's nothing. You just must wait, struggle and suffer the pain. It's like giving birth. Then you look at the baby and think, wow, good for me. I did it. We will cope. I want to balance anger with love and tenderness. My pregnant Dasha picked up a little mutt named Bun at the shelter. Bun entertains my child and relieves some of the anxiety. My husband and I have a second dog, Squirrel. We love our little one. But to be honest, she looks like a little bat. Most important, the formerly homeless Bun and Squirrel are full of love for us. You need balance. My grandmother, who is half Tatar, was supposed to inherit a huge apple orchard from her Tatar grandparents. But she didn't. First, the Soviet government took away the apple orchard and destroyed the trees. Even if she had managed to inherit it, she would not have been allowed to do anything, acquire a profession or earn a living. I think, could it be my fault that the war started? Maybe my thoughts about the new apple orchard were interpreted as some absolute evil, a kind of mordor that rejects everyone who loves, creates and generates something that destroys for centuries anything that is capable of creating happiness and giving life. When watering the apple tree, take care with the supports under the fruit-laden branches. The next to last text we're going to read is an excerpt from the prologue to Anna Politkovskaya's 2002 book about the war in Chechnya. Who am I? And why am I writing about the Second Chechen War? I'm a journalist, a special correspondent for the Moscow newspaper, Nuvaya Gazeta. And this is the only reason I've seen the war. I was sent there to cover it. Not, however, because I am a war correspondent and know the subject well. On the contrary, because I am just a civilian. The editor-in-chief's idea was simple. The very fact that I'm just a civilian gives me that much deeper understanding of the experiences of other such civilians living in Chechen towns and villages who are caught in the war. That's it. For that reason, I've been going to Chechnya every month since July. Naturally, I have traveled far and wide through all of Chechnya. I've seen a lot of suffering. It has been such a terrible war. Simply medieval, even though it's taking place as the 20th century passes into the 21st and in Europe, too. People call the newspaper and send letters with one in the same question. Why are you writing this? Why are you scaring us? Why do we need to know this? I'm sure that this has to be done for one simple reason. As contemporaries of this war, we will be held responsible for it. The classic Soviet excuse of not being there and not taking part in anything personally won't work. So I want you to know the truth. The very last thing we'll read. Is a kind of blessing, a prayer. A hope. A poem. Let there be new flowering by Lucille Clifton. Let there be new flowering in the fields. Let the fields turn mellar for the men. Let the men keep tender through the time. Let the time be rested from the war. Let the war be won. Let love be at the end. Thank you all so much. Billy, thank you all. I mean, that is just such a powerful, powerful combination of the material and words. And thank you for your sincerity in preparing it and delivering it. And how does it feel to question the actors to speak those lines? I don't want to speak for my fellow castmates, but we did Intractable Woman, the show about Anna Politkovskaya, in 2018. And she has not left us. Her words, her work, her life's passion and pursuit and spirit have not left us. And so to return to that spirit is unfortunate, given the situation in the world today and ongoing, but feels powerful to convene in this way. Yeah. Okay. No, no, go ahead. Over the past few years, but obviously more recently, we sometimes check in as a group. Or even like some of the three of us, the actors and me, the director on text or whatever about little news bits or things, whether it's stories about certain journalists or things that are chilling that are happening.  Did you see Elena's post? Did you see, you know, what's happening? You know, it's funny. I have to say that one of the more profound moments for me in that, in the play that we did was the experience of meeting the Elena, who's the young reporter who works at Novoia, and having her present for our first read through. And then she came back and saw the show and she had gone traveling all over the country. And I've always liked to check in when she posts on social media just to see the incredible work that she's doing. So, yeah, I've been, I've been in particular thinking of her a lot because she's, you know, she's part of the legacy of Anna and she's experiencing this all. And I hope and pray for her safety and her work and hopefully Novoia Gazeta will be able to open again and be able to report independent journalism in Russia. Yeah, it's very personal for all of us. I think just getting to know so much about Anna and all the other journalists who put themselves at risk and continue to report after being poisoned and harassed and their families as well. And like, it's changed the entire way that I look at any war and any independent media coverage. And I think like one of the most, and it's taking me back to that time, but it's forever with me, like Nadine was saying, like it's never left. And like, when we were working on that play, we had a lot of journalists come to see that Kate had organized some, you know, talk backs with like certain local online journalists and others. And that like, it was so meaningful for them too to see some of them who knew Anna and also just reflecting on their own journeys abroad and covering either war or personal stories in places that don't get to be covered. So it's just so, it's just so important, especially the way that the war on Ukraine is being covered and we're watching before our eyes, no via Gazeta being, you know, closed down. And yeah, so it's been, yeah, it was really great to get together and thank you for, you know, letting us be a part of this. What does it mean to you? Well, just listening to what Nicole and Stacey and Nadine were saying, you know, sometimes I, I think about the fact that we're doing theater and what does that really do? And I do feel that on a one-on-one basis or maybe on a, you know, on the basis of each audience that we perform for, sometimes you are able to sort of plant something in someone's heart or someone's mind that does reverberate. And certainly, as has been said, the experience of producing that play and, you know, other plays that Placo has been able to produce. You know, I was thinking before today, like I said earlier, I'm thinking of playwrights in Ukraine who have guns in their hands right now. And here we are with words. But words are powerful. They can be. And so it's very, it's very meaningful to be here today.  You know, whether we're together in a theater or together through technology like this, it's really important more than ever. Yeah, but also your work, actually what unites us with the journalists like Anna is the search for truth. I think it is really what you all are doing on stage as actors, the writers as writers. Kate as a producer and artistic director. And it is a strong play. It's a great play. Everybody loves Lehman trilogy so much, with Stefan also wrote, but I think this is a play that, you know, goes to the heart, you know, of making art and being a testimony and a witness. What theater does, what writers do, what producing means. And it's one of the great productions of the play company with, they were sponsored the Sacram binder or Guillermo Calderon's Villa and they were really engaged with the story and they stay with us. And they're not like television shows where they are like sugar, soda, drink and you forget what happened. You don't forget when you saw this play. It changed you as, I never look at news again the same, you know, so something happened. And also it became true whenever the Gazeta will be published again, it will be a free country, you know, so we'll see where it goes. But I really, really want to thank you for taking this so serious, for preparing so well, for delivering so beautifully. There's a very, very significant, you know, work and also the life of a person, entire life, someone who got killed for searching for the truth, for not backing down and for continuing to work, even so people's old children, you should know it in a way in antiquity, you know, of our times who says, you know, I care about the dead, I care about the corpses in Chakni at the time or reporting on the Ukraine what their colleague does now. So it's a very powerful thing. We want to really, really thank you and we already have the next group, Fesbanrynd is here and Moje and perhaps also Bernice Miller from John Jay College who over the last decade also engaged deeply, I think with Eastern Europe. So first of all, welcome everybody, but all of you, thank you. I hope to see it again. I hope you will put this episode up on the Playco website and send it out. We send you a link. This was very powerful and very strong and like all the contributions today, really, truly meaningful. It also shows what theater can do if we really ask what influence, what can we show, what can we do? This is an example actually what it is. Thank you so much and Fes, are you there? And all of you, bye-bye and thank you. Bye-bye. And Kate and again, thank you Stacey for being with us. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. It looks like Fes and Anne are upside down. Anne is here. Yeah. Yes. Oh, good. That's better. Yes. Wait one second. I got to do this video. Anne, maybe you too. You could move it around. We see you upside down. Yes, that's perfect. Yes. Yes. Ah. Yes. Here we are. And welcome. Both of you. We felt strongly that also CUNY stages, in a way it's represented CUNY is a, a large university system with 21 colleges, but actually a 16 or 17 of them have theaters. They have theater programs. It's not as well known. It's never been as richly endowed. Like our private colleagues at NYU or Columbia, but nevertheless it's important work. And the communities that are, that are also served relates layman college, John J college, LaGuardia, the Borough Manhattan community college, state and island, Brooklyn college, the programs, our colleagues put on is, it is stunning. But of course, today we went right away for this event to theft, who has been engaging in a way for a long time. For a long time in a deep way. And it's not just because of now what happened. And so I would like to welcome both of you and theft. Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do and about your work. Thank you, Frank. We'll tell you. I'm the chairman of our. Yeah. Hello. Renice here. Yes. He just joined. Hello. Oh, hooray. Hello everybody. Briefly, John J college of criminal justice. We are criminal justice college. And therefore our theater program is a minor. We don't give degrees, but we do the kind of theater research that other universities are not doing. Because we're focused on theater for social change. We're looking at theater, not merely as one of the humanities, but more research oriented, more background in the social sciences. We have a program called performance and justice. My research is very broad, but it did take me into Ukraine on and off over the years. Where I met some fascinating people who we're going to talk about. And then what happened, what brings Anne into this conversation. Renice and I both graduated from Hunter college. By the way, a shout out to Hunter. Yeah, Greg Mosher. Great theater man. Herman used to be on that faculty. Well, in any case, I had started directing again in about 2015. And I were joined together in Paris to do some work. And then we went down to Vienna to show the work. And some of the people in Ukraine actually came to Vienna to see the work on the theory that maybe I could bring the work into Lviv and work with the internally displaced people. And I thought this was... So the ideas internationally displaced actors. Internally displaced. Internally. In other words, the people that Anne and Renice and I were working with were already involved in the Medan. Our translator was one of the organizers of the Medan in Lviv and in Kiev. And she was at 19, a crack translator. Her mom is Mayor Harbuzia on the faculty at Ivan Franco. The group changed around a little bit. Our membership changed around, but we had gotten the invitation and Renice joined the group. And around January 2016, we prepared to go down there with something that we'd created on the condition we could give a workshop to young folks. And we went down there and we just immediately got to work. It was ice cold the whole time. And Anne and I were talking earlier today, and we were trying to get prepared in those days to teach people what we had been teaching ourselves, cross-section of various trainings and work on voice. Ultimately, one of our members was a little nervous about teaching. And I said, look, they're much better than we are. We really just have to go down there and be with them.  And we learned the city from the guts of the theater out. Let's ask Renice and also Anne. Renice, how did you come to that project? As Seth was saying, he extended the invitation to me. We were, at that point, working in France with Anne and several other of the company members. And Seth invited me in. And so we ended up leaving from Paris after we'd been working on our own practitioner project. We went down to take that project and at the same time to continue working on this piece that Seth had begun to build with the students there. In Ukraine. In Ukraine. So we went to Lviv and that's where we spent most of our time building with, I think there were maybe six of us all together. Anne, do you remember how many of you were? Oh, yes. I think it was six, yes. And how did you connect to Seth? Anne and I connected to another colleague that I'd met up at one of Eugenio Barba's symposiums in, I think, 2014. And so we started like, you know, hatching this idea of what we could do, you know, with the sort of interdisciplinary work from various theater trainings. And so my colleague who I'd met in Denmark said, you've got to meet Anne. And ultimately Anne stayed with the group. In fact, she's still working with us now on different projects. So Anne just came in pretty much blind to everything. I told her what we were interested in. She said, I'll do it. Anne, you are connected to SAP Poetics International. Tell us a bit about that. It's a, wow. Maybe Anne, can you hear us, Anne? No, no, no. I'm here, I'm here. Tell us a bit, yeah. It's people coming from different countries, speaking different languages and meeting on stage. And each one with his own languages. So in the performance we, there were English, German, Russian, and Spanish, many, many languages. So it was about to create another language who is stronger that the language we speak. And the body language is stronger. So you all went together and next to the work you went, worked in France and you created something new in Lviv. Tell us about the project. What was it exactly about? Any one of you? Well, I feel this. It was at a moment where the global migration had really caught fire. And so even as you went through Europe, you would see a lot of people who were displaced on the streets of Paris. I saw families, you know? In Lviv, you didn't see that. But that was the story we were creating from these actors who came from all these different places including, where was Ali from? That's from Iran. Yeah. And so there were people who had access to these stories of displacement. And it was almost like we were in the safety of Lviv, creating the story about people who were displaced. And the students in Lviv were going through their own sense of displacement. And so there was all these levels of connections that were happening. But our piece was called, we were doing Port d'Algeres. We called it Port d'Alger in 1963 because we were focused on things that we could connect from our present world back to the uprising in Algeria in those days. And also we'd used photographs from the uprising to make our political positions. A physical score. Physical score. Yeah. Raqouzi as Mayor Hald would have called it. And so what was unique about our group, Frank, was that each actor was a wealth formed performer themselves who could hold a solo themselves. And so we brought our individual stories and ideas together. And Seth created different tropes from which we found a physical score and that united the telling of the different characters that we were bringing to life. And the kids, so we were working on that play while at the same time working with the young people on building their own story, which was vastly more energetic than our piece. So Seth, tell me, you're in New York City. I think 400 languages are spoken there. New York City has 12, 13 million people. Why do you felt strongly? Let's go to Ukraine for my work. I will tell you personally, I have two reasons. But first my family comes from Sli, which is just south of Aviv and we're from the old Rabbinic world. So 100 years ago. It's your homeland, your family. Essentially, yeah. And I knew of it through stories. And eventually I went to these places and, you know, I saw some fascinating just things about what remains of Jewish life, what happened to Jewish life, what's going on in these cities now. Stree was the first city in Ukraine to fly the Ukrainian flag after, I have to think the orange revolution, but certainly after the Medan. And the other thing is that when I understood my research on Kotovsky, it wasn't taking me where I wanted to go, which is more deeply into the ways in which secret police either support or interfere with the performing arts. Everybody said, you've got to do the research on Les Kurbas in Ukraine. And that's what really brought me in there in a way that, first of all, you know, I could justify all the research and also get the feeling of belonging in my homeland that I could never have gotten just through family conversations. So these two things were really motivating factors. And as really said, the energy of the people was even more motivating. The students, actually that Bernice and I and Anne were working with, I had followed through their four years of university because I was doing my research and everybody seemed to know these students. And indeed, I got a full right to do their graduating projects with them, which is quite a story. I want to focus more on what we were doing. Tell us about, yeah, the Les Kurbas Theatre, your research, what is that theatre? In 1907, it was a cabaret theatre and it had a lot of different functions, but now it's a state theatre. I remember, I think it's Kuczynski is the director. And so we became friends. But the point is that that's now a state theatre linked to the Ivan Franco University, but also with a great repertoire. But I remember in the days that Bernice and I and Anne were there and even before they were already raising money for not merely internally displaced people, but to support various people who were soldiering. And indeed now, just to put it in the conversation, one of our most important members from the original thing is now, you know, in the military.  They're running various safety centers, hospital, helping people. And the Kurbas Theatre, unless you crank, you crank theater both, state academic theaters are doing that and they're creating new repertoire, which, you know, if you go on their websites, you can find out about. It's very important. But my motivations are quite different from Bernice's and Anne's. I'm just telling you about how I came into it. And why did you join and went to Ukraine early on? First, I followed Seth and his crazy ideas. And also I was just after the terrorist shooting in Paris and it was this need to tell this, the story we were telling around the world and that is getting outside of Paris. And that was, yeah, my, my, my needs at this moment and seems very relevant. And in fact, when I, when I, whether it was short, not shocking, but like it's amazing for me when I met this young people who are actually living in the country at this time was already at war, but this more silent war. They were ready to fight for their, for democracy, for, for, for their countries and, yeah, to see these young people who are 20s. And so committed to democracy was, yeah, quite a strong memory. So what did you learn being in Ukraine? What did you learn about Ukraine instead? What did you all learn from being there? I'm European and it's Europe. I felt like it's, it's my continent and I didn't felt any differences between being in France of being in Ukraine. And that was, yeah. And all these young people also, I had nothing to learn to them. They had such skills, great singers. Yes. Yeah, I think for me, like Ann is saying the skill level of the students really, I found surprising. I had no idea that they would be of that high caliber of performance. And I'm Jamaican American, but I've spent a lot of time in Europe. Nonetheless, what I found, some of the impressions that I was left with, which are now quite disturbing to me, was the meeting of the old and the new in this Ukrainian city, where so much of the city, the architecture, the feel, the smell was old, but the kids were new. They were far more adept at technology and ideas and their creative response into the world was fresh and unique and bright and vibrant. And so the juxtaposition of these two things really turned me on. And to see now the leveling of these cities, that for me, it meant so much to see and to smell, to touch, to see that being destroyed is just so painful. How is this for you looking at this war? You know, I've had Frank a number of different responses. The first level response to me is the devastation for people, just human beings, what's going on. The second level is the devastation for people that I know and what they must be going through and seeing places that I recognize in the media and how that resonates. But then there's also the complexity of me being a black person who had been in Ukraine and black skin and having experienced racism there. But because I had such beautiful experiences with the young people we worked with and the adults within the theater circle, I was so well taken care of that these two experiences existed there for me. And so for me, the response is very, very multi-layered. It's not just one response. It's like these deep responses that constantly question our humanity. Seth, if you... I'm thinking about what Rene said, and it's true. My experiences were quite different. And I learned much better than anywhere else that I worked and that when it's time to go, you snap your fingers and you go. The most important two words I ever learned in my life, I don't know what they are in Ukrainian, but let's go. I mean, that was the attitude. And then once you get there, you look at the materials you have and then you snap your fingers and say, let's go again. I think that the use and energy of the people that we were working with gave me an incredible new lease on life and a resilience to things that I didn't have resilience to before. Because if you look, for example, at the outrageous history of anti-Semitism throughout Eastern Europe and the Stathols and all of that, many people would ask me, why you want to go back to a place where they killed your people over and over again? And I just, I hadn't really entered into my mind. When you really look at the situation, it's just far more complicated. And so I was compelled to get involved in a historical situation that had little to do with my identity as a white male from New York. So, you know, for Denise and I, we're always approaching, we've worked together a long time, we're always approaching the same situation, but from such opposite perspectives. And in Ukraine, both of us just had to, you know, turn on the workflow. And that was the best thing I think I've ever done in my life as an artist. I'm so grateful for the opportunity. We can talk about personalities in Ukrainian theater, but we didn't know that the great personalities of Ukrainian theater had opened up that door for us. We were just there to work. And it was an honor, an absolute honor, and watching the cities get destroyed and hearing that some of the people that I knew had resurfaced. Some of our actors are in bunkers now, secretly carrying on communications and things like that. We can't even talk about it. So the now of that is the now of now. You know, and I'm very, very pleased that I could actually say to the people that I work with in Ukraine, you can take this and you can do whatever you want with it. So we have an NGO down there named Gershom Theater. It does what it wants. And the spawning of new projects is something that I just want to foster in ways that the students give us, the creative idea. And I say, let's go. That's my attitude. You're also working on a musical project or even creating a theater in Lviv. Is that you mentioned that? What is that about? Well, we're doing a lot of different things. The first of all, we did take over a building and we kept it alive. And then we brought new members into the group for not this original 13, but the singers and the whole dance community came out because of the movement exercises. Ultimately, we had to let the theater go, but the groups just stayed together. And then we would go back and forth between Ljubljana, Ljubljana was sort of our second city and Lviv. And ultimately we would have a symposium once a year with performances, workshops, et cetera. And then 2019 hit and it was impossible to get going on that again. And then it dawned on me, we could do it like we're having this conversation now. Everybody makes a very short 90 second to two minute video with a prompt from various poetry, but they don't have to use the poetry in the piece. So they can dance it, they can sing it. There's a lot of different stuff going on, but this is new. And it's the fact is that 50% of our 106 members are from Ukraine. So 50% of your members, go ahead. You have 100 members in that new theater you created that theater community in Lviv. Half are in Lviv, but we have some in Burkina Faso, Tokyo, France, New York, USA. I forgot about USA, right? That's amazing. I remember I said, you read something or from a text or something. You said, Frank, you don't understand how we work. We work in a different way. What's that different way? Well, to summarize it rather quickly. If I get a piece of text, I have to match it to the actions. I'm an actor. Or if I get a score of actions, it should be useful with any piece of text. When I learned this from Torgare Vettol at the Odin, Bernice learned it, I think, from Roberto Carrari. So we began to work this way. And the simple act of justification, which is something that Claremont introduced to us, we tried it in many different ways. And it's especially important when you don't know the language that you're working in so that the physical language should be able to justify anything. Bernice and I argue about this, but we both agree that it's what we are constantly focused on in the work that we do. And Anne got it. She understood it better than we did. And you know, just to add on to what Seth is saying, what's really unique about the work that we do is that we are very internationally centered in that we are pulling on all of us from the various countries and tapping into our common humanity and recognizing that these stories of injustices that we're exploring are not new. We're exploring the human condition and using our art to hold up a lens at the same time for us to meet each other. Like Anne said, we meet on the floor. We bring ourselves into the theater. And you know, right now I'm working with the Romanian playwright, Saviana Stinescu. And she's written this beautiful play that Heartbeat Ensemble is producing called Be Trapped Inside the Window about domestic slavery here in Connecticut in the USA. And this issue is not just here. It's like wherever there's injustice in the world, we have artists who respond to hold up the mirror and say, is this who we really are? Is this who we want to be? And Sub-Poetics International is doing that in a very global way. Yeah. So if you cannot do it now, obviously, and who knows for how long in the Ukraine, Anne and Stas and Marie, where will you do your work? Or where will the group come back together? Right now, we're doing our work on our website, a four-part series called Will You Love Me in December as you did in May. And we've got episode one and two already out there. Yes, we're charging a little $5 membership thing, but you can be sure that that $5 is recycled into supporting the artists. We're going to put together episode three. Frank, it's Sub-Poetics International at Squarespace. I don't know it right off the top of my head, but I'm perfectly happy for people to contact me to find out about it at my university email address. And Renees is also doing some exquisite work with one of our sister companies in the United States and it's called a Laboratory for Actor Training. So these are the places where you can see the kind of work that Renees and Anne and I have been involved with and are continuing. But it's on TV now, that's basically it. Yeah, so you reinvented the genre and you adapted to that new times after Corona, still the time of Corona we live in. I think President Biden said 100,000 Ukrainians will come to the US. Do you think some of your actors will come over? One is already here. I believe so, but I think it's actually the case. Are you reaching out to them? Of course, yeah, we're working together. We're creating episode three of Will You Love Me? in December as you did in May. And one of our Ukrainian members will be working with one of our members from Burkina Faso who are both here in the United States. Sanctuary or not, they're working hard. And I believe that family members will come and I've opened my doors to one family. That's incredible. I mean, that's quite stunning. But also in a way represents the spirit of the city of New York that in a way it's very local, but on the other hand it always has the global, the planetary scope in mind. I think it was Tony Kushner who actually joined us today with Oscar users who said New York is the melting pot that never melted. And there's some truth through it, you know, but perhaps it's this time, that time of Corona, the time now of a war, you know, perhaps the temperature is going up and that lead structure is melting and we are getting together and new fusions are coming out. I think it's really of interest. Also the fact that your college is named of criminal justice, you know, which is in a way also a mission for the theater, you know, to get justice for criminal acts. You know, there will be war tribunals. They have been, Milo Rao staged many trials. You know, might be also an inspiration, you know, but he had life, the real actors and about real, real actors in the sense of who were accused. He did this in Moscow, the Moscow trials, the Pussy Riot jail sentence. So he restaged it secretly in the Sakharovs and there was real judges and prosecutors and lawyers and there's a lot to do and perhaps, you know, this could also be one of the engagements, you know, or in your great work at that college for criminal justice to find a way to bring truth to light. We are already a little bit in our next segment. So we have now with us the next group and it is the great American poets cafe who is teaching, joining us at Daniel Gallant who was formerly the director, could not be with us, but we have the great Kimberley Ramirez with us, J.F. Ciri and Paul Latour. And so say hi to Stass and Vernice and Anne-Marie from France, right where you, it's almost midnight there or past where they touched and they talk, talk to us about their work in Ukraine over the decades, almost for many, many years they have been engaging their created work, created a theater company in international one and now, of course, all the rules have changed, everything is different. So thank you for joining us and Stass and Vernice and Anne and we move over to that also, I think, jewel in the New York theater community, that famous place in a way, some say legendary place, the Neyarikin Poets Cafe and Kimberley, you are, I think, at a conference somewhere in Florida. That's true, that's true. Yeah, so tell us a little bit where you are, what you do and also perhaps speak a little bit about the Poets Cafe or Paul or J.F. Ciri. Okay, so first I have some exciting news to share. We were on the backstage with the stage managers and it appears that the Instagram account for the Seagull has crashed, like has been flagged for censorship because so many people are tweeting and retweeting and sharing the hashtag for New York theater artists for Ukraine, so it's quite interesting. So everyone's trying to contact Instagram and recover the Seagull's Instagram account but I think that this is a testament to the amazing work that you're doing and you're only part of the way through the long day marathon already and you've crossed the internet with the censorship. We like it, I hope it's not our fault that CUNY technology just wasn't up to pick but who of you will tell us a little bit and also audience about the Neurikin Poets Cafe? Okay, do you want to, Paul Latore, do you want to give a brief history or I can do that if you'd like to start there? Paul, start and then Kimberly before. I'll hand off gracefully. So the Neurikin Poets Cafe was started by Lower East Side Manhattan, what's called Lower East Side, queer, Latinx, black artists who started in parlors. It started with Miguel Algarín in his circle, Dikin Bimbo, like so many visionaries, luminaries of the Lower East Side of New York City outside of the theater district and they founded this cafe starting out of living rooms and evolving into various spaces throughout the Lower East Side and then eventually residing where they are in East Third Street today where the cafe has operated successfully with poetry performances, ASL slams, you know, theater productions and as a venue for teaching, education and culturally impacting the world, honestly now, moving through virtual spaces such as this one today. Yeah, Kimberly, you can... It's a cool fun fact that the Snap kind of evolved from that when audiences and poets were assembling in Miguel Algarín's living room, they applauded a little bit too much for the neighbors, so that's how the Snap was born. So it's a good fun fact. Oh, I did not know that. Yeah, and legendary Jean-Michel Basquiat was supposed to be hanging out there and crash there when he wasn't famous yet in the attic of the place. So let's talk a little bit. You know, it's also mostly known also for spoken word artists, you know, which you are and since this war started, the invasion of the Ukraine in Russia, how does that spoken word community react to that? What do you hear, J.F. Ciri? Maybe you tell us a bit. Well, I can't speak for all poets, but I can speak for myself as a poet.  I would imagine that it's challenging for a poet to watch what is happening around the world and not be inspired to comment on that artistically. So like a lot of different things that are happening around the world, I'm sure lots of poets are gravitating towards the images that they're seeing on the media, the stories that are being told and reported on in the news and, you know, taking that and sort of wrestling with it philosophically and creatively and then sort of sharing some of those stories in our work. So that's how I would answer that. Mm-hmm. I've seen a lot of frontline activism and people speaking, people of Ukrainian background and descent and heritage speaking towards what's going on and those not, but who feel, you know, solidarity. There's been a lot on our online and in-person mics, support, people wearing the colors, people leaving words of love and embrace and endearment. So it's been a rallying cause, I think, in the Nereken Poetry Cafe circles that I've been present for over these last few months, for sure. Mm-hmm. I mean, the Nereken Poetry Cafe, people may not know where it's located, but it's E3rd between B and C, but it's also at the intersection of art and activism. And this is no exception. And I think that the way that the cafe has handled the lockdown period also has made it a somewhat more international outreach, and we have all kinds of hybrid, high-flexy things going on in the space where there's screens with other spoken word cafes all around the world, like super international slams and things going on to Tokyo and a bunch of other cities around the world. So I feel like, now more than ever, there's an international awareness and this is certainly a playing a role. It's been less than one month since the Russian military bombed the Ukrainian theater at Medigovol and 300 people, just civilians, innocent civilians, and when you think about the way we gather at the Nereken Poetry Cafe or the way that we gather at our theater, it's the place where we feel safe, and it's always an escape, even in times of peace. It's always a place where we can just kind of go and just be like, huh, I'm with my people and with my community. This is my space. And if you have to be hiding from bombs and terror and war, a theater is a top choice, right? We all feel like we're gonna, especially with the children, the amount of children that were in that space and how that was probably comforting to them, like in contrast to hiding in the subways or just to be in the theater, like maybe a transcendent space, this huge red roof. And on each side of that theater was written children in big white letters on the entrance and the exit of that street, just children. And when you think about, like my mother was, she was oppressed by an authoritarian regime and had to flee her country as a child. In Cuba, right? Yes, in Cuba. And so I've been hearing about experiencing war and oppression and totalitarianism from a child's vantage all of my life. But when we see these kids on TV, these Ukrainian children asking questions, trying to get a rationale of looking to adults who can't explain it. It doesn't make any more sense to adults than it does to the children. But their words, if you listen to their words and their songs, they are accidental poets. They're making poetry. And I have some of the words from the children of Ukraine if you can indulge this offering before we take segue into the readings that everyone prepared. So these are the Ukrainian children's words. So this is kind of now from me, or for us, a found poem of their terror. When they shoot, I run home. I am afraid and I cry. I think about dogs. When you get shot, when you get shot at, it's the scariest thing. I try not to think about it, but it comes into my head. Mines can be either very small or big in order not to be deafened. You should lie on the ground. You should cover your ears and scream. I do not want to go back to the basement. Do you hear? And the Ukrainian charitable fund is amplifying these voices of children and they're doing everything that they're looking to artwork. The children gravitate to artwork naturally to try to feel better in this time of terror and crisis. We hear them singing. They're reaching for paintbrushes and paints and they're painting these drawings and they're creating this artwork and psychologists are analyzing it and helping them. And this one kid, this one little Ukrainian kid paints these billowing ways and curves of paint just like on the paper. It looks like kind of an explosion. And they say, what is the name of your drawing? And the kid says, war. Really emphatically, like war. And then the child continues to work on the painting and then all of a sudden holds it up and says, I'm done. I'm finished. It's a clown. It's a clown. And the psychologist says, but didn't you have another name for the painting? Wasn't it war? And the child says, no, no, no, I changed the name. Let it be a clown. And it just like, I'm getting chills right now. Just remembering the story. Like the idea that that child was able to manifest from the terror that he was witnessing that went directly on the page and their artwork to manifest humor out of it. And I don't know if any of you saw that article about Zelensky, where Zelensky constantly references humor. He talks about Monty Python, the Beatles yellow submarine. He's making jokes. He talks about our American movie, Groundhog Day, and he urges us all to keep the humor. I mean, if Zelensky can say this, he's like even a surgeon in the surgery, like you have to have some elements of humor and he characterizes Putin as humorless. Humorless, yeah. And Zelensky, as was Hitler, was known to have had absolutely no sense of humor ever. And it's a bad sign. And it's not a good thing. And maybe Paul and J.F. C. No, I don't want to disagree into that. He asked us to think about the poet in the time of war. I'm just opening it up like it can be anything. It can be, you know, we can spin it into humor, spin the art into humor like that child did. So whatever the offerings I think J.F. is going to share something first, and then Paul and then coming back to J.F. for another piece. Thank you so much. So the first piece I'm going to share is really just dedicated to the women. It's written originally for Latinas. And so I just want to open to everyone watching that it was originally written for one group, but I do see it as a call to all women. We are of the earth, brown and rich ever connected to our race as we birth humanity. Our bodies grow like the limbs of a tree. Our children, it's leaves ready to embrace the world. History is written into the lines of our faces, our eyes, the stories of our past. We are our mothers. We are our daughters. We are the Guerreras of our past. I force a Nuestra Sangre. We are of the water. Yemaya welcomes us in her ways, teaching us her rituals, guiding us as we guide our own ancestral spirits, urging us forward. Our mothers once daughters, our daughters soon mothers, the cycle of life keeps to the rhythmic beat of our hearts. In sync, we travel as one. We are of pride and knowledge. We feel with our minds and think with our hearts. We are strong and sensitive at our cords. We defend and protect and defend and protect and defend and protect. Somos de hiero. Withstanding the abuses of our society, continuing to raise the children in our communities, practiced in the art of patience and love. We are of work. We know the burdens of home early and we take flight from our parents to create new spaces of rebirth. Somos de alta y poesía. We are a song and dance. Somos de cultura y orgullo. Mujeres Latinas somos. Thank you. And now I'll pass it on to Paul. Beautiful, beautiful. Ooh, okay, following that. Just got to brush off some of these chills. All right, this piece is called Starving. Tonight we bring voice to a most noble plight. What's a noble fight to a missile strike? What's a colony to a country? Distended bellies to those well fed? What's it did now? What's it gone on to those still battling climactic threat? What a survival to a super powered rival who might simply not care to comprehend? Human beings in a mile. What's a mom to a king? What's a king to a god? What's a god to a non-believer who don't believe in anything? We make it out alive. All right, all right. No church in the wild. No churches in war, no temples built in wild brush and no religious schools. High school senior bulimic, I would take table scraps, offer them up to gods of lack, starving myself of sustenance purposely in hopes that I could grow smaller. It's ironic when we deprive ourselves. At times we deprive others of what we could provide. The world had we been full-strengthed beings, beacons of light, bastions of human decency. They're consumed by not eating. We atrophy hopes to be free to pursue the inalienable rights of life, liberty, happiness, sad as I was in those days. I'm not sure what much of the world has to endure. Justices of war, enslavement, another uniquely first world trigger fingered horror scenes blowing what remained of my faith, smithereens' faith. Not one in all omnipotent, reigning king, some kid sat upon hill, ant magnified glass in hand as he decides who is worthy of savior, faith lost if not only in gods, but in the bullies of our worst nature, faith in us collectively to do the right thing. When confronted with choice to act or stand pat, sat on hands, turning backs, on table scraps, tossed aside while so many go underfed, you know. In ninth grade there was this bully, I forget his name, that's not the important part, was crucial was how during lunch he would roam and patrol the cafeteria like a Bolshevik armed with a scowl and his red right fist stirring shit, sticking his privileged thumbs and plates on trays of whoever food he deemed so fit, ruining meals, spoiling appetites in equal measure. So many unable to afford replacements, he felt compelled to enact this atrocity not because of lack or want to keep what he pleased from their plates, rather just to lay claim to it, dominion over his white-tide kingdom just for the sake of spite, simply because he could. He found power in being more ruthless, larger, stronger, agent of chaos, mischief, God of pure selfishness, like low-key, high-key, hating on his brother's accomplishments and ever since that day I noticed most bullies simply grow up without outgrowing this. So these days I praise the lips that give me capacity to tell these stories to speak my peace on such unholy days as these on Seder, Easter weekend and Ramadan breaking fast upon dusk telling non-man-made gods that we will forgo in hopes to be granted serenity. My long-modeled modus operandi of lack offered a sacrifice to only feast after forty long nights not to relent, one moment sooner such a shame that the strength gained in caving in and filling concave cave of this cage's rib, the sustenance would make one far less apocryphal for we will not accept atrocities brought on first hand neither by disorder nor power-drunk presidents setting megalomaniac precedence with arms hovering over button ready to red-right palm invoke red dawn where doomsday clocks tick down to final hour and bring ruin in frigid wars recounting how all life is merely biting their borrowed time. I recall that bully in the lunch line how not one administrator authority figure in the room stepped in yet we collectively govern ourselves to the decision it was time to bring stock to it yet that reckoning wouldn't come soon enough it took until junior year two whole years of hunger and torment when I said every time he tries to eat off his own plate let's flip tray so maybe that when he sees what it's like to lap perhaps he'd stop and what do you know our tactic did the trick two days into a borscht fed famine he demanded we stop this bully sought ceasefire yet only when we fired back till nary a crumb was left yet when temples of body come Jericho crumbling down tower are babble undone by merciless serpentine tongues like 900 bodies dumped in unmarked graves in Kiev stacking pyramid all along the eastern front soviet warmongers no better than pharaohs begetting furors who enslaved the whole race and we know who's to blame those lunchtime bullies left unchecked with thumbs pressing axes to grind family lines to find powder war crimes in Crimea Warsaw Kharkiv and Shenehiv where red armies will not cease until they're sworn enemies for reasons untold to them are Putin the ground these Vlad the impaler neighbors to a sister city now Vlad a mirroring destruction conquering a place they lay no rightful claim but still want it anyway every but the overfilled gut of fascist bully bear back upon horses unsaddled with the very smallest of small dick energy guilty partying these united soviet socialist sent republican missiles with promise to follow up warhead Chernobyl the atomic thread between superiority and unclear threats shows we can very much consent descent and mutually assure destruction and we sing songs of war and calls to arms but you can't embrace your young or hug someone with nuclear arms isotopes isolate unable still so far to go just to reach armistice arms racing Armageddon setting doomsday clock ahead of time finished lines run through red tape conflicts brought on by delusional dogs of war desperate desiring power so absolute it corrupts up absolutely because whoa huh yeah what is it good for absolutely nothing these hollow caustic hollow acts that cost us more than spoils split amongst victors very few far and between could ever be re keeping count of countless casualties the causality no statistics could ever cat tally child anatomies buried the true tax of war's taxonomy but we stand with heave evive maria pool along with a 7.1 million displaced inside Ukraine 4.5 million seeking safe refuge as they flee now being embraced by nations far and wide united welcoming refugees for the many more we still need to offer support not deny passports of entry based on place of origin I say if you are not letting in those of black brown and african descent then you are doing a disservice to the cause causing shame not embracing sovereignty can't say you heed peace when you still speak colonized tongues of apartheid seek to divide amongst lines of race creed non-believers who don't believe in equality so we the healers soothe sayers and painters of word we poet stand on watch today united in palms length the only arms we wish to race or raise this rice says this human race we once reclaimed giving offer what we can offer in calls for support to those still resisting fight for liberty to live to see another day as resistance sends Neptune missiles to seek flagships of black sea fleet upon the black feet of wanderers still seeking asylum refuge from attempted coups invasions a tale as old as time and evil still seems to be trying on its new mask this time no birthright or throne war we condone support for those in the throes of survival the only triumph because as I learned the best way to fight a bully is to starve them that we are not one to stoop to levels less they wish to deprive others we can very much go blow for blow so long as they target one of our plates none will rest until the bully respects that if we go unfed so will they a thumb for a thumb nor an eye for an eye because we're not blind to injustice so long as Ukraine's not free we won't allow these Bolshevik bullies to digest one bite thumbs in eye so garks if we must kick up a bit of dust because liberty is rarely ever won nor given freely on silver plated lunch trays we get we must seize it so we stand with them as Ukraine fights for a home rightfully theirs even we typically non-believers believe with all the conviction we can muster that this resistance this time is justified stood by side stood until the bully sees that he will not eat until Ukraine gets back their seat not just the seat but their entire table to sit with no fear of Russian reprisals of thumb stuck in orbital plates in sight as they eat in peace finally all the while knowing you can never stamp out all war like you can't prevent all bullying we know at least we can stand on the side filling us with nourishment to not only survive but thrive find happiness because the one thing we believe is in these intrinsic rights to life liberty we