hello everyone i hope everyone can hear me uh good afternoon and welcome to the asian dramaturgs network event series for 2021 and 2022 uh the asian dramatics network adn is formed with the intent of mapping and networking the region's dramaturgical experience and knowledge at adn uh we have been collaborating with center 42 singapore and we've held our symposiums in singapore since 2016 but we've also been around the region with gatherings of dramaturgs performance makers arts educators in the
asia pacific region and we have actually met in japan australia and indonesia for symposiums conferences and even a laboratory workshop for dramaturgy this is all in conjunction with center 42 singapore who is our principal organizing partner for adn for today we have another series we have another online event a special one where it's entitled ongoing online durational and digital dramaturgy uh the durational and the digital in performing arts today has been continuing to grow as even when the
world is entering into another period of the coronal virus which is the endemic period and where i think we're starting to again experience mobility freedoms of traveling around the world but having said that are we still going to continue looking at digital performance as a very viable source of viewing so we are diving today into the notions of durational dramaturgy in a digital context specifically looking at a previous performance that was held or rather it was actually organized by esplanad
e singapore theaters on the bay called 14 which is a five hour dance performance with multiple locations this special event was conceptualized by taiwan based chen mukang and sun ray hong and today they joined us with sean chua who's also singapore based to talk a bit about this particular performance and what is special about this event again like i said is that it brings together digital the digital and the durational something that we have only begun to actually explore perhaps in the later p
art of the pandemic when we were more fluent with technology especially digital technology and obviously getting into grips with digital dramaturgy for this particular event i'm very happy and very we're very fortunate to have actually uh dramatic dr chiang nin yuan joining us who will be the main moderator with wu kang chen wukang soon rae hong and sean chua i will now just very quickly introduce nian to all of you who will then take the show away nian is a singaporean performance scholar educa
tor and dramatur she completed her phd in theater and performance studies in the university of sydney in 2020. her work involves the politics and poetics of storytelling in the digital age since the pandemic she has been a dramatic for several works of digital theater including who's there in 2020 that uh is quite an amazing piece of landmark digital theater there is also then unbecoming in 2021 for theater works now festival her research has been published in on critical stages studies in theat
er and performance and performance paradigm nian is currently researching intercultural acting pedagogy at the intercultural theater institute in singapore without further ado i'd like to pass this over to nian take it away indian thank you so much honian and hello everyone i hope you're enjoying your saturday so far it is my great pleasure today to moderate this roundtable discussion of 14 and the title of this piece stems from the number of days typically mandated for self-isolation and as a t
heaters themselves have remained in a period of semi-isolation the artists behind 14 are finding new ways for audiences to experience dance in a state of what i like to call alone togetherness and i had the privilege uh to catch 14 post hoc uh this week in preparation for this session and instantly the day after i received the secret link to the recording of the show i tested positive for covet 19. so that was how i experienced the show in isolation in bed drifting in and out of consciousness an
d one of the best ways i think to experience the show but we can talk more about audiencing later so but without further ado let me introduce our speakers today who will talk to us about the event for about 35 minutes before we open it up to a roundtable discussion and a q a to the rest of uh for the rest of the session uh including for our facebook live viewers and just a reminder as well uh for ukang and rey at any point um if they need to speak in chinese or mandarin we will all chip in and t
ry and translate for everyone as long as we just want a comfortable casual conversation about your work i hope i don't embarrass my half taiwanese heritage okay cho kang is a taiwanese dancer and a choreographer in 2001 wukong danced with ballet tech and perry dance and became the soloist starting a long-term collaboration with choreographer elliot field in 2004 he co-founded horse dance theatre as an artistic director and in 2011 he began collaborating with artists in different fields and his r
ecent works include dances for okanchan in 2020 which was the recipient of the 2021 taishin performing arts award and online streaming works such as thank you so much for your time in 2019 and thank you for staying home in 2021 and of course 14 in 2021 uh sure hong is a video designer and director creating original works uh internationally since 2008 and he's known for creating large-scale performative multimedia environments which interact with human perception memories and uncanny experiences
in our daily lives he is the recipient of the 2020 lucille lotel awards for his projection design in the headlands produced by lincoln center theatre and his design works have been presented in a multitude of renowned spaces including broadway guggenheim la mama and national taichung theater among others rey was the visiting artist at the bennington college and on faculty at taipei national university of the arts and last but not least on this panel we have sean chua who was dramaturg for the si
ngaporean contingency of this work and we can talk more about that later and based in singapore he is engaged with embodied archives and kenny personhood and the participatory frameworks of play he has presented his research at the asian dramaturg's network the substation and performance studies international and his works have been presented at uh the singapore international festival of arts singapore art week and the esplanade sean is a recipient of the national arts council scholarship and he
holds an m.a in performance studies at the school of the arts in new york university he has served on the psi future advisory board of fab and has lectured at singapore management university and lasalle college of the arts away to you gentlemen well since you say i can speak chinese it's really tempting i really i probably would just i would probably just jump in right away my fluent chinese um hey story home is us are we going to start sharing this this slide so i'll pass it to you right right
now pass it to me yeah you go go right ahead and i'll follow okay slideshow oh it doesn't work let me do it this way okay okay we're going to talk about 14. so this is 14 is uh how do i say this we uh khan and i we've been collaborating for the past few years and then the when the covet hit everything changed so we just started to have this idea about because everything was closed and also theater was closed and we kind of lose our jobs in the moment so we talk about like how how beautiful this
empty theaters are and we should do something for the theaters so so that's that's how we came up with this this idea how about we do like we have performers doing solos in the theater by themselves so that's our initial ideas and then and then we maybe we do here and then we what happened next oh and then we had opportunity invitation from the national theater taipei they asked us to propose a a digital um show to them and then so then we came up with this this idea this this solo marathon um
and in one theater it's only in um national taipei national theater taipei um with 14 14 minutes solo um 14 hours in total um so that includes 56 performers and and then and then the the kobe situation in taipei got better and then the theater starts to open up then then our project got you know just just we couldn't do it anymore so so then what happened next was we did did our own mini version at horse in the rehearsal room of course um in june 2012 2020 it was a one hour show a mini version w
e had eight performers um we learned a lot from that process and then a year after we i guess we'll conquer this opportunity to connect with the um espionage yeah iris call and faith jump in yeah and and they asked us to maybe to consider to do another version and then we just start to think about how do we do this and then they said maybe we can try to do it cross country cross venues it was wild so so we started to talk about how do we do this and that's why we came up with this this why you'r
e currently seeing this page um we're thinking about to using internet to connect all the satellites meaning all the venues internationally and we have cameras to sort of being our digital eyes to look through to kind of witness what happens in the theaters and then so so what what you can see here the main stage meaning meaning is the the stage in each venue and we have artists cameras and commentators all witnessing the moment and then we sending we have internet like transmit um transmit and
double channeling back and forth um to to the to to taipei also sending back to the commentators so they can commenting while we're watching the performance and then everything is sending back to the horse and then goes to the website so that's our main main technical theory um and then next page this is sort of the snapshots of the show uconn do you want to talk about the commentators oh yeah because in the i think uh sorry i have to go rewind a little bit in time so all this start from uh our
friendship between me and ray because uh in the beginning we get to know each other and we realize oh we both like like spore watching basketball game and uh and then we start to collaborate but we don't want to work for each other we want to work together so we we start to have this we start to build this relationship of uh like sort of decentralized not serving each other kind of relationship and we bring this relationship to every project that we we built together so also we use this method i
n this work as well so the commentator part in our meeting version we we find a anthropologist to commenting the whole performance and we think that really went very well it has a very uh therapeutic feeling here's hearing the performance and watching what's happening and from a different aspect of commenting so we want to extend that into this and and as you can see we have five screens showing the commentator and each one they can all be controlled separately so it really depends on what langu
age you speak and you can turn the value up or down and you can adjust them and for myself my personal choice is just put everything to the loudest and to test my ear how i receive the information and strangely because we think most of the digital performers it's so hard to focus and we keep getting distracted all the time so we wanted to put all the extraction possible into the frame so keep the audience or spectator on the other side of the computer very busy listening to this language and com
paring the different language if you know both and comparing the information with what you see at that moment and sometimes you realize oh i'm not i'm not really interested in in their point of view and i'm more i value more of my point of view and so this uh false process is what we what what interests us that's why we really enjoy and having this commenting and they did wonderful performance it's like it's like olympic because somehow they have this uh angle of um the uh what should i say righ
t when their performer is performing it's like their home game so the commentator will really have the sparks like try their best to tell tell you how good italian is how good they are and when it's taiwan's turn how good they are and indonesia are the same so this competitive feeling is really keep it uh very exciting right okay and there there's one thing i want to share is during the process because it's cross control oh hey i i'm talking yeah for example yeah um um so so because it's cross c
ountry and then then we are everybody was working remotely like in at our home so so the the strategies becomes so crucial like how do we work together but not together um so so kind of and i just started to think about maybe we should just develop this structure that it's it's almost like a guideline or or or a handbook that we could pass it to everybody's working on the on on this production and everyone can produce so so we call this thing um an artistic outline and that includes all let me s
ee one two three four five six seven eight categories starting from the partners we start to try to explain what's gonna happen because from the only kind and i can kind of know the website is gonna be but it's so abstract because we are in the process we're still designing the the website and also working on this outline so so this is this is almost like like like our bibles so so that we could share with all the partners so and then we're starting from from the presenting partners which we des
cribing what's what is 14 and then and then we in the next category is notes for drama church and then notes for artists because we we we give the freedom to each venue they will choose their drama church and drummers will help us to pick the artist because in each venue it has its own arc it has its own theory why they choose their artists and how to make sense across all the performances [Music] and then we have notes for the commentators like how how we like what you should do and what you sh
ould avoid basically they can do whatever they just witness and chat and then the next category is the cameras because th this is important because we want to it's almost like a gift a gift to the performers we want to give them space we want to give them uh a mental space even so they can own they take the ownership of the theater so during the show during each solos there's nobody behind in cameras or there's no crew around the performer the performance do is performing is doing it we call it
a real solo authentic solo in the in this big theater and between each solos there's um we call this interludes and we we name it we call this gates in theater so we ask each venue to shoot four solos uh four interlude videos pre-recorded and the topic is gazing theater so they can just pick whatever they they think we can contemplate um yeah and then the next one the ending [Music] the solo vowing this one is also pre-imported um yeah because we're imagining maybe at the end we can do this a sp
ecial fouling moment which turned out pretty cool i think and then we describe the website while the website might look like there's multiple windows the main stage will be switched between venues and the commentators they are always with the audience but the audience gets to control um the website we built all the functions all the buttons on and off so they have the freedom to control so so this artistic outline was so important for us and also for everyone else at all the partners of performa
nce um and then i want to show some just some photos from backstage this one was the control room so everything all the signals was sending in from all five countries to taipei in this control center and then we will send the signal back to each countries because the the commentator has to see it live so they can com commenting so that that makes it so complex and then this diagram on the right side was just we were chatting with the the vendor there and it was the first day yeah this first time
we approached them and the guy was yeah he was so smart he just she gets our idea and then he was trying to explain to us how we could do it yeah just just mesmerizing moment next one yeah it was so fun because it's it's like we had endless meetings at our home and then the show happened just so it's it's it's almost unreal it's i never done this i never work in theater this way because we can't and i we only the horse team gets together at the very last week when we are when everyone else was
in tech in their theaters so yeah just want to share this um i think this this this was our last slide who count do you have anything else to share yeah and uh and it's a strange ride because usually you decide what to do but in this process we have to learn to decide not to do and not to interfere and on the other side uh the the collaborating partner or artists they're also learning how to take control because what uh it's somebody's uh interjecting into the i think it's one of our audiences w
e'll try and mute them sorry about that okay okay no it's okay i was so happy that to have somebody hike into the into the meeting and then okay it was cantonese wasn't it it was kind of strange that's not so sure please continue so sure so each each layers have has each responsibility to generate material and we as horse team we need to learn how not to interfere and how to open up spaces but in the beginning all the collaborating artists continue to ask us for more guide guidance because they
in the beginning it feels like oh we are the boss we are we are going to tell you what to do and so it also shows shows the relationship the the local art performing arts environment how things were come together like the theater theater and they have money and they find artists and they gather the artist they like and they gather the geometer they like and commentator they like and they assemble and who are not involved or just some well too bad but it shows it shows this power structure which
during the process we just enjoy observing these small things yeah and thank you uh for inviting us thank you all inviting us putting this discussion together so me and ray can and sean can get together once again and talk about it and and trying to recall all those small excitement back thank you that's fabulous thank you so much for sharing uh that answered quite a few questions that i really had but um i think for now maybe i'll just what i just want to share screen for the audience um for th
is uh yeah just to to give them a taste of what it would have been like um because there's some components on the screen as well that are very interesting so for example like the rolling the rolling comments also uh from the audience could you yeah maybe later we can talk a little bit more about that let's let's move on to sean first but um or maybe now maybe now just just say a few words about about that comment section the commenting thing was i i guess the story was coming from our the mini v
ersion we did because we last last time we did we had six i guess an account six cameras and then we just think about maybe we shouldn't do the editing ourselves we should give the freedom to to we should we should make it so chaotic so the audience audience couldn't handle so we just opened up six different channels on internet so like including facebook on instagram and youtube all kinds and with all different contents but it's simultaneously happening together and then we had a chat room open
up in google so the audience they can chat with us in the back back room in in our green room and also chat uh you know they can leave messages but but it turned out to be like almost too much for the audience so they because they need to handle too many things in the same time so that's why for the 14 we decided to we should make an interface we should make it a little bit easier for the audience so they can get as much as possible but also they can focus so so that's why we have this commenti
ng thing this wording thing coming um you know happen we try to build this so from our side we can also feeding information but also the audience they can also say things which it might happen it might happen something because performance can see it live so it might happen you know to them they might respond to it so this is how we how we develop this um ex how to exchange ideas between the audience and performance and right cyberspace yeah right yeah i mean it's also a wonderful way of of being
together i suppose um and seeing all these um being together with the other audience members and i mean when i was watching this uh alone really alone because it was over already um it was nice to see the little ghosts of the previous audience members kind of commenting some some of them yeah have very funny comments um did you try to type because it works it doesn't work okay i'll try right now testing testing i'm not a robot i hope it works no it doesn't work well maybe maybe it's in the end
yeah it usually takes a little bit of time on time i see no i i didn't go to the set extent of trying to comment by myself into this void uh but um okay and then yeah and as they were talking about the commentators this is yeah one of my favorite parts of the show of course uh i was listening to charlene a lot of course because she's you know a good friend of mine uh singaporean but i was also listening um to everybody else and uh they all have very different styles of commenting so it was reall
y great girl yeah hey biter um anything else that we might have missed jacques anything else we might have missed from this interface we have a list of what is this possible oh okay that's a main page yeah right right i see okay yeah maybe we can speak a little bit more uh later on but uh for now why not we move on to sean hey uh thanks so much for uh inviting me as well anything like what wukong's hit earlier like it's it's so interesting to to think about the work again after this like uh [Mus
ic] span of time since the work was out right because i think um the project was so ambitious you know on on so many skills uh and i think but then also like where the different kinds of countries came in we didn't have like a lot of lead time also right so a lot of the kind of discovery was happening simultaneously right like i think a lot of us wasn't really sure what the infrastructure of the website might look like how would the different pieces come together um a lot of it was was just like
a lot of trust also and also but also like trying to figure out like what the the language of the performance was right with each other because um on one hand while the score was very clear in terms of what the parameters of each of the different modules were like um there were also like different kinds of interpretations and nuances that only became clearer when we were iterating and trying different things right with each other and seeing how some of those pieces come together and so yeah i h
ave a little bit of a presentation uh let me just share that hang on so this might help to at least like put some uh images so what what i'll be doing is i'll be focusing on the um okay slideshow [Music] okay um can anyone see the screen like well okay so so what i'll be doing is so i'm shown in one of the dramaturgs um as as we've heard earlier and 14 is essentially a kind of like meta structure right within that meta structure there are five different kinds of um contingents uh one of which is
the singapore contingent and i'm the dramaturg for the singapore contingent there's a dramatic attached to each of these um four other contingents uh and uh what what i was doing is i worked very closely with the four artists um which i will talk about a bit later uh with espionage with the um filmmaker uh zhongwei as well as the light designer genevieve as we we kind of put this work together and what you're seeing on screen right now uh is actually what the the performers are seeing right so
actually like there's just a countdown timer uh within the estimate that they have to so they get a sense of um exactly when the performance is meant to to be wrapped at because um i think wukang and ray made it very clear that they were very strict with the 14 minutes right at the 40 minutes it will cut so so this was kind of a prompt for um some of the performance um so so actually what i'm showing you are kind of like not not really what the audience is seeing but like the kind of behind the
scenes a little bit um so so for the singapore side we were working with um four artists well the first one you're seeing uh in french is oops oh no it's next uh uh sandias uh sandhya's performance right so uh um and so the four artists we had was sandia um hashima this is hashimas this is wristman and uh daniel and um when i was talking to each of the artists i think what was very interesting was so remember this was at a time in the pandemic this was like in september right where i think thing
s were still very uncertain they were kind of like opening closing opening again like there was a lot of uncertainty for many of these artists um we haven't actually stepped into like the estimate theater and and just just uh for a while right and remember this is the esplanade the huge estimated theater not the black box right so i remember one of the first oh no did we lose sean this is the reality of ah okay am i back yes yeah i'm back oh sorry where do you lose me at something but this is th
e time of the pandemic right yeah yeah yeah yeah from there again yeah yeah i was talking about uncertainty and instability so i think that was very performative um so so this is a time of pandemic where there's lots of uncertainty we didn't know when things were opening or closing um and and so and and for many of these artists they haven't like been uh in the theater um for a long time right and remember this is the esplanade theater right so not the black box but the big explanation so so one
of the first questions we're talking about is actually what what is our relationship with this specific theater with this specific space and and while well i think a lot of us were kind of romanticizing right about this kind of beautiful forlorn theaters that have been abandoned during the time of pandemic i think there were also lots of questions about actually um because these four artists they're all like independent practitioners where to be honest like most of us wouldn't have access to th
at huge uh ethnic theater so ironically um if there wasn't covered the the the opportunity to even like like use that space right might might not have been there so so there was that question of like is this even like a space like is this really home right uh um on a it might feel like home in a symbolic sense but in a specific relationship um uh i think you know something like rizman or daniel might have like like entered that space like more than a decade or so ago right uh and when when the s
pace was first opening so so i think the first question is navigating actually what is our ambivalence with this space and because of that i think each of the artists were were occupying like very interesting kinds of interventions into the space itself right so for for centia you know um she she decided to go with a very very uh minutiae of the feet right tapping on her her uh uh training as an odc dancer for example so we so the first shot you know we see of sandia is you know she's coming fro
m the the seats in the audience right and just like the first half of the 14 minutes it's just like the kind of micro movements of the feet and before she comes up and we see this kind of very presentational performance right um i think like san diego was the most presentational whereas like when we had um uh hashima right who recently was uh kevin gave birth and and she was experimenting with the bing kong which is the the something that you wrap around your body after child birth right so so w
e with with hashimoto we talked a lot about what does it mean to rehabilitate rehabilitate the body uh by by extension to rehabilitate the space of the theater right after this uh long absence so if you look at the image like hashimoto's was working with um this this staircase is actually uh in one of the wings of the theaters actually and so so you can see that the kind of bingo like draping around the space right and so we were really thinking about what doesn't mean to think about the theater
as the kind of body right that we were wrapping around uh and so so so that was the kind of extension and radiation that she was was experimenting with um and trying to feel the space and and her energy with the space was almost um spiritual ritualistic almost right with the kind of gravitas in which was moving through and conducting the space um and for for risman risman was was staying with the dressing room uh because you know we were talking about how actually for most performance i already
spent most time in the dressing room than on the stage itself right so the dressing room as the space of intimacy and and risman was experimenting a lot with um the breath right that starts to to to become this something else that animates the space and experimenting with all these kinds of infinity mirrors and projections uh within the space itself um and and of course uh uh and i believe daniels came um all the way at the end right so we started with a very presentational work with the sandie
rs and with with daniels and actually the whole process of working with daniel was an interesting one as well because he was coming back from um i think it was ireland at that time and uh so he was he didn't have the vtl thing uh available so he was actually a lot of the kind of correspondence was happening uh during his 14-day hotel quarantine right so there's a metamata layer to this uh in which she was putting pulling his piece together and so with daniel's piece it was a very campy very ener
getic one that completely like deconstructed the space of the theater she was running around um all the way from the the very very end of the the backstage all the way into the audience um and so that kind of entire disorientation um of space itself um and with i think we talked a little bit about the the commentators already um so for us we had uh um charlene of course who was our commentator and i think what was very interesting was how each of the commentators had we were bringing very differ
ent kinds of energies towards the the way in which they're talking about the performance um like for example uh i remember that uh um susan right which was kind of very diligently annotating every single part of the performance whereas i remember the documentation for for taiwan was you know very westward was so candid right and she was eating and she was commenting in such a uh a lively way it's almost as if like you're watching a variety tv show for example um and and with with with with sean
we had lots of conversations about storytelling right and oral traditions of the storytelling and i remember we were talking about how you know in when in in kind of like um in older kinds of oral traditions right like that it's always about that kind of long durational time that kind of cyclical repetitions that are happening right and what the kind of rhythms of speaking and talking how does information like like so we're playing with those kinds of cadences and i remembered like uh one of the
things was also like to give space to silence as well right to give space to to that which cannot be communicated so not to kind of overwrite the performance with the speaking but to think about how the speaking becomes like a kind of partner with what we're seeing um on stage as well so so i think one of the the kind of metaphors that we were playing with was also you know what if we think about the commentators um uh as as a kind of chorus leader right like if we think about the kind of drama
turgy of greek tragedies right and so these these commentators are there kind of guiding and initiating us as the spectators right who is trying to make sense of what is called the formative context of this experiment and and they are there to kind of walk us through and what was very interesting is that because we had five um it wasn't just a singular voice either but um you could as the audience you had the kind of agency to permutate right like out of with these five you know either kind of a
lternating or cross cutting them and and feeling which are the kind of affinities with with which um commentators you you were feeling with each of those performances um i think i think at this point i i kind of wanted to take a step back right because i think that the frame that that was posed to me was to think about the the digital and the durational and i remember like you know what what is a durational performance and and and i was i was thinking about whether i would necessarily consider 1
4 a durational performance um and and and so i so here i kind of and very much inspired by and dance called andre le peki in thinking about duration of performance right so for him um duration he talks about how duration is not time extended um actually duration has little to do with extension or other spatial references duration endures a profound transformation in which time is no longer measured assessed inserted into an economy that is felt so so here le is inspired by um henry bexon right a
nd thinking about duration uh and where duration is not about um i think often times when when we we say this is a durational piece of art we we think about it as like a very long performance right it's an extended period like longer than the usual and performative parameters of time that we are used to right so anything that's more than an hour and a half or two hours for performance for example um oftentimes that's that's the way in which it circulates but i think le pakis intervention here is
to think about how actually something can be a second and that could be profoundly durational right and because for him to think about the duration is to exceed the kind of um chromonomativity right in which time is usually disciplined right of the 30 minutes of the of the one and a half hours etc and so with the way in which is thinking about durational art and durational performances it's about the quality in which that kind of measured time is um dissolves right to to allow for a different k
inds of kind of way in which time is felt liberated from chromo normativity so if i apply that kind of lens or frame to think about a work like 14 it's very interesting because on one hand um [Music] the the the the 14 minutes is so exact within within 14 right like that that is the the whole parameter of the work that the measurement of time is is so um specific but at the same time it is because it's precisely because it is meant to echo that kind of 14-day duration that kind of durational qua
lity of the quarantine right in which you know how are we inhabiting that time the kind of counting down or is it that within that very strict parameters we are free to experiment with a different kind of rhythm of of creation of thinking about the work etc so so so on one hand there is that kind of form parameter but that i think to me what is the most the most durational aspect of the work um and to me what i consider actually might be the protagonist of the work is actually the commentators u
m because they it's it's it's really because they are the ones who are sitting there right for that five hours um of course of course you know we said that they could eat they could rest or or and all of that and some of them did right but at the same time um they their presence was still with us for for those five hours right and and so i remembered charlene like sharing a little bit about some of those like how like being sensitive to the energy as well and kind of leaning into the moments of
exhaustion for example or when when like or what really pulls her or not right and and so so for me like like there was something that was fascinating about that layer in terms of how it it in some ways as an audience i was almost like rooting for their their their commentators as well right as they introduced us to a different way of thinking about not a kind of focused time in which like you you have to be like fully present or whatever but but like how do you accompany a work right with this
varying degrees of um focus distraction and all of that um which which then i think maybe leads me a little bit to the sense of the digital i mean i think then the the question that i was considering then is what are the kind of different registers of duration and the digital that's happening within a work like this right because there's also the kind of durational quality like i think about time and duration on film versus performance was also something that we were discussing a lot about right
like for i remember one of the conversations i had with zhong wei when we were trying to find different kinds of ways of framing the work was i think i think my provocation to him was to think about not to turn dance into film but to think about how the film becomes deformed by the dance as well right so so what that also meant was that for example having to unlearn um the kind of like i think as a filmmaker for him it's always about the cuts right like like after a few moments we have to cut w
e have to keep like sustaining the audience's energies by by cutting to different shots whereas like i think for us we're thinking about how do we sustain the integrity of that presence right that liveness can we hold that for a little bit longer than is usually comfortable for a kind of filmic form for example so so there is that kind of degree of of thinking about duration but then there's also the degree of thinking about what does what does duration or focus or presence mean um in a digital
space where our attention is often like perforated by like all these other things that are happening right like a whatsapp message that's coming in right now or checking my email or someone walking in at the back how do we how do we not deny those kinds of presence but they kind of pull that and acknowledge that as the kind of basis and paradigm of thinking of this presence and co-sharing of time and space um and and and and in many ways that's not new right because like i'm thinking about the k
ind of like wyong performances that are very long right that are durational that you can kind of step out away for a while come back you're kind of talking to someone as you're watching the work you know that they're actually this kind of um being in a black box being very quiet watching a thing with full focus for one and a half hours i mean that is actually the the um what is abnormal actually right that's actually quite a recent kind of uh uh intervention in itself so so so i mean these are s
ome of the questions that are kind of muddling uh in my head as i'm revisiting and thinking about the work um within these i guess parameters of thinking about duration and digital i think i'm just going to stop here for now i'm sure like we can unpack or chat about some of these things uh um together but yeah that's me thank you so much sean um yeah i was you i literally wrote in my notes that the commentators were the most durational aspect of this durational performance and you know they are
the constant presence throughout the show and we watch them watching we watch them you know um becoming stiff fidgeting uh stretching hunching over you know it's a fascinating disjunct from what we are seeing with the dancers you know and we see also the commentators attention tuning in and out you know sometimes looking at the phones like you're talking about you know somebody's going for dinner and going going to the toilet and things like that and it's so it's a wonderful thing to watch actua
lly um uh and it's also a wonderful kind of reflection as to when so what what attending to a digital show especially a durational one usually means you know people can easily tab in and tab out literally like um and so i uh i for one was was very delighted uh when the taiwanese commentator when daniel came on and she she just started standing up and started dancing she's like i've got this mic i've got this wire but i don't care i'm just gonna dance who cares the theater is your playground and
it was it was great you know um uh it's something particularly unique i think about the digital age the idea of watching someone watch something even if it's yourself i'm currently watching myself uh it's something very particular about zoom in in that sense um we are very used to watching a copy of ourselves uh but but to as an audience member to watch another audience member um i mean i also think about things like youtube reaction videos right this this kind of uh commentating also reminded m
e of that and i was wondering if i wish the commentators were here um i was wondering what kind of prep do they have to go through uh for this performance did they have to rehearse um i don't know sean do you know if charlene had to rehearse for her besides you know your own dialogues with her yeah um so so i think what was interesting was because we we did have a few runs right and um uh i think for for susan i think she was almost like there for all the runs right and high commentators i saw t
hat he was there for a lot of it as well um i think for for for charlene i think we're quite deliberate about okay let's only bring her in when necessary right so i think we did a bit of the tech stuff but then i think i wanted her to to kind of just respond to to the work's fresh knife right as she she was seeing it um um so so in terms of rehearsal i don't think that there is um but i think there were lots of conversations about um yeah i think i think a lot of conversations were dwelling more
in the realm of the the what does it mean to think about storytelling right as a kind of medium and and then what kind of like bodily prep that that requires what kind of foods we lay around the area how do we like adjust the space such that the light isn't like shining into our highs for five hours right and there's those kinds of considerations that we're playing with yeah absolutely yeah i mean i felt very like you know when she was like oh what is your body doing now because i was worried f
or her body i was like what you're sitting for so long like charlie are you okay um yeah but uh but and she said what is your body doing now and now my body is is pretty bad at the moment i mean i have cocaine so so it was it was really nice to have that dialogue um uh yeah just as i'm i'm watching the show and i thought what was very like affirming also was to um because i think the brief right from ray and uh wukong was very generous for the for the commentators as well right it's like you can
take a break you can eat you can rest you can etc and and i think often times as audience members we especially people who have been used to going to performances pre-covered we are very prone to being very harsh on ourselves right i keep seeing people or hearing people talk about how guilty they feel for being like bad audience right for not being able to pay attention to the work or having to like constantly like um just to get through like a one and a half hour recording they have to split i
t over like six sittings etc and and i think by watching these commentators being very being distracted being not fully present in that usual way in which we imagine the kind of contract an audience needs to have the performance that kind of gave the or that it felt like it gave the audience permission also right and affirmed that actually it's fine wherever you are at that's okay yeah absolutely yeah um okay so sean has given us a very detailed rundown of at least a singaporean contingent as a
as a dramaturg within a specific contention but i i'm interested in overall because dramaturgy is a lot about sequencing right what comes one after the other you know and so how did you all decide you know as as um as i suppose uh directors of the the show how did you decide what which performance came next or uh the sequence of the the performance i know daniel cole is like it's like of course that's the end that's the finale but but yeah no oh really pure luck no it was pure luck because we di
dn't get to see it before like a few days before the show so it's purely random is this this sequence no no no no we got some information from dramatur knowing what the performer is going to do or and some some and some but some performance we saw before we decided but a lot of a lot of the performers we didn't get to see it and we had to make the decision i have to make the decision through just the information uh dramatically provided us so we just randomly and we got lucky daniel cox was the
last yeah i mean it was a wonderful for those of you uh who don't know i mean it just came out guns blazing um i i mean i want to see if i can show a little bit of it just just can you all see [Music] yeah so that was and and and yeah even even uh uh the taiwanese commentator always was like yeah of course you know he's the finish he's and what a way to end you know um yeah so that's why i was wondering how did y'all decide um how to sequence so really it was just all based on textual informatio
n that you got right right right i can say a little bit so so we had five rehearsals i say rehearsals meaning with all tech stuff ready and we had total five and then we the first almost first three was just figuring out the technical issues so we didn't really rehearse anything so until the last two was week in on the horse team we could actually and also for everyone else can actually see what's happening besides their own country so so before then i guess we only got the the written written d
escriptions from each venue each armature saying what they might want to do for each other so we just it's a it's a gamble we just we sit down and then we just figure out oh we talked through oh maybe this here maybe maybe maybe um rasman could be the intermission [Music] try to put him in the middle and then maybe someone can beat in the beginning maybe maybe danielle maybe he could be the end so we got lucky yeah because and we got lucky and also i remember uh in the beginning we also ask each
dramata to to give us some suggestion if if he thinks that this piece should stay in the middle or towards the end or after intermission they please do suggest so they those information helps yeah i see i see um yeah sean did you want to add something about that sequencing or what did you suggest yeah um so so so i think for for us the the arc was quite clear actually um so so we decided we were very we wanted to play with um sandhya's very presentational performance as like near the start uh a
nd then you know you're kind of almost moving through the stage right so you step in the audience seat uh you go up to the stage and and then you go to the wings and then we were saying that oh actually wrist months would be good as an intermission right because you're going backstage right and it's almost like the the relationship between that space and stage is not um specially obvious uh and then kind of rounding off with uh daniels that brings us back into the audience area and because of of
that um uh order as well they were setting up decisions about the the frames right because initially i think in some years when we did want to kind of review the theater space but because um we decided actually but later on we decided maybe we can we can reveal the space uh in daniel's piece right so with with sandia's point we keep it tight to the the the to the calf prosthenium arc but not so much the the audience side of the space itself so there was a kind of graduated review of an initiati
on into the space right right thank you so much oh by the way as moderator i suppose i have the the responsibility of saying that please put in your your questions in the chat at any point you like and also for the facebook live audience please also just comment wherever you are and uh the center 42 team will communicate your questions to us so yes it's not just me asking questions over here um hon yang can also jump on at any point and um yeah about the the san diego was it sanyas please yes it
was it was um it was very spectacular it was like kind of theater magic uh at some points and but then i also really liked how it cut to the interlude which is just like bang okay that's just house lights on yeah it's just yeah so that was that was a really nice transition actually okay so my next question is um is is about trans when you transpose a performance into a digital space uh my friend uh the artist javon chandra i always like to say everything becomes multimedia you know uh if you're
a dancer you know if you are a actor you're a stage manager whatever it doesn't matter what role you are in my experience everybody including dramaturg everybody has become an expert in multimedia or or a kind of a yeah a multimedia artist even a film director you know everybody needs to understand framing camera angles technological affordances you know directing themselves in some way um and in 14 you see a little bit of that you see a lot of dancers directing themselves i suppose um framing
themselves and is this do you think this is the future of being an artist in a post-pandemic age you know that these kinds of skills and knowledges are now necessary to become an artist a dancer or a dramaturg doesn't matter what role you play we're talking about 14 but obviously uh wukong as an artist as a dance artist has been i think spending quite a bit of time thinking and and and actually even philosophizing about what it means to dance in front of the camera what it means to dance digital
ly yeah like i said 14 for me was a very layered complex and rich experiment whom he undertook with ray but on his own his musings i think the thinking behind digital dance uh online live digital dance also goes beyond 14 or perhaps 14 is the product of it after a long period of doing other stuff which is why this question is very interesting i want i would definitely like to hear from wukang please uh yes uh i think it's there's a engine there's a drive to survive so so this is the the need to
survive and where is the resource and we jump in and we study and during the process and we gain the knowledge and we gain the knowledge of of understanding what we're lacking and understanding that we can never compete in a digital performance i mean digital format like netflix and uh it's during pandemic this three years is so clear that we we're losing we just believe really happily because i think it's so so interesting that we uh the performing arts in theater is a very i would say old trad
ition right i mean of course it's not taiwan's tradition coming from from europe or or other country but this performing arts lively is a has a long history not like a digital performance so but we immerse ourselves in in this culture and we are preserved by the government and we continue to evolve into a contemporary arts a contemporary performing arts and but at the same time the the mainstream pop culture or movie and other medium are just exploding and so this is the moment we get to meet at
the same platform and oh my god no compete no compete and and so it's very interesting three years and this will somehow help us to continue to to think because i mean i mean luckily when we do work we don't need to we don't always have to tell a story i think that's our advantage that that we still we we have we know there are some value even though they don't turn into money or the audience system oh no numbers yeah viewing numbers yeah like any little beginner of youtuber has more viewer tha
n 14 altogether so there's no compete uh but we are doing some other stuff we're doing we're doing some other stuff we i just feel lucky that we get to get to work on this project and i must say that faith and irish and like espionage are so smart very smart to putting this together because they have to pull a lot of stuff and and and in the beginning they have to push us they have to push us it's to to uh uh ask us to expand our idea to to to collaborate with uh international collaborator and h
ow we change how we change the idea of fourteen and including more people yeah it's lucky lucky really i've got another question um which uh i think wu kang didn't quite expand on and maybe uh it was cheeky naughty of him not too but he left a very strong impression on me what he said just now um i think for this particular uh event 14 there has been actually a lot of stress on or rather the emphasis is on the drama terms on dramatics and dramaturgy and i i'm quite sure i read it in rays of uh a
presentation just now where it said it did say something to the fact that the dramaturgs were the one who chose the dancers am i correct yeah and then this was followed by what wukong said just now where because of this it became almost a political commentary uh where from where wukang and rey were sitting they could see who were the ones being chosen who were the ones not being chosen and this for me was strengthened by what sean said about his choice or his curatorial thrust of the singapore
dancers of these dancers who may never see actually the main stage of a national theater like esplanade because of the kinds of works they do and therefore also to reframe in a way what they were doing and again it's it's almost uh it's not almost it is political so two things come to mind one is that we actually see the dramaturg here and i really would push the idea where you are not just looking at dramatics already in this particular event 14 ray and wukang i think what you have been doing i
s you have been collaborating with your curators right you've been working with curators with dance curators who have curated mini programs right you have not just one dancer you have four dancers with four different programs putting together what what the traditional western idea of a dance concert is about so you have dance concert from each country being put together in a bigger dance concert of global scale right but these dance concerts from each country is actually curated by a dramaturg n
o less but still the the work is i feel bigger because dramaturgy we always think of when we talk about dramaturgy there's always this idea of it uh of a particular project or particular performance but here's the dramatur having to look bigger and further and zoom out a bit more where they are looking at the big picture and i think uh kudos to the both of you for actually putting or rather working with uh dramatics in that position i think uh i would say i'm envious of sean uh who's been involv
ed in this because not many of us as dramatists get to curate special programs like this and that's meta in so many ways already right and also then uh the dramaturgy of oh this was in just pre-pandemic indian actually had a series of events where we were looking at dramaturgies of technology and so to actually say that this event just call it digital and durational i feel that now i am lacking some insight also i think it should be dramaturgy of technologies because you are dealing with not tec
hnologies of just the body as sean has uh so insightfully uh revealed to us in his own curatorial way of looking at the dancers but the technologies also come from really hardware we are talking about a grasp of the technicals that we've never had to before right before this neon was laughing at me because i still do not know how to blur my background for zoom and here you have ray just now giving that amazing uh slide you know of of how how things are working and how how the movement of technic
als are going to be so for me these two are very pertinent things that because of this event here we are looking at the politics of such an event you know of who's being chosen who's being represented who's not being represented and also then actually shedding light on the bigger ramifications of the bigger ideas of technology where i think you're right to say that with this kind of technological uh knowledge we are definitely have to we definitely are looking at competing with netflix right and
this is a seed because it's interesting you brought up netflix netflix started as a video store i use i used to rent them there you go i used yeah when i was in new york always yeah there you go so interesting they got so big precisely so we are talking about that and again going back to what nan said about the future for the two of you especially rey and wukang and ray because of your technical knowledge um where does uh 14 go or is there going to be another 14 or what other kinds of potential
the potentiality of such an event as 14 can be done um is a question that i would like to address the both of you also and just adding on to that and not to waste what 14 was like what is the archive or optimal future of 14 going to be like absolutely so hard because they're in this this involves a lot of detail that we haven't discussed and addressed such as copyrights because me and ray none of us owns 14 we only we only draw the outline and the all the content content were developed by the a
rtist and the the footage the angle was decided by another person so when it put together it became 14 and [Music] so we haven't haven't really talked about it and or decide what the copyright and for now we just have this secret link that we can sometime lay in the night or during quarantine just open it up to make sure that oh it was really there and it actually exists for now and and uh because uh we decided to get that this website and some of the some of my friends who watch the the show fo
r five hours and at the end they just say where where can i get this software that's all they wonder they want to use this software tool for meeting and for for the i don't know ray do you know the future of of this project it is still unclear i think first thing because we did 14 during pandemic now now it's almost we're almost hitting the post pandemic so that's why people were watching i think that that's that's one part and next part it only belongs to internet which means belongs to nobody
like for example like because we did the show and then we did this production and we expect to have some feedbacks from whoever saw it but it's we never really i mean i didn't really hear a lot from people and also i was trying to look up online there's no critics like like you know like like people didn't really write about this it just it's gone it evaporates after after the show so which makes me curious like like where where does it belong like because we build this venue on the website so t
he website becomes the home for this performance and and we we i am sure that me and ray we invest a lot of time talking about uh the creativity and of of this project on how how or we have never seen this part how we've never seen how they use this idea and all that but at the end it feels uh some of my friends would consider oh it's just a platform and we huh okay you didn't create anything because other people create so all these layers are still we're still digesting okay thank you thank you
so much for sharing this uncertainty i can't believe nobody has critiqued or i i just i really can't believe it because this is just such a guy gentoo's project um but you're right because i also only heard of it when you send me the email about it uh sean you work with archives a lot uh do you have a kind of an ideal vision for the future of 14. yeah no actually there is one review in the streets times by melissa quick so at least one exists um whether it covers the whole ambition of the proje
ct that's a different like i think that's an interesting question right like what what is 14 you know is it just about the specific um uh works or is it about the infrastructure or is it about the process right like what what are the parts that that should be documented and i think you know i i think i'm just come back to that earlier point that um nian was sharing earlier right in terms of viewing the work post uh after the the the performance itself and so the thing coming back to the digital
and duration all the interesting for a lot of like digital works the performance is the archive right like the the moment that it is screened online that because that constitutes the artifact um of the archive as well there's no whereas like you know in the past when it's like a natively live physical performance then the the recording becomes a kind of shadow of that right whereas like in the paradigm when things are happening digitally that that is the work right and and i'm thinking about how
what is the durational qual what happens if we think about archives as a kind of durational performance right that maybe 14 doesn't end um after those five hours maybe 14 continues every time like that like when yen was was watching it you know it was still part of performance she can still comment on it she is still interacting with a community of other kinds of audiences reacting to it right and and i was just thinking like maybe all kinds of archives should include that kind of audience reac
tion audience co-presence you know in in terms of how a work is being documented as well so i think that that was one thing that came to my mind and i think the other thing that i wanted to also offer was this is slightly in in reference to an earlier question right about the competition between live performance and digital theater i think it's helpful maybe to also like not think of it as a kind of zero-sum game that that we need to be in competition about but rather i don't even think that it'
s about trying to think about the transposition of the life into the digital but i think the challenge or the invitation is for us as artists and performance makers to think about the digital and i think that the paradigm of the digital is also shifting as you're talking about right as as you know like the way in which it incurs into the physical augments those relationships in different ways is becoming more and more complex rather than a kind of binary to begin with so what happens with if we
take this digital or hybrid spaces um as a new starting point to to to transcreate right our practices to think about our works and you know rather than to try to translate something digital uh physical to digital like i think if we think about it from the lens of that kind of trans creation and to start from a very different kind of orienting context it opens up very interesting possibilities and opportunities as well potentially one can hope thank you so much uh sean uh we do have one question
from the audience from maxim hi max do we need to prepare he says to create and perform in or for the metaverse anybody want to tackle this question tanyan do you know what the metaphor i was just about to say i think we need to unpack metaverse a little bit of what it means to different people different contexts and actually different platforms right sean was talking about a lot of things that will matter about 14 the whole exercise of putting together curators with an autonomy to choose dance
rs is already a matter a commentary on the work itself and then to look at it from a metaverse where we are looking at a world upon another world so what are we unpacking here from 14 is are you saying are we is max trying to say that this matter verse that 14 is a matter verse in itself where there are many ways of performing it right from dancer to cameraman to dop to commentators uh i stopped here sean please oh yeah sorry um i think yeah so i think just to unpack the metaphors because i thin
k that's also a word that is used a lot these days to mean very different things and i think oftentimes when people say metaverse they're thinking about ar vr or specific platforms right whereas i think oftentimes um the way in which the metaverse is invoked is it's more of a paradigm shift it's a whole ecological shift right and and the idea about the metaverse is that actually the distinction between the physical and the virtual will be like dissolved right there is no kind of binary between t
he life or whatever but but how the the the virtual incurs into the physical and vice versa is a lot more complex and a lot more dense right so i think the first thing to to acknowledge is that the metaverse isn't here yet right because i mean we can see glimpses of it but i think where i think one way to read the question as a kind of provocation is to think about how yes you know 14 might be a work that um was circulating in a it's a very different kind of economy of circulation when it's oper
ating online for sure but it also has very in it builds interesting infrastructures in the the physical um spaces also right in terms of the networks of relations that are being forged amongst the participants um another thing another infrastructure that became very obvious um was the technological infrastructures right the geopolitical technological infrastructures across different spaces yes the parameters might be similar um across for each of us but like it's very clear like which are the sa
tellites where um you know maybe like the light becomes like almost an interesting aesthetic that incurs into the performance right or or that some of the performances had to be pre-recorded because of um restrictions that were happening uh in bangkok for example right where all performances had to be cut by a certain time so so i think i think i think it's very easy to think about the digital as this like flat homogenous space but i think we must remember that that is never the case right as au
diences and we we still um inhabit these spaces in very specific spaces for example and and to think about how what does it mean to then make performances accessible it becomes a very interesting question to consider also yeah i absolutely this is exactly what i wanted to talk about oh sorry and where did you want to um add anything because i was just struck by this one particular comment rolling through the screen in the performance which was the glitches are reflections of the techno technical
circumstances each city faces please embrace this creative reality right and it was it was a wonderful acknowledgement of the territory that comes with the digital and we can you know we can talk about glitches as you know aesthetic you know i don't know uh elements but but beyond the idea of glitches being creative reality i like to draw attention like what sean said to the possibility of it being uh the reality of political economy right it takes a lot of resources to mount a digital producti
on especially of this scale and of this quality and at the same time there is a huge and widening digital divide in in asia especially you know uh it's been quite obvious during the pandemic uh you know as urbanized you know resource rich places like singapore and taiwan you know thrive in this this era of digitalization unless urbanized spaces uh with less digital infrastructure will be left behind and what what does it mean when it comes to making art you know when it comes to transnational wo
rks there's always already an uneven distribution of resources collaborating with people of different countries but i suspect even more so for for digital works right um so if transnational digital performance is going to be the way forward you know uh in terms of performance collaboration oh yeah you know if we save on plane fares and save on hotel fees and all of that sort of stuff but do countries like singapore and taiwan or places like that first have to firstly acknowledge this this inequa
lity and secondly how do we find ways do we have a responsibility to find ways to help artists in other kinds of places navigate this terrain you know do did you have to experience this negotiation in 14 i think sean already hinted at it earlier yeah i think we have to end with this question sorry we are i think i think hung it yeah yes honey and messaged me but yes please comment on this and then we can wrap up you can have a quick um thing and then maybe like wukang and and ray can cancel insi
de this right because um remember in our conversations one of the the tips i mean of course 14 is a lot about isolation solo being alone but through the process we are so aware of how paradoxical that is right this is a work that is so ambitious there's such a huge network of people and um to make that that moment happen requires a whole team of people that we reveal in the kind of transitional photos right so so on top of our solo we talked a lot about the solidarities right how can we think ab
out solidarities across these spaces how can we think about the kind of redistribution of resources i'm not sure and anything maybe like i'm not so privy to the kind of producing side of things for example like whether um um uh like specific like infrastructures or like wi-fi devices were invested from i don't know like estimate site to support some of the other um spaces but maybe uh yeah wukong and can can share a little bit more about that come on ray and wukang i'm sure there's a lot to be s
aid about uh just trying to navigate yeah we're just not sure who should start just start we are running out of time but we need to hear oh yes uh the this inequality it's so obvious right from the start yeah the the the uh yeah just the wi-fi just the basic wi-fi like italian like yeah in italy they don't they they oh my god they don't have they have very limited choice that but that's what they need and so so we need to find solutions for each different uh collaborating partner and it shows it
shows and it reveals the inequality that we think shocking because yeah we thought we thought it should be very easy because it took out took us very long time not not very long a few few meet things with our tech team to think oh this is very common this is very common machine that you can get and we even check on the internet oh they they do have it but it just when we in contact with them it's just so hard for them to get it so yeah it shows and uh i don't know ray can you i don't have too m
uch to talk well it's i just feel like it's it's there's no way turning back and yeah it's still it's still somehow mirroring the real life situation because you need so much resources to pull this together and we've been chosen by other people because we did something here so i don't know it's just it still represents the yeah but no matter what i think we need to jump in to digital uh or at least set one foot in it's like it's like bitcoin it's like all this digital stuff that or the metaphors
you may you may have uh uh your personal reason that uh you don't want to tap in but you need to know right you need to know what it is you need to know what it is and whatever they're playing and that just by gaining this uh knowledge expand my understanding about the world that i didn't know it exists yeah yeah on one hand there's something yeah there's something so accessible about the digital so so flat in its hierarchy as uh you know the digital is digital performance is accessible for peo
ple who are in wheelchairs you know um people who cannot afford babysitting they can just go online and watch it but yeah so there's something really freeing and accessible about digital performance but there's also you know the other side on the production side of things you know you need good camera you need good you need lots of production resources um in order to yeah and i was just in a the reason why i asked this also is because i was in a panel the other day um uh organized by a filipino
theater company and they look seeing them try to survive the drive to survive in this pandemic using the digital they are trying the best to use the digital as well but it's just they just don't have the same resources and funding that uh but i but but i think it all i mean just we we still don't have enough people doing it i think because we think it's uh irrelevant this this two world but once more project or more production being created we will know more samples and soon we'll find ways to d
o digital performance without spending any money yeah hopefully yeah like like right now like before we are so used to see performance with real set like uh uh german opera or or peanut buttons like real set and and later we get to see like no sets at all and uh a company on tour with our tech people and we without even manager just to perform two of them with the laptop and they just tore everywhere so i think soon we as performer or creator in yeah we'll find a way to tackle this yeah yeah abs
olutely i think that's very very well put pairing it pairing it down paring it down and um making it accessible eventually for all um okay i think we have to we have to wrap up uh it's 3 40 we are over time but thank you thank you so so much for your time and energy and and sharing it's very very generous of all of you uh honey and do you so happy to be here so happy yeah how are you doing i i just want to yeah quickly again thank uh wukong ray and sean to share the experiences with 14 and very
big thanks to nian to to moderate this particular session um just one last word that i like to to to say is that this thing about inequality actually if you look at it even pre-pandemic it's always been there whether it's technical whether it's cultural whether it's financial or political right i mean we we can even go on to argue who was the first one who got invited to i don't know the the uh edinburgh festival that in itself is already an inequality but that is where then uh for me the richne
ss of performance comes from it is because of that kind of inequalities that actually rich performances come from and then how we deal with the inequalities and the lacks uh as wukham puts it very succinctly it's a matter of survival how we want to survive i know of indonesian artists for the last two years we've turned back to becoming fishermen and farmers so there are ways i mean they are still doing a bit of dancing here and there but you know there are ways of surviving so they are these ar
e different strategies that we are all trying out and solidarity is something that i think sean uh rightly says so that uh it has to be seen as an effort in solidarity and for that wukong and ray i salute the two of you in doing this and i really hope that you continue in other ways yeah it's not just about dance it's i want to stress that actually this is about the technology and when i say technology i do not mean hardware i mean not just hardware but also in the thinking and putting together
everything thank you very much for this and on this note i would like to just wrap this session uh and i'd like to thank everyone for staying back uh to to listen this is not the last one that we have we have another one tomorrow actually uh this year has been an amazing year for us starting from last year where we had a series of e-zines that were put out based on all our conversations conferences symposiums workshops into publications where we also hadn't had these panels to review these publi
cations which is in a way a trial for us to look at proper publications for asian dramatics networks a wealth of archives that we have amassed since 2016 and we also if you go into on our website we have a little map to show where our dramatics uh have or rather contributing dramaturgs and artists who have actually put their two cents into what it means to dramaturg or what it means to do dramaturgy in asia but more importantly like i said this is not the last of our series we have one more tomo
rrow starting at 3 pm singapore time called trance local connections introducing apel which is a special artist network in berlin based in berlin where they look at a different way of doing residencies which uh favors asian artists yeah and we also will be we were talking to the founder ming who is singapore uh born and he's a dramatic i would say in putting together the residency program uh please join us tomorrow at 3 p.m we'll be talking to ming uh his dramatur dana and also uh fizza manan fr
om singapore also who will be our provocateur on that note again let me thank ray shawn and yen thank you so much i think i'm gonna bid goodbye good afternoon good evening good night to all of you thank you
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