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David Gonzalez is a storyteller who brings storytelling to theatrical settings. He has been recognized for his unique productions and has taught at NYU. He believes in being sensuously involved with stories and using his body, voice, and experiences to bring them to life. He emphasizes the importance of investing time and energy in cultivating one's own craft and imagination. He sees storytelling as a limitless art form that allows people to use their own imagination to create powerful images. He believes that being an artist means living in a permeable way, seeing and taking in the world around us. Interview number 115, David Gonzalez, bringing storytelling to Broadway, well almost. Thank you my dear brother, what a beautiful soul. All children love stories, folktales, they are messages from our ancestors that you have come to the right place. We will have a storyteller in every school. Storytelling can teach. You have that openness of a child. Good on you, Eric, for doing what you're doing. That's a great question. Thank you. I'm inspired to be here. I'm really honored to be here. We tell stories. Know yourself. Follow your passion. And live with grace. Hey, welcome to the Art of Storytelling with Brother Wolfe, and this is Eric Wolfe, and I am so excited that you have come here today, that you are taking the time, you are taking a moment to really think, to really look deeply at what it means to use, to love, to cherish that thing that I value so much, which is, of course, the art of storytelling. And I have found here in the jungle of New York City, I have found a storytelling artist who has taken storytelling to a completely different place, a place that already exists, and he has brought the narrative art, the oral tradition, to stage settings. He is bringing storytelling to theatrical settings, and that is David Gonzalez. David was recently named the Joseph Campbell Foundation Fellow for 2010. He was nominated for a 2006 Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience for his production of The Frog Bride at Broadway's New Victory Theater. He is the author of the opera libretto, Rise for Freedom, produced at Cincinnati Opera House. He also received his doctorate in music therapy from NYU and taught there for 10 years. David Gonzalez's poetry was featured at the Lincoln Center's Out of Doors Festival, Bill Moyer's documentary Fooling with Words on PBS, NPR's All Things Considered, and the World Science Festival, among many other venues. He was the host of the New York Kids on WNYC for eight years, a radio show that was live kid-to-kid radio. I'm going to have to ask a question about that during this interview. So David, thank you so much for coming on the show. Hey, it's a pleasure to be here, man. Thanks for everything you do for the community. It's tremendous. So the listener, David, just told me before we started, we're right near a hospital, and so every once in a while you're going to hear the sirens going off. Yeah, not any old hospital. That's Bellevue Hospital, the nut house. So I live really close in case of emergency, Eric. You and I just slip into Bellevue, and we'll be well taken care of. And they'll never let me out. So Dr. Gonzalez, do you have a story you can share with us? Well, I thought I would tell, I'm a great fan of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, who's written scores of books. Eduardo Galeano has chronicled the history of Latin America, and in one of his books, The Memory of Fire, which is a trilogy, a phenomenal trilogy on the history of Latin America, he recounts pre-Columbian myths, and they're stories which I had never heard before, and they're odd characters and odd situations. And so here's one, which I've adapted, and it goes like this. Long ago, long ago, long ago, long ago, long ago, every feather of every bird, every feather of every bird was white. The cardinals were white. The blue jays were white. Every feather of every single bird was white. Until one day, when one bird heard the sound of the river, dared to take a sip and dive into the flow, and you know this bird became blue. Until another bird heard the cry of a child, dared touch the wound, and this bird became red. Until another bird saw the forest, dared open his wings, and he flew up into the branches, darting, swooping, twirling, absorbing a thousand shades of green. But those birds who did not drink or swim, those birds who were afraid to touch, those birds who dared not open their wings and fly, those birds who stayed home, bored, uninvolved, playing way too many video games, well, they remained simply and totally and plainly white. Tell another, tell another, it's so good. Look at that, look at that, look at that. Look at that, look at that, look at that. Oh, look at that, when he was just a little one-inch worm, his father hunted with tiny arrows so that his squirmy little son could eat the hearts of songbirds. And with this melodious feast, the boy grew and grew, and when he was a snake as long as my arm, his father hunted with the big arrows. The birds fell to the forest floor till the skies were empty and there were no more. And then Papa hunted the jaguars. He set his traps, he caught them, clubbed them, cut them, delivered their hearts to his serpent son, who devoured them until no more jaguars walked the earth. Then Snake Boy said, Papa, I'm hungry, I desire human hearts. And one by one, one by one, Papa emptied the village of the two-leggeds and he had to go further and further and further to find food for his son, till one day Papa was hunting, hiding up in a tree, when he was found and taken down. Snake Boy waited and waited and waited, and driven by his gut hunger and his pure love, he set out to find his father again. And when he came to the village that had taken his father, he wrapped himself around it and began to squeeze out his anger. The villagers were terrified, they dipped their arrows into the fire and released them into Snake Boy's skin, his long muscles, his spiny bones. But Snake Boy didn't stop, he didn't stop, Snake Boy rescued his father and then he jumped up into the air and he's still there, alive, Snake Boy is alive, undulating, undulating, undulating through the cosmos. His skin shines with the light of a billion fiery arrows. You can see him for yourself, if you look up at the sky on a moonless night, see the Milky Way, cause that is Snake Boy, today. I love how you told these stories and one of the things that really comes to mind for me is this idea of, is there a tension in oral narrative between telling the story flat for the sake of the story and telling the story with theatrical sort of underpinnings and support? Well, that's where personal style and personal artistry comes in, I dare not presume. I also dare to be as sensuously involved with my stories as I can be. To me, the great joy for me is to realize my instrument and to play my instrument, whether it's vocally, rhythmically, physically, to bring it to life through this instrument. And so my approach, my style is to be very enlivened, either vocally or whatever the modality is at the time. What's the key to opening up that sensuality for a storyteller who may, a lot of people listening will say, well that's nice, I'm glad he can do that, I wish I could do it. What's the doorway that really made a difference for you in terms of opening up your ability to use that sensuality? Well, let me parse the words here a minute, cause I prefer the word sensuousness to sensuality. Sensuality is towards kind of the personal satisfaction of the senses. Sensuousness is the condition within which we live. We are sentient beings in a sensuous world. So I can only speak to myself, I don't make, again, presumptions, but I've been really fortunate to have great teachers in body work, psychotherapy, movement, vocal work that's integrative and you can never diminish the value of a brilliant meal either. So what I hear you saying is that one of the limits of your performance is yourself and by working on your tool, your body, your voice, your health, your experience, even of the meal, even of life, that you are working on your ability to perform better as a performer, as a storyteller. That is absolutely true. Usually I take off maybe eight weeks or so during the summer and I don't tell. I do a lot of other different things, I hike and I'll swim and I take different courses. Last summer I took a course in butoh dance, meditation courses, I play my guitar, I play the piano a lot. I don't tell stories and when I come back to narrative and narrative art, all of that has informed me again. I think it's a blessing to have a venue, and by venue I mean an art form where in all that experience can be channeled, directed and brought to bear, have a meaning. So on one side I'm kind of a culture hound, I'm always going places and doing things and listening and going to strange clubs and oh my gosh, I went to Coney Island at one o'clock in the morning not too long ago and saw this twisted freak show of post-modern wildness and it was really daring and scary and I thought, wow, these cats are taking it to the edge. How can I do that? And conversely, sitting in meditation and stillness and where does silence play in? How can I use that? Yeah, the limit is one's own being, what are the limits of one's own instrument. I really like storytelling because I feel like when you watch a movie, you know there's a budget and in storytelling, I mean we'll talk about the theatrical experience, but it feels like if you're outside the theater, there is no budget. The limit really is, sometimes when I'm telling a story and I pull this trick or I pull this plot point or this device or even this image, it's like you couldn't do that image on television without half a million dollars and I just got 150 people to just believe in that image and see that image in their own heads. Well how much time and energy have you invested in cultivating your own heart and soul, your imagination, your craft, how you move your digits, how you wince and smile, how you tip your head and hat and how much time have you looked at the world around you and integrated all that and become an artist? That's an artist's way, is to live in a permeable kind of fashion, to see and take in. This is a new thing for the show, let's just pause there, let's talk about the artist's way as you see it. We've kind of discussed and walked around this idea of seeing the world, we've talked a lot about that, we've talked a lot about how to take in the world, but this concept of putting that together as an artist's way, could you just talk about that for a moment? Yeah, again, it's the way I live so I don't presume much. I know that there's a circle of energy and I don't mean that in any kind of cosmic way, I mean it very literally. Take in shape, color, form, sound, dynamic, movement. Take in gesture, take in the world and really try and feel what those things are. But at the same time, cherish the opportunity to integrate those as quickly as possible as part of the giving that I offer to my audiences. So take a class, bring it right back in, use the venue of the narrative form to use what I've gotten quite quickly. An example of that for me has been, last summer I took this course in Butoh, which is rooted in a phenomenal story in Japan post Nagasaki Hiroshima. The aesthetic there is quite different, it's not about beauty, it's about anti-beauty. It's about the beauty of ugliness in a way, and that sounds crazy, but it's true. It's about let us not forget that we decay, let us not forget that oblivion is our next door neighbor, sits on our shoulder. And so there's so much about slow movement and this counter pressure of the force to live and the pressure that keeps us grounded and keeps us moving toward the earth as in death. And living in this workshop was profound for me. And the very next time I performed Orpheus, which is one of my signature pieces, the moment where Hades confronts Orpheus, I just let this gesture live and it lasted so long, my arm reaching out through each of my joints, the shoulder into the elbow, through the wrist and every joint of my finger till finally there was that point. And that maybe took 30 seconds just to extend my arm. How long is the whole show? Oh, that whole piece is about 35 minutes. Right. So you took 1 60th of the show and put it into this one move. Yeah, exactly. And it was, to me, it was a simple example. Now that's probably not the best example because obviously it was a course that I was taking and it was already within sort of the framework of aesthetic performances and stuff like that. But you can translate that quite quickly to the people we meet, the things we experience. I was at the beach the other day and the rhythm, the visual rhythm of the way the remnants of these waves and these sort of arcs and the sand and the way that these little stones and shells were showing up and to me it was like a musical score and I felt like I could write that. I could turn that into music somehow and that's just another example. And I think that most artists live in that way. We take in from our world. It's so hard to do what we do, the effort to create and to put forward. So to be nourished, to be given these gifts, even if we're just making them up in our head, to take them in as offerings for our own creative process and our own unfoldment as people. So you ask about the artist's way, for me that's the cyclical nature of it, is to perceive the world as offering, offering, offering, offering, offering and to integrate it and use it as quickly, as decisively, as precisely and as effectively as possible. You get the understanding that time is limited and you're going to change each step of the way. Yeah, and when you have the good fortune like you and I do to be able to tell stories regularly and some certain, particularly signature pieces that you can come back to, you can hang these things on and try different ways because the infrastructure, the architecture of the story is there. You can play with the details, integrate a new thing, change the rhythm of a gesture. Another thing I've been playing with, I've been listening to some pretty fierce hip-hop artists, you know, these rappers, and they're doing this hyper-compressed talking, like really super-super-fast, you've never heard it on the radio, it's like unbelievably quick, you can't even tell what they're talking about. And I've been playing with the compression of language and the expansion of it. So yes, let it breathe, and flip it to a moment where it's so tight. And I'm getting that from pop culture, and it's the other side of this very deep, quiet meditation work I'm doing. And again, gratitude to the venue, gratitude to the craft that lets me do that. This is Elizabeth Ellis, and you are listening to The Art of Storytelling with Brother Wolf. Let's look at the theater. A lot of people listening to the show, they're not familiar with bringing storytelling necessarily into traditional theater settings. And they would be really interested in any lessons or tips you have for how to do that process and how to succeed in that process. There are a lot of ways to discuss that. I think one way to look at it is about expectation. And again, there are many different kinds of theater. We look at Spalding Gray, just sat at a table, lights, a cup of water, he was a narrator, a memoirist, a storyteller. And he was wonderfully successful, had a tragic life, but within his art and craft, he didn't need much. As I said earlier, I'm involved with the sensuousness of my instrument. And that starts to extend into working in theatrical venues. So that means the theatrical theater audiences, the theater managers, people who are the artistic directors of theater, are used to and look for how the arts of theater are brought to bear in new and interesting ways. And it isn't just the writing, it isn't just the performance on stage, but it is how sound, music, text, light, physicality, stagecraft, all gather together to bring the story to life. So in my journey into these theatrical venues, it's been wonderful to appreciate that and not have a chip on my shoulder about it, which I kind of did at the beginning, like, oh, who needs all that? Oh, because like you said before, you know, we are the poor theater of one, yeah? There's no budget, you go and you do your gig. And Lord knows, that's a great pleasure. No one needs to do anything more than that. However, I, being a sensuous person and loving the theater, was really curious and really fortunate to have the opportunity to start to play in that world. So then I started to set about how to find collaborators, who are the people that I would want to work with who did their craft the way I did mine. So then finding a lighting designer who knew about story, who knew about subtlety, foreshadowing, shading, knew how to build into a story, who's a storyteller himself in his craft. And then musicians who are not just, you know, playing the riff, but who really understand narrative, what an arc is, and how music can support, uplift, transform, direct a spoken narrative. And then that keeps on growing. Lately, I've been working quite a bit with video, designing some myself, but also working with pretty extraordinary video and graphic artists, visual artists, who know how to, again, we'd have these in-depth meetings where we'd study the story. And I'm the artistic director of the project, who I do bring in an actual director who kind of helps put the pieces together, but I have a vision of what it should be and how we need to each function. So that's been brought to bear in about seven, six or seven different productions that I've done on theatrical stages. You mentioned in the intro, the Frog Bride was really blown away to get a Drama Desk nomination. Some of your listeners might not know, it's kind of, the Drama Desk is like to the Tony Awards what the Golden Globes are to the Oscars. It's the critics, not the inner circle of Cognizanti, but it's the critics. And for the Frog Bride, it's a beautiful Russian fairy tale, which I originally heard from Robert Vly. I adapted it and went to all these different sources, and then I negotiated with the estate of the Russian composer Prokofiev, and they gave permission to use one of his beautiful suite for five melodies for violin and piano, and then the Guggenheim Museum here allowed me access to their collection of Kandinsky's paintings. And so we have a Russian fairy tale, the highest Russian music from the 1920s, and the great modernist Russian painter, though he lived most of his life in Germany and France, in the 1920s. And so I went to Kandinsky, and I hired a brilliant, brilliant, crazy Rastafarian freakazoid video artist, and I sat with him. He'd never done anything in the theater, but his imagination I understood. And then Daniel Kelly and Christian Howe, musicians who could swing into the classical music but also wrote an extraordinary score of incidental music and sound effects and comical things as well, a brilliant director, Leonard Petit, who helped us sew it together, and a stage manager who nursed the process through and made everything, what was dreamable, doable. And we worked on developing that project for four years, and then it had a really long, wonderful run. We toured all over the country. We got these awards. You know, it paid my mortgage for a while, and we're now on to the next thing. A big part of this is being able to work with fine collaborators who understand my aesthetics and for me to understand what the theaters, what they love to see, what they want to bring to their audiences, and it's slightly different. Now I do, I don't know, 50 to 100 school gigs every year and festivals, and it's a very different thing, and I love it. There's no headache, no video, no lights, no five-hour tech, you know, and you go out there in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and hit, and that's great. I love it. But I've really been fortunate to be able to find and develop this other side. So what I hear you saying, that brings up a whole set of questions for me, but the first major just reality check is what I hear you saying is build a community of artists with a common vision and channel that vision, channel that energy into the show. Yeah, absolutely. And I would say that, you know, be the artistic director. That is, let everything serve your vision of the story. Because if you give a script to a director, they can take it any which way they want. So it's two parts. One is finding collaborators who understand the nature of storytelling as an art form, and then B, being deeply involved with the collaborative process. So it's very time-consuming, but it's very exciting to do. Is it still storytelling? I could just hear some of my listeners going, no, it's not, unless it's one person telling a story from memory, or unless it's, is there a place, like how much of it was completely formed and solid? I mean, it was completely written as a story. Was it one person performing the entire story, or? Yeah, it's just me telling the story, except that it's very integrated with a really rich musical world and a really rich imagery world. And everything serves the story. And in each of these productions, The Frog Bride, Mythalo Jazz, which is the Orpheus myth, Sofrito, Sleeping Beauty, which we're working on now, a bunch of others, I had the story first. It was me. I worked that story out in front of school groups for a year or two or three or ten, and then started, you know, through the good graces and fortune, just being able to draw resources to build up around the story and within it. It is absolutely storytelling, and it's storytelling done with a high degree of theatricality, so everything serves the narrator, telling the tale. I play all the characters, I do the once upon a times and the forever afters. You would not mistake it for anything but storytelling. And there's no third wall. Something happens in the audience, we can adapt to it, we move. There are constraints. I mean, for example, with The Frog Bride, there were, I think, 140 light cues. There are 54 video cues. There are countless musical cues, and that becomes a three-dimensional grid that you have to be attentive to and take responsibility for. But I work with my team, so everyone is flexible and fluid, and they're following me. A great example of this is the video is not run off of a PowerPoint or off of a keynote. The video is done off of a very complex computer system, which I had to buy because it was the only way that the stage manager could call moving video cues in real time. So she's not going off, that's time to go with the video. It's like, when David gets there, and the musicians are, when he gets there or how he gets there, and they're really great improvisers, and they'll ride with me if I take it here or I take it there. So I infuse this in what I call a jazz aesthetic. I'm a jazz musician. So it still has this feeling of something that is being created in the moment, which to me is a core value of good storytelling, is that it's not preset. There are many storytellers. If you're one of those people, I apologize, I don't mean to offend you, but there are many people who do memorize every single word. I'm not one of them, and I really respect someone. So you've designed, I find this very exciting because I've always felt like, oh, I can never be in that environment, and hearing you, I'm like, I can do that. Just have a series of cues, and give them the cues when it's that time in the story, and let the story unfold the way it does. Yeah. I mean, it's as simple as that, and careful what you wish for, because there's a huge responsibility that goes along with that, and making sure that it does serve the story, that you are working with people who really respond to you, and that each of those moves, technical, musical, lighting, da-da-da-da-da, does not overshadow, that it's always in support of, enhancement to, or directing the story. And I've done it long enough, so I've taken some kind of strange risks. I even lost an agent over this once, when I was getting ready to do the frog ride. I had this idea that the narrative should stop, and the music and the video should propel, and then the narrative comes back in, and that happened. And because I had this idea that if the storytelling is going so well, if you have such deep rapport with your audience, if there's such a connection, if that story's living in the audience, they'll hang to know what happens next. And in the story of the frog ride, which is actually quite intense, what we do is we get to a point and it stops, kind of abruptly almost, and then this gorgeous Prokofiev's music for violin and piano, stunning, it's not kiddie music at all, it's extremely mature, but the movements are really short, they're only like 90 seconds long, and then the Kandinsky comes in in this really creative, colorful way, and all the momentum of this creative involvement with the narrative in the audience gets moved into this sound, music, visual world, either as a rest point, or people start to see the story in it, or make connections, or they get re-energized and re-infused with vitality. And that was a really hard thing to pull off, how to stop the narrative and let these other elements propel without losing the story, and we worked on that, I'm not kidding, Eric, for hundreds of hours, working on the flow, the choices, the moments, it's in the details. So I say be careful what you wish for, because once you get involved in this kind of thing, you have to take responsibility, just like you do with your gestures, and with your voice, and your content, and your language, that's what we're working with here, imagine that, you have to take responsibility for the entire stage, and everything that goes on. It's big, but the rewards are great, too, because now we're taking these shows into really big theaters all across the country, playing to audiences of 1,500, 2,000 kids, being booked in for a week at a time, or sometimes longer, and the rewards are wonderful. So it's worth it, if it's a natural evolution for your own creativity. I just want to hear also about the doctorate you did. Tell us again what your focus was in your doctorate. Well, I have an undergraduate, a master's, and a doctorate degree in music therapy, and I was really lucky as a very young man to find that discipline, it was a perfect thing for me. Music therapy, just a little bit of background, is the use of music in therapy. That sounds ridiculous, but it has to be broken down to that simple an equation, because each musician has their own music, and there are so many different kinds of therapy, so many different kinds of populations that we need therapy. So my approach comes out of jazz, blues, improvisation, coupled with a humanistic approach to therapy, that is, we work with what is present in the moment, and my great teachers, Clive Robbins and Paul Nordoff, the designers of Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy, what their work was about improvising in the moment with a handicapped child, listening to what that child brings, meeting it, creating an aesthetic, beautiful world where that musical exchange can blossom and grow. As I got into reading Carl Jung, and then later Joseph Campbell, and the world of myth and story became really vibrant within me, as I started telling stories, I started to integrate in my therapy work narratives, and making little, telling little stories as part of the therapy, and having the kids I was working with tell stories, and accompanying kind of spontaneous arias that would come, and then I got fascinated, I read a book by Marie-Louise Von Frans, some of your listeners might know, she was Carl Jung's long-time collaborator, and her particular interest was in fairy tales, and her book, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, was really instrumental in my, sort of, sea change in how I worked. And she would talk about amplifying images, and historical images, and dreams, and stuff like that, and I thought, why don't we try and play with those within a workshop setting? I had already been conducting workshops in improvisation and such, so my work began to take the form of taking a fairy tale, or a myth, with a group of adults, and people like you and I, we call this normal questing, sometimes they say normal neurotics, but I don't even like that. Normal questing adults, who are looking to enrich their lives, or deal with certain issues, whatever it may be, but to take a story as the orienting framework for an in-depth therapy process, and then to work with it in a chronological order, so that the architecture of the story guides the therapeutic process. For example, in the story of Orpheus, we meet Orpheus, whose gift is that when he plays his music, he can enchant the world. Trees lean in, animals doze, a whole host of things happen. He meets Eurydice, when she dances, she enchants the world, flowers are born beneath her feet. So in this workshop that I started to work on, what does it mean for you, if you were Orpheus? Where is the enchantment of your song? Do you have access to that? What do you dream it to be? Can we touch into that a little bit? What is your voice? Not necessarily a speaking voice, but how do you manifest transformative enchantment in your musicality? And so we do a whole improvisation about what it is to be Orpheus, and then a whole other one about Eurydice, and her, it's about the embodiment of enchantment. How do we move in space and time? How do we enchant our, how do we sit, what's our posture? How do we enchant through our dance? A whole lot of improvisations, and then they meet, and marry, oh my God. So in the group process, and this is happening in very expressive arts modalities through improvisation. We work in a big dance studio, a lot of instruments everywhere, I play the piano, there's scarves and it's a very luscious and alive workspace. It's not dreary and talky, it's about an active discovery of these mythic characters in relationship. And then the story proceeds because Eurydice is bitten by a snake. What is the snake? Really, what does that mean? And I'm not telling you what it is, I'm not interpreting for you or for the clients. What do you imagine the snake to be? People start to writhe and question, and you know, something that changes skin, or maybe something that rises up from the darkness onto the land and goes back, takes and goes, and coils, and you know, and then to improvise that, and then Eurydice is bitten. And what is it to be separated from the music and the body? And there's a loss there. And then, so people write poems, they dance and sing this, and then we do group process so we talk about it. How many times have you told this story? I've told Orpheus, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds of times. Something was said about, you know, you have this interpretation, this understanding of a story, and then you tell it, and you understand it differently. And then to do that a hundred times, to really go inside a story so many times, to find every time a new detail, a new aspect, a new, I can just imagine the things. You could talk, I bet you could talk several hours about this one story. Well, my dissertation is about Orpheus and Eurydice. That myth is the guidepost to my own personal life emotionally, socially, spiritually, psychologically. I come out of, for me, music is the highest art. I love storytelling, I deeply embody storytelling. And nothing transforms and transports me like great music. So this myth about a musician who conjures and transforms the world through his music, and a dancer who transforms her world through movement, they marry, the separation, and then what this questing for how Orpheus goes to the underworld to find her again, the sacrifice, the struggle, and the music is always there. You can interpret that also as the art is always there. The true voice is always there, the still, quiet voice, however you want to hear it. But for me, I always connect to the high art of music, which to me integrates all those other things. And he gets her back. He sings for Hades. Now in my version, I have him as a jazz musician, so I'm scat singing, it's kind of like Bobby McFerrin meets the underworld. So he meets Hades, and he's singing Charlie Parker's Donna Lee, something like... That's one of the hardest licks in bebop. And then he kills Hades, and he kills Hades, he nails Hades with a version of, I do a scat version of the Ave Maria. Orpheus gets Eurydice back. He lost the most important thing, and he gets her back. And then what happens? He makes a deal not to turn and look as he rises out, and at the threshold of the light world, he flips, turns, and loses her again. And then what happens? Does he stop? No. He comes out, and he plays even deeper, more passion, more soul, more wisdom, more oomph. And that, to me, is the story of the artist, that we are all questing for something outside of our reach, that either we lost, we had, we found, but we are always looking to be united with something that transcends everything else. And we never quite get there. I mean, there are fleeting moments of perfection in our craft, few and far between, but we're always trying to get there. And Orpheus, to me, embodies that. So at the end, when he comes out, he wails. He wails. And I have him there doing like a blues, like a dirty, down, wailing blues, because his heart and soul is just flowing into that. And it's undeniable. So I hold that story very deeply, because to me, it speaks about the artist's way, and speaks about loss, and yearning, and something about the human condition. All right. I got a hard question. So you have the right to pass. Just telling you. So if you don't want to answer the question, I won't be able to take it. I'm going to ask you a question. It seems to me that when I've seen your material, your material is very accessible to a larger audience. But this story might also be accessible, because you've worked on it so much. But that this story is also the tale of someone who is not necessarily telling what the audience wants to hear, but they're talking from their passion. And it seems to me that in this world we live in right now, that we are, as artists, as storytellers, as musicians, that we have a role of waking up the world, of saying to the world, this can be different. This could be better. This could be something else. Do you feel that there's this dichotomy as a successful artist? Do you get trapped sometimes between creating something that a large number of people will enjoy, come back to, and find? And also creating something that will change each person who walks in that door? Or at least get that person to question some aspect of the world they accept? My task is to bring those into that. That's my mission. My mission is to make, is to have deep rapport. I don't care who it is. I don't care what audience. Give me anybody. Anybody. My ministerial coat has got a thousand colors. It's got every symbol on it. You know, from the funkiest to the most erudite. I don't care who the audience is. So I want to have rapport. I want to have a confident relationship with my audience. I want them to trust me. So I will look at them really carefully. And I will flip and change and do whatever I have to do to make that story come to life. Because what I want to do is to make that story come to life. I want to make that story come to life. I want to make that story come to life. I want to make that story come to life. I want to make that story come to life. I want to make that story come to life. I want to make that story come to life. I want to make that story come to life. I want to make that story come to life. I want to make that story come to life. I want to make that story come to life. 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