Black Material Geographies

Episode 7

Natural Dyeing & Oakland Youth

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Throughout my life, I've always done lots of extracurricular activities. As a child, I played soccer, took dance classes, took pottery and art classes. I spent several afternoons at places like Studio One and formally the Alice art center in Oakland, now called the Malonga Center for the Arts. I always enjoyed art classes and making things with my hands. Fast forward to 2020, and I'm doing a keynote talk over zoom for Textile Arts Los Angeles. After my talk, I get a private message from someone saying, did you used to take art classes at Studio One? Is your mom Opal Adisa? And the answer to both of those questions was, of course, yes.

The person messaging me was multimedia artist, Karen Hampton. Welcome back to Black Material Geographies. This is a show that uses blackness as a lens to explore material culture and the overlooked people making more sustainable futures. My name is Teju Adisa-Farrar, and I am speaking to you from Lenapehoking, also known as Brooklyn, New York.

I love the phrase, full circle, because it expresses how in moments when we feel seen and affirmed, they feel circular. So as someone who believes in circular economic systems, full circle moments feel more validating. Two years ago while doing a keynote talk that I was hesitant to do in the first place, I had a full circle moment. Unbeknownst to me, one of my former art teachers was sitting in the proverbial zoom audience. She was attending the conference as a participating artist, and didn't realize I'd be presenting a talk. This artist, Karen Hampton, was one of the people who gave nineties Oakland kids like me creative outlets and opportunities to express ourselves during after school time.

Often in conversations about arts, culture in our environment, urban youth are frequently left out. They're not even on the margins of these conversations. They are simply not included, even though so much of what they do is create cultural expression and alternatives just by expressing who they are. So, today, we're talking about Oakland natural dyeing art and urban farming. I wanted to start off with Karen Hampton, my former art teacher, and one of the first people in the Bay Area to do natural dyeing using plants grown in her garden.

Karen Hampton:

I became interested in natural dyes in, really, about 1975 when I was taking my first real weaving class and found out that you could get color from plants. And that was like the beginning of the world opening up for me. When I first started, I found a little book, a little pamphlet book, and it was all about supermarket dyeing. And so I started by going to the supermarket and getting onion skins and getting berries and stuff and making dyes. And it just was very exciting. And that was how I learned about the Latin names for plants and just how beautiful the plants were and all the different ways to dye with them. It was just really, really beautiful.

I became attached to textiles from when I was a young child because of my mother's lineage. And my grandmother was from Jamaica and had been a seamstress in New York and my mother and her sisters... It was not their income. It was where they found comfort-was where my mother found happiness, was in sewing. So I grew up very attached to the sewing room and learned to sew at an early age. So when I started learning to weave and to dye and to spin, it was like I found my place. And then when I started working on narratives, and it took me quite a while to work on narratives. I was trying to figure out where do I fit into this whole picture, because the fiber world didn't look like me, and I needed to understand where did I fit in, how did I end up following this dyerction, that was really finding my truth and how did it fit into the rest of the world?

So, as I dug in, because I needed to learn history, because I had been denied history. I had been denied my own history, knowing my own story. And as I dug and dug into finding my family's story, I found that I was learning much more universal stories; stories that had been left out completely out of any kind of history book and started just finding my own way through it. And then I think of the ancients. And when I think of the ancients, I'm thinking about our forebears who were 10 and 12,000 years ago, and what did they see and how did they synthesize information from their environment, because I believe all the answers are in our environment.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

While Karen thought she stumbled into natural dyeing in the 1970s, she came to realize through personal research that her work with fiber and plants are part of a lineage. Not just a lineage of the black diaspora, but a broader lineage of human history. For millennia, most products humans used were created using only local natural materials because that was what was available. For centuries throughout Asia, the continent of Africa and the Americas, indigenous humans were producing fiber and dyeing textiles in a way that we would now consider regenerative.

Most of the practices, now considered regenerative, are more accurately described as indigenous. For indigenous humans around the world, including those in tropical Africa, fiber dyeing and agricultural processes were natural and intertwined by default. Grace tries to reclaim the interconnectedness of plant systems through the work she does. She is a natural dyer among other things and also has a personal relationship to the plants and land she interacts with on a daily basis.

Grace:

My name is Grace. I was born in the desert. I'm from Arizona, but I've been everywhere. So that's a complicated question for me, but I'm definitely from Arizona. And what I do, I'm a dyer. I'm a natural dyer. I still am struggling with using that phrase and that word because it's so... the image is so much not like who I am. So I struggle with it, but I know that's how people want. And I'm also, I'm a earth worker, I'm a land steward. I work at a farm and I work with youth, and helping them to realize their relationship with the earth, and more particularly through food. Now I call my practice transmutation, which I think is a very encompassing word for different categories of how I approach natural dyeing and just my daily life and my relationship with the land. I've always been interested in color and I've always loved color.

And I remember when I finished school, I was working as a production assistant and I was doing a lot of printmaking and doing a lot of pressing. And I believe that's when my first introduction into natural dyeing, like as a thing that people do, was introduced to me. And I was like, oh my gosh, I love this because when I was a kid and my mom would go to Africa, she would bring back all these wax fibers and textiles from Africa and she'd bring me dolls and things like that. But I always really loved the colors of fabric. And I was like, oh my God, I can do this myself. I can steam flowers onto fabric and it will stay. And that's what got me into it. Eventually, it turned into a meditative practice and eventually that's when my relationship with plants became real.

My relationship with the earth became real, was through natural dyeing because I was like, oh, I'm using these plants. And that became a conduit for how I can communicate and engage with plants, and communicate and engage with fabrics, which I've always loved. My favorite color. It's hard to describe, but it's sort of like illuminessence. And I've always been really fascinated by the fact that when you look at a plant and you can see all these different colors that are being reflected from it. When I started to learn about practices that I can heal myself with just on my own. I was like, okay, well maybe if I can just put myself into this space inside of me where it's just fully illuminessence.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

We often forget the many ways we use and consume plants in our daily lives. The dominant economic system in the west is made possible by caffeine consumption, which is a substance found in over 60 plants like the coffee bean and tea leaves. Colonialism in Africa, Asia and Latin America, along with the enslavement of Africans in the Americas, made it possible for the consumption of caffeine to become a daily habit in Europe and North America. Still, many of us don't know the different ways we can intentionally use plants on a daily basis and unearth indigenous practices at the same time. Grace's relationship to plants deepened her relationship to herself, as was the case with Karen.

Improving our understanding of and relationship to plants is not just about healing ourselves and learning about our collective human history, it is also about protecting the planet that we all live on. We have to reckon with the history of colonialism and plantation slavery that degraded the soil through monoculture and began the mass extraction of carbon from the earth. This made way for the industrial revolution, which created infrastructure that would allow for mass amounts of carbon emissions to be polluted into the air, absorbed into our atmosphere. So disconnecting daily life from our relationship to plants has contributed to over-consumption and the climate crisis.

Karen Hampton:

It's finally been this period of questioning the industrial revolution, and really looking at this whole thing about how are we going to save the world, that fast fashion does not work, and we need to do things in a very different way. And so it's this beginning process. There are 41 different plants that produce indigo. So it's a quality of the plant. What I like to think about is, what do our ancients, how did they figure it out? They were amazing. They figured it out. Probably, first they're walking along and gathering plants for food or whatever or medicine. And if a plant that contains indigo is crushed, it turns blue, or if it dries, it turns blue and then figuring out, what is the process of how we harness that color. It's just these questions of humankind, and how did humankind develop over thousands and thousands of years?

I believe the oldest indigo dyed cloth that has been found was found in Peru, and I think it's 4,000 years old. Number one, that a piece of cloth lasted 4,000 years and that it still has some shading of that color on it. Let's go back into the diasporic ways of printing cloth like you find in Africa, like you find in India, and then harness that with natural dyes, so that you're not doing anything that's harming the earth, and you're creating color and variation and everything else that people can have to really make their mark.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

The ethos of a true sustainability movement is about reclaiming those ancient human practices centered in creating materials from plants in a way that do not create unnecessary harm on the earth or in our communities. Oshadi Collective in Tamil Nadu, India, is a women's wear initiative that creates clothing from seed to sow using ancient Indian agricultural practices. These practices regenerate the earth at every level of the supply chain. They dye their clothes using natural pigment from plants that are indigenous to India and their ethos is to give back more than they take. Grace often thinks about this in her work as a natural dyer. As she began healing through her relationships to plants, she also had to reckon with the reality that she is still pulling them from the earth.

Grace:

And slowly, as I slowed down as a person, I realized that the only way that I can do this without feeling like I'm just literally extracting color and just extracting time and just for no reason. Like, oh, here it is-. It's the same thing for me. So I was like, okay, well this is a good way for me to learn. I really have a duty to learn about these plants. I really have a duty to learn what I'm doing because at the end of the day, I'm harvesting and I'm taking all to just make some color and I'm working with the land and I'm saying that I'm working with the land.

And so that means that in everything that I do, it can't even be separate. I really need to honor these plants. And that's how I'm trying to see every plant that I work with as like a journey. So it's just been very healing to work with these plants. It was so important because literally it was a non-verbal, non-human relationship that I was developing with something that was teaching me. And I didn't know for two years that they were coming into my life, because I didn't have these people. They're like, this is your ancestors, this is your lineage. And it truly wasn't even like that. It was like these plants only.

Karen Hampton:

We have lost so much of what we learn from our environment, what we learn from the ancient world. It was really poo pooed by the universities. Natural dyeing was totally poo pooed. And it was poo pooed because people were claiming, professors would claim that the mordants, because you have to use mordants, which are minerals, to help the dye stick to the fiber. That the mortons were as toxic as chemical dyes. And so chemical dyes offered so much more. So there was this huge conflict. So I stayed away from that world because it was so prejudice towards it. They hardly did any natural dyeing in that period of time. In the seventies and eighties, it was all chemical dyes. So their work became really garish colors. So it really has been, I don't know, the last 10 years or so when cultures in Mexico and Oaxaca and Guatemala are embracing their heritage of these incredible natural dye history.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Karen was a pioneer in natural dyeing and no doubt helped to pave the path for younger folks like Grace who have come to this practice more recently. But still decades later, Grace feels a different type of exclusion in this space, even though it has given her so many opportunities to heal.

Grace:

When I first got into it, I first got into steaming, because I saw all these roses and I was like, oh my God, there's all these roses and there's all these florists that use all the extra flower waste. And I was like, okay, I'll start there, because I saw some people were doing things similar to that, and I love that. And then once I noticed that I could make patterns and do all these different things and then all these liquids with different PHs that can adjust, and all of a sudden something that's pink, turns yellow, something that's red, all of a sudden turns yellow or brown and then you're sad. So it's a lot of that. It's a lot of experimentation. I think what was fascinating for me was the slowness of it, because I can be pretty slow and I really love that there's communities that aren't really trying to be fully fast paced all the time.

And I felt very comforted by that. And I still do because a lot of the ways that I move are still very slow and I'm hoping that we can move towards that, because I really, truly think that as we slow down, as people, as we slow our minds and allow ourselves to do that and not feel shameful, then we will actually be able to produce more, and not in that way, but in a different form of abundance. But it really takes a lot of trust, because every part of ourselves since we were a child, they're telling us, that we can't trust that part.

It was hard for me to feel like I was even in the right space. It's so easy to be in those spaces and to just be like, yeah, I don't belong here, and I'm never going to be like them, and I'm never going to have... The first thing that really for me was the privilege of even being in that space. You have land, you have this thing or-. Natural dyeing, and I know we talked about this before, that it's such a privilege to even be able to think about taking plants and then turning them into colors and then having them be on fabric. And then they take that to a whole other level of like this locally, regionally source. I know where it was milled, I know where it was-, all this stuff. For me, just seemed like so far beyond what me as a black woman should even be focused on.

It's still a challenge because I still just feel so separate from it. And I feel like my process and my approach is so separate. I've never gone to a white woman dye workshop because I know they love doing those. And it's like, I've never, because again it is very... Now, it feels much more ancestrally guided than it ever has been. And I feel like it's a shame, because first of all, we are the creators just in general. I always take it back to the grander and then the smaller of like in terms of textiles and fashion, it's black women, it's black people that have been the helm of this forever, but it's so crazy how much marginalization can happen without them realizing that it happens.

I feel sometimes, even jealous. I'm like, man, you have all this thing and you're doing all this thing and you're steaming and it's like, you have all this land, you have your husbands, you have your dog, you have no worries. You have no worries. And your only worry right now is what color this pot is. It's crazy how much that that it's been such a gleaning thing for me too, because it shows you exactly the system that you're in and it shows you exactly the ways that artistic craft, as a black woman, that doesn't have a lot of privilege, that doesn't have money, that doesn't have all these things, can be completely stampened and be completely trampled on by your circumstances to the point where you can't even really create.

Like for me, this natural dyeing process has been such a process for me internally-of like healing a lot of even trauma that I've had, because of time that it takes. It really takes me to a whole different world where I need to slow down. And to come from a different perspective, it's something that I think about, but I don't really expand on all that much. I just hope that it changes because it's really even hard to get young people to be engaged with it. When you look up natural dyeing, you're seeing all these white women do it; the same with all the other things. And we're going to start to see it even with African spirituality. I feel we're going to start to see these white people come like, oh, just like they did with yoga and all of this stuff.

So, I want to see, and I want to be able to open up more spaces because every time I do produce something, I'm like, oh my God, this is so beautiful. They’re gifts of the earth. And they're the first building blocks of how we create. Natural dye is a form of expression and it's a form of expression that we ultimately not just put on our clothes, but just express ourselves and our world with. And historically that's something that has been dictated by other people.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Grace understands how even in a healing practice, a feeling of exclusion can deter people from receiving nature's gifts. As a black woman, she struggled with not only feeling like she didn't belong, but also experiencing white women appropriating our heritage and other people's cultures without acknowledging it. As a natural dyer, she hopes to open up this space for youth and other folks who look like her so that they feel like they belong and so that they can experience the magic of plants. Grace also works at an urban farm at a public high school in east Oakland to make sure black kids see people like her doing environmental work.

Grace:

For me, when I think of young kids I think of a lot of young people, because at first, when they think of natural dyes, they want to make something. They want to make a pair of pants or they want to create something with that. And I want to give them the agency to do that because that's what they want to do. And ultimately their ideas are going to be mined anyway. So let's give them the tools to be able to explore what it means to work in something, to be in a world that typically has been so extractive. The fact that they were enslaved people dying indigo, dying clothes for the people that would eventually whip us. There's trauma there. I definitely believe in generational trauma. 

I believe that we receive messages every day and we receive behaviors that affect our nervous system every day that we can't even conceptualize in our minds because we've gotten so wrapped up in trauma. So if we're back on laying slowly, slowly, slowly, just looking at the soil differently, just working with the soil differently, then we're slowly going to be able to recapture parts of ourselves and be more present. We need to be able to connect more with this earth. We live on a gorgeous planet, but to really deconstruct what that means, to grow one little calendula flower, the joy, I think for me, when I see kids like, oh my God, this happened, just to bloom, just one I think would really guide them on the right path. And I know that because that's what happened with me. My whole life changed when I just started growing flowers.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

It sounds like there's so many layers. There's the personal layer of your healing. There is the interpersonal layer of being a relationship to other natural dyers who mostly don't look like you, and there's also this structural element about access and privilege, and who you see in the space and who can be involved. And I know that your work at the farm at Castlemont deals with some of these layers as well. So can you tell me about the farm at Castlemont and what it's like working with youth in east Oakland and the land?

Grace:

Yeah, totally. It's really... to look at the whole space and that's been my earth space for the past two years, it's a little over an acre or maybe a little under an acre, it's magical. We have banana trees and we have all these different veg growing and all these different native plants and flowers. And we have a lot of purple collards. We have three rows of them. We actually got rid of half a row, which I felt guilty over, but we don't need all that collards. We have strawberries that every summer-I love to take the kids and any of the babies, anybody who comes through to the school, which by the way is Castlemont High School in East Oakland. I've been there for two years, but I started off volunteering and I've known people, Brandy Mackers who got me into this farm somehow, or maybe it was different people.

Somehow I landed at Castlemont. I really don't even remember how that happened. And I was really blown away because I was like wow, there's a whole secret garden back here and there's two other smaller, even more secret gardens that have a Kiwi tree and pomegranate tree, and all these things that you would never ever expect in east Oakland when you come back and you go through all these damn gates. I try to focus on the farm as a component of the vision, that is feeding our people, and feeding people and making sure that we have access to good food, making sure that we have access to the earth that gives us everything, making sure that we have access to community that knows what's up, that knows what we need to do in the case of a food emergency, that was working as the farm to table guide for high schoolers there.

And they would come through, during the pandemic, it would be during the day and we would just cook and we would just talk. And there wouldn't be really curriculum. It would just be getting used to the idea of being in a garden space, being outdoors and cooking, because that's a lot of privilege that a lot of white kids… I don't even mean to make it like that, a lot of privilege that a lot of people with money have is these spaces that liberate our minds. So I was less focused on the curriculum because it's like, we're already in these walls. What do you call them, gates, everywhere. So adding curriculum to that for me was just like, this isn't even the world that we're trying to do. 

So I communicated that to them a lot and I communicated like, oh, they come in, and they still do, with their Cheetos, their Cheetos and their Takis and their weed, and all this is fine because they're high schoolers. And then we're just trying to ground out like, okay, let's just go get some mint. Let's just start really small. I wasn't even trying to go in there making vegan pancakes with vegan butter, with sunflower seeds and whatever, sun butter.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Because that’s not relevant to them.

Grace:

I was just trying to meet them where they were at, which was really nice, not only for me and my healing, but I'm hoping that it was nice for them too. And I'm really grateful for these young people. I learn so much for them and I'm hoping that their experience with the farm just continues to grow so that they know that this is a portion of the future that we want to see, but it is most definitely not. And we should never be comfortable with the fact at the end of the day that this is within gates, because it's like in a prison garden. And not to say... and I was just talking to Boomer, who's one of the people at the farm. Obviously these kids are not in a prison. They're very privileged to not be in jail, but this isn't the future within these gates. And they are privileged enough to know they are privileged to be able to go out to the garden, but it's this two track of thinking, two things can happen at the same time and that can be okay. But we can never be comfortable with gates.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Yeah, because the architecture of our present [inaudible 00:29:54] to the architecture of our future. So if you're seeing gates, and going through the metal detectors, then when you go to prison and you're going through gates and metal detectors, you're already used to it.

Grace:

I just don't want anybody to ever get comfortable with that. With the school systems, with a garden ever being in gates.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

A couple of decades before Grace started working at Castlemont High School’s urban farm, Karen Hampton created a garden near the parking lot at Studio One Art Center in North Oakland. During the 90s, I was one of the kids from west Oakland taking classes at Studio One. Although I was more privileged than some black kids in Oakland, I still greatly benefited from the free and affordable classes at community spaces like Studio One, including the art class I took with Karen more than 20 years ago.

Karen Hampton:

Well that's where I started, was teaching youth in Oakland. I think about it frequently. Really my own kids were my teachers. They taught me so much and how they learned was so instrumental in me being a teacher in my early years and really working with kids in Oakland was probably the biggest truth for me because I felt like I was giving back to my own community. It was really, really the true joy of my teaching was then. It's so funny because I think frequently about all the different things I've done from that point until where I am now, where I teach college. And nothing compares to what I got working with the inner city kids in Oakland. I love where children's minds are and how they're developing and they're building their concepts in their own heads. But they're also exploring the world and they’re learning.

And it's just so important. It's like giving them platters and letting them see what is there around them. I remember one of the courses that I taught back in those days, it was at Studio One Art Center and they built a garden box for me in the back by the parking lot. So we were growing plants to use for paper making. And it's so much those things that really were so instrumental to me of how all these things are just around us. And we have no clue as to what incredible gifts they have to offer. And that is what I love to explore.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Grace and Karen are deeply committed to learning about the gifts plants give to us. Learning about plants comes along with all these stories of lineage, ancestry, belonging, dispossession, and reclamation. Grace and Karen not only learn about themselves through natural dying and working with fiber, they simultaneously share this knowledge and experimentation with others. Be they youth in Oakland, young adults in college or anyone in the neighborhood who was interested. The care and skill Karen has developed to master her craft has led her to learning about all kinds of traditional cultures and practices. She believes this work of learning about all of our ancestors, ancient humans, can give us the building blocks for a more sustainable future.

Karen Hampton:

I'm really interested in a lot of the Japanese fibers because the Japanese they're so smart as a culture because of their development in textiles because they were land poor. And when your land poor, it means that you're farming is very different. It means that you have to really know every inch of your ground. So you see the use of a small family farm from like the mid 1800s to the mid 1900s, especially in Japan, where they would be growing their [inaudible 00:34:33]. They would be growing their Wisteria, which would be giving them their flowers, but also being able to take the vines and make their yarn for that. And that's what so many early kimonos and bed coverings and things were all made out of. They’re beautiful fibers. I think that materials are what inspire you to work. Or at least with me it's tools and materials.

It's almost an attitude of build back better. In order for natural dying to really work and to change the world, it has to enter industry. And the only way that it can really truly enter industry is by having materials that can really be used. And there are companies that really know how to produce indigo. They have fields of indigo. So they're incredible. I am so excited with everything that they're doing. They're working with Indigo and Madder. And then they're working with some companies in India to get some of their other materials, but they're trying to get to the point where they are doing it all. So that's where I get really excited seeing where the new frontier is and how are we going to change the world.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

We can change the world by changing our industries and ourselves. Changing one without the other will not work. Honoring the earth is recognizing that as humans, we are part of nature. We too are part of the environment. Grace embraces this understanding as she reflects on natural dyeing and community.

Grace:

You can get to that too, and honor the earth and you can still get your clothes from somebody that's natural dyeing, it's a community, it's a communication. And to be able to build that and form that honestly, however long that takes with love, with understanding, tremendous amounts of disagreement I'm sure will come through that process, tremendous amounts of confusion and frustration. Hopefully, eventually emerges trust so things can function a little bit more smoothly, but at the end of the day, this is all an emergent process. 

We have to trust in the process of emergence by being intentional and being firm with ourselves, I think are some of the lessons that we can learn through this earthwork. Take ourselves a little bit off of the Instagram world and all of that. Not to say that it's not powerful too, but there's so many other ways that we can communicate how we're thriving to each other and to the world. I just want these kids to thrive. They're literally the future. These two year olds, the 15 year olds, it's just, that's what we need to focus. They're brilliant. They're radiating.

Teju Adisa-Farrar:

Bringing black people and youth, especially into the epicenter of the environmental movement is not only the future, it is the present. Taking classes at Studio One as a child contributed to why I'm here doing the work that I do. We can only speculate in hindsight, how Karen's class cultivated my interest in plants and fiber. Regardless, the visual and performing arts classes that I took allowed me to express myself. These classes taught me that even if we can't see it, we can make it from our minds and with materials the earth provides. To meet the climate crisis head on, we need to create new systems and reclaim ancient practices. 

We need to get right with the earth. with ourselves and give the youth space to be how they want to be in nature. Natural dying is but one of the many ways black women historically, and currently are contributing to a regenerative present. With every plant we choose to learn about, and every urban garden in the inner city, we are making the sustainable futures that we want right now. 

It's time for the wind down. I invite you to take a deep breath and stretch your body.Release tension in your shoulders, jaw, neck. Taking a moment to reflect on the plants that we use in our daily lives. Taking a moment to reflect on the colors of our clothes and blankets and towels. 

Today, we heard about the colors plants produce as healing. Today, we heard about the Oakland youth who just need outlets to be themselves. We heard about indigo and plant practices from ancient humans. We talked about so many things, so let's just sit in that feeling for a bit. I invite you to take a deep breath and thank yourself for listening to something new today. I invite you to take a deep breath and imagine a plant filled planet, our planet. 

I invite you to take a deep breath and imagine urban gardens in every single neighborhood. I invite you to take a deep breath and imagine the thousands of colors plants can produce. Thank you for spending time with me in Oakland and indulging in my childhood activities. Thank you for listening, learning, and experiencing the material geographies that we are all made of.

You can subscribe to Black Material Geographies anywhere you get your podcast. Black Material Geographies is part of the Whetstone Radio Collective. This podcast is a team effort. Thank you to the Black Material Geographies team, my producer, Tiffani Rozier, audio editor, Rhae Royal, composer, Philip Kelechi Nnamdi Iroh, researcher, Haven Ogbaselase and intern Kai Stone. I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder, Steven Satterfield, Whetstone radio collective head of podcast, Celine Glasier, sound engineer, Max Kotelchuck, associate producer, Quentin Lebeau, production assistant, Amalyssia Uytingco, and sound intern, Simon Lavender. 

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