 I'm Teresa Eyring, Executive Director and CEO of TCG and I am so happy to welcome you to How We Move Forward, our final session of Convergence. Thankfully, this isn't really goodbye since we'll be returning in a few short weeks for the second part of the 2020 virtual conference convening, June 2nd to the 5th. You can find more information on that on the conference website. Hello, I'm Adrian Bedou, Deputy Director and CEO of TCG. Before we get started, it's important to show love for all the people who made it possible. Please share your love by writing in your message in the comments on Mighty Networks or in your favorite social media network using the hashtag TCG Virtual Conference. I also want to show love for our funders and sponsors without whom this week's event would not have been possible. I also want to thank TCG's board members who've been an essential partner in responding to this crisis and a huge shout out to all of the TCG staff members who've shown not only nimbleness and creativity and pivot in our programming, but have shown up in an incredible spirit of care for the field and for each other. I hope you've all felt the love from the TCG staff and if you'd like to return it, please post in Mighty Networks and let them know. I want to offer a special shout out to the conference's staff, Devin, Ann, Sam and Amelia, as well as Erica, Elena, Sarah and Ciara, who've partnered with them in the magic of this convergence. We also want to thank those of you who've been able to give to TCG during this time. Your support enabled us to provide this conference at no charge, which we know provides greater access for those who may not have normally been able to attend. The gifts you've made this week add up tremendously and allow us to make sure resources and programs like this one remain open. And to those who cannot give right now, we're so grateful for the many other ways you give to TCG and the field. Lastly, you want to say thanks to all of you for making time in your schedules and space in your hearts for these past three days together. Yes. Thank you all so much. I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling a sense of renewal and hope from how we've shown up for each other. I know I enjoyed seeing and spending time with so many of you in real time. We don't get to do that enough, but now it's time to close convergence with some thinking about how we move forward from here. I still remember the first time we gathered for a how we move forward session. It was the 2015 TCG national conference in Cleveland, and we'd held this space to hear from personal affinity groups, many of whom had convened the conference for the first time. One after another, our colleagues spoke from the heart space, envisioning a more equitable, accessible, and just theater field. The solidarity was palpable, as was the feeling that something new was becoming possible. It ended with Kanisha Foster charging us to tweet one way we'd take action for equity as a form of collective accountability. And so we find ourselves here today, again, with a deepened feeling of solidarity, a charge of accountability, and a sense that a new way forward can and must be possible. I'm Elena Chang, director of EV&I initiatives at TCG, and we'll move forward by inviting three kinds of sharing. First, an affirmation to someone that you already knew or just met who had an impact on you during your time at convergence. Second, a request for your community to listen deeply to some truth or experience that needs collective witnessing. Third, a call to action for the field to hold a particular issue or community top of mind as we move forward together. We reached out on Mighty Networks yesterday to solicit some responses to these prompts. We ask you now to give our colleagues the gift of your deep attention, to witness the affirmation, truths and calls to action they'll share, and to do so in the spirit of grace and generosity that we invoked at the beginning of our time together. And I have a call to action. Nearly 33 million U.S. households cannot access the Internet. Digital opportunity gaps disproportionately impact low-income families, rural communities, tribal communities, and many more. I hope that we can advocate to Congress to accelerate the disbursement of already existing federal funds through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund so that funds can spread across America to everyone who desperately needs access now. Let's make theater whether digital or live accessible for everyone. I want to thank TCG for connecting us in this convergence. Hearing the hopes, the fears, and all the great ideas from everybody is inspirational. I'm Jason Najoum, managing director of synthetic theater, physical theater, company-based theater in Arlington, Virginia. And I've been reflecting a lot over the last two days on the fault line in our field between organizations and the artists that they serve. This has always been an issue for our field, but it feels particularly acute right now. I'm noticing that the artists that we contract with, that we employ, are in such a precarious position right now, and they're always in a precarious position. Much more than many of us in this conference are not only because of our social location-based privilege, but just because the system is set up so that managing directors like me have a job consistently, even through crises like these, when the first to be laid off, the first to not get government support are our artists. So what can we do to more consistently provide a safety net for our artists at the organizational level so that they're not wondering where their next rent check is coming from? Hi everyone, I'm Jennifer Wincer, artistic director of theater at COCA, Center of Creative Arts, and my call to action for our field is to uplift young voices and to center them in the art-making process. They are the future of the American theater. My name is Briang Schwartz, and I facilitated the LGBTQ affinity space, and one call to action that I would ask my community to consider is who wasn't in the room yesterday, whether that be their racial identity, their sexual orientation, their gender identity, just to be mindful of who wasn't in the room and who may not necessarily feel welcome or have access to a space like this. From all of the little faces I've been seeing in all of the little boxes, I love all of you. I think we have a vibrant, vibrant field, and I'm uplifting Lisa Mount for her fabulous facilitation. The woman is magic. She's a spider woman, and I'm just going to put my mask on now. And I'm done. Hello, my name is Adam Flores, I use he and pronouns. I'm the manager of community engagement and education at the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival. As we move forward, I want all of theater makers, particularly those involved in institutions, to be holding up the way that we've embraced accommodation and accessibility during this time. We made wide changes to our programming and the way that we thought about bringing stories to our communities, and I hope that we continue to bring that and think about accessibility and accommodation, not as an add-on, but as the core of what we do as theater makers. I of course also want us to think about the ways that we come out of this in a more just, inverting space when it comes to the representation and the essentialness of all people, particularly those artists, audience members, creators, and staff that are marginalized by race, sexual or gender identity, physical ability, age, socioeconomics, or cultural grammar. These are the things that have always been at the forefront of our marginalization. This is a great opportunity to take time and not look to return to normal, but to return to something new and more beautiful because there never was a normal to begin. Thank you. Let's talk about designers. It's not just a pipeline issue. Designers from marginalized and underrepresented communities, they exist now. They're working as professionals now in the American theater. Actively search for your designers rather than just using the people you already know or the people who have only been recommended, maybe even post something, you know, a call for resumes where you could actually get to know people and then you could make the time to actually interview people for the shows themselves instead of just looking at a resume and a portfolio. New to your theater designers should be hired. Hire more women designers, hire more designers of color, hire more non-binary designers, hire more disabled designers, hire more designers from underrepresented and marginalized communities and identities. You can do it. Don't expect these people to find you either. You should do some work and find them. Look at who you're hiring now and who you've hired in the past, not just on your staff, not just on your stage, not just who's directing, but who designs and what story are those choices telling? Is that the story you want to tell? I know it's hard work and I'm asking you to do more hard work in the middle of a pandemic, but I know you can do it and I believe you'll do it because designers are vital. They're vital to the American theater and they belong in the equity inclusion, diversity, access, and justice conversation too. Designers deserve to be treated humanely. Abolish 10 out of 12s. Hi, I just want to encourage everyone to really start thinking about how we create theater in this time of COVID-19. I feel like a lot of people that I've talked to is holding on to the past. There's very much this question mark with how do we create exactly the same experience of what we're creating on stages in the past that does not exist right now and in an attempt to create that world with holding our imagination and our creativity. There's also this fear of turning into film. Live theater is not film. Live video presentation is not film. What is so great about theater is it asks audience to instigate and utilize a part of their brain that brings imagination forward, that they're imagining they're not in the theater, that the circumstances and what they're seeing is real and it's using their imagination to really get a story. So when live video is going on, we're activating audience's imaginations. There's awareness that there's a limitation, that there can't be a full-on change of set, that we are in a COVID-19 period. So how do we make it seem like people are sharing space, connecting with each other, talking to someone that is not in the space with them? That's something that I really want us to be able to embrace because I think video theater has the potential to be extremely accessible, not just in a replacement for live theater, which I don't think there is any real replacement. I hope once COVID-19 is over that we will have live theater back, but I also hope video theater stays because it makes theater accessible to a younger generation. It makes us theater accessible to people who just have technology and need and are geographically stuck. And I also think it makes it accessible for artists, people who have not felt welcome in the theater in the past, specifically at institutions and places that have been predominantly white, that haven't allowed for people from different marginalized backgrounds to come in. So please start redefining how you view theater in this time. Gee folks, my name is Kristen Clifford. I'm the Associate Artistic Director at American Stage in St. Petersburg, Florida. And I would like to make a call to action to our industry to remember to think about our elderly populations during this time and how we can lift them up and engage them coming out of this isolation. Thanks. My name is Annalisa Diaz. I'm the Director of Artistic Partnerships and Innovation at Baltimore Center Stage and also a co-founder of Groundwater Arts. I wanted to take a moment to just offer something of a hopeful vision. I don't know about you, but I've been in a lot of rooms recently over the last few days that have been pretty heavy, understandably, with the collective sort of trauma that we're all experiencing as a collective and also as individuals. So I wanted to take a moment to just share a little bit about an organizing framework that Groundwater Arts has been developing over the last more than a year. It's called the Green New Theater and it's a set of six principles that is meant to guide the field both organizations and individuals toward a just transition and a just recovery from this current crisis that we're in but also the interconnected and ongoing climate crisis, which has been caused by 500 years of colonial capitalist violence. So I'd invite you all to check out the Groundwater Arts website and also our brand new Facebook page to figure out how you can get involved because you are all essential to a generative and just future for our field and I really mean that. Our friends at the People's Climate Movement often say to change everything we need everyone. It's an exciting time to be a leader of color in the theater. More doors to leadership have opened in the last decade than ever before. Our peers from all walks of life who have traditionally underrepresented in these institutions are skilled and qualified and we've navigated the same educational and professional training systems as our white sis-able peers. We were ready to join the wave of progress that's inspired us to become the best at what we do. I'm here in my position because of a comprehensive inclusive search process in which representatives from across constituencies at my company were brought to the table. We're spending a lot of time these days dreaming of a future for the American theater that is more just, more equitable, and more welcoming to more people but we don't get there without a couple of key ingredients. We need collective accountability for the ways that each of our organizations uphold and perpetuate systems that were designed to exclude so many of us. We need greater transparency in our decision-making at every level of our organizations including but not limited to the hiring practices of our executive leaders. In April 2015, 87 leaders had stepped into new roles as artistic directors, presenting an unprecedented opportunity for inclusion. These leaders were appointed from national searches, deep dives into the local community. In a study published by American theater those, those hiring processes resulted in only a 10% increase in artistic leaders of color, a 0% increase in the leaders from the transgender community, and there is a 20% increase for leaders who are women. The study also showed that as the budgets of institutions in the survey increased the diversity of their leadership also decreased. And when these positions open up it is an opportunity for transparency, for equity, and for openness. We have to demand that every process, every search process is just that. Empowerment is an essential part of growth. Transparency, visibility, and community involvement will help ensure these hiring processes are free from the historical biases of these mostly predominant white institutions. Additionally, it is important that we lead the charge by being an industry that walks the walk, the work on our stages, display a world reflecting our determination to create a just and equitable world. We must also demand that our practices and processes reflect the same. We ask that you create equitable, transparent hiring practices. It's going to be really hard work. I have every confidence that we can do it together. And together we're going to build a better future for our field. Hi, everyone. I'm Devin Berkshire. My pronouns are she, her, and I'm the director of conferences and field-wide learning at TCG. We are so grateful to the participants of Convergence and Beyond who just shared their powerful and provocative words with us. And I would love to encourage anyone watching to pick up that charge that Kenesha handed us five years ago in Cleveland at the TCG conference and take the suggestion that Adrian also made at the top of the broadcast and share out your own calls to action or affirmations or commitments to your community to listen deeply and be a witness to their experiences. You can share them on social media or if you're attending Convergence on mighty networks, we want to hear what you are taking forward from this. And we ask you to hold each other accountable for those commitments. If you're sharing on social media, use the hashtag TCG virtual conference. I want to express deep gratitude to Erica Lauren Ortiz, TCG's marketing director for her technical feats of magic making how we show up and how we move forward come alive among many conference contributions. As Adrian said, a lot of TCG staffers went above and beyond to make this work. And we are so thankful for their time and energy during this time that is stressful enough as it is. On behalf of all of TCG, I also really want to thank our incredible facilitators who held space for their colleagues throughout these three days from the convergent circles to the identity affinity groups and professional affinity roundtables and of course, the budget group roundtables, including our field's essential freelance workers. This was no small task to trust a group of conference producers who'd never produced a virtual conference, but all these facilitators signed on readily and enthusiastically and we are so grateful. They are to credit for the value of a lot of these conversations. So please give them shout outs or just a one on one thank you as well. It will be their insights, these discussions and your feedback in our postconvergence survey that will help us shape the next and last part of this particular adventure are convening from June 2nd to 5th that Theresa mentioned earlier. Convening will show up differently than convergence and while we'll have some loosely structured conversations like the ones we had here, there will also be more knowledge building and sharing, more social time and yes, more art. The agenda will be up on our website by early next week and registration is planned to launch next week as well. There will be more spots available than convergence, but like convergence, we'll be moving quickly and we'll continue to ask for your patience as we navigate this world of virtual convenings together. Between now and convening in June, TCG is planning more informational webinars and please do stay up to date with TCG's online circle community focused on COVID-related resources. If you're not part of that community, email Corinna Schulenberg to sign up and of course TCG led by Lori Baskin has been working nonstop advocating for the theater field at the federal level. So when you're on our website, be sure to sign up for the action alerts so you can join Lori in that advocacy. So friends, our hearts are full as we close this time with you and while we truly wish this all could have been done in person, we think this was a close second and now I will hand it back to Teresa and Corinna to send us off. I'm so excited to see you all at convening and remember if you're able to support TCG as we work towards theater's reemergence, please make a gift at tcg.org slash donate. And don't forget to join the staff of American Theater Magazine in our closing happy hour right after this session where they'll want to hear from you about your experiences and test your American theater knowledge with some trivia. Thank you so much again for spending this time with us and to close us out, I want to pass it to Corinna Schulenberg. Thanks, Teresa. I'm Corinna Schulenberg. My pronouns are she, her, hers, and I'm the director of communications at TCG. For many theater people, we like to begin and end things in a circle. That's one of the reasons TCG's logo is a circle and why we've called our convergence homerooms circles. That's why we're looking forward to continuing these conversations on our online platform, the TCG circle. And I would like us to collectively imagine a series of circles. First, there are the circles of our own bodies, the circles of eyes of hands, the valves of our hearts. Then there is the wholeness of our bodies, greater than the sum of their parts, perfect and complete as a circle. I'd ask us each to hold the circle of our bodies and silence for a breath. Then I'd like us to consider the circle of our families. We are, after all, meeting in each other's houses. Some of us may be living in the fullness of our families in close proximity and the joys and challenges those circles offer. Others may be feeling the circles of their families stretched over distance and lost. Whatever the case, I invite us now to hold those circles for a breath. Then I'd ask us to remember the gift of Amelia's opening invitation to make a promise to ourselves and the circles of our theaters and our communities. Let's please hold those circles for a breath. And now let's hold the circle of our planet, this beautiful and bruised earth, this pale blue dot amid the vast dark of space. Let's hold her close in our hearts for a breath. And as we imagine these circles, concentric and interdependent, we can also imagine them as a spiral, that most sacred pattern of nature embedded in our DNA and everywhere around us, from the tiniest snail to the forces of storms to the great dazzle of nebula, we can hold these circles growing up from the roots of our ancestors spiraling up to the generations to come. We can hold these circles as we move through these portals. We can spiral up toward our reemergence and beyond. Thank you and be with you soon.