 Please reply. Welcome, everyone. My name is Meena Natrajan, and I am a co-artistic director and the executive director of Pangea World Theater. Hello, welcome. My name is Dipankar Mukherjee, and I am a co-artistic director and ensemble member of Pangea World Theater. Welcome. On behalf of Art to Action and Pangea World Theater, we invite you to our National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation's first ever online gathering. We always begin with a ritual. I think beginning by itself is a ritual. If you were all here in one room in Minneapolis like the past few years, we all would be sitting in a circle. We all would be eagerly waiting the beginning, and right in the center will be a lamp. So just close your eyes and imagine that we all are sitting in this huge circle in various cities. We begin always with what we call two minutes. It's a ritual that we have arrived at in Pangea. It has been created by the ensemble. What we do is we sit in a circle, and then I ring a bell. Anybody in the circle can ring a bell. We have this ball, and we ring the ball. And then for two minutes, we just breathe together. And we arrive at a collective breath. This is a personal time. And then after two minutes, nobody's going to keep time. It's just a sense of silence and being together. After two minutes, I ring the bell again, and then we begin our journey. That's the two minutes that we begin our journey with right now. Welcome to this circle, a square circle, however, but it is a circle, and we are connected with each other. And now I would like to invite my teacher, my mentor, my guide, my artistic colleague, my thought partner, Sharon Day, to begin the next few days of our journey. Sharon is a healer, a medouin, a respected indigenous elder in this community and in this country. Sharon is a friend. Sharon is kind, fierce, a visionary, and a mind-blowing artist. She is one of the most open, compassionate, fierce friend that I have got who does not allow me or this world to play small and to maintain status quo. I have the distinct honor of being her mentee. And it's a privilege to call Sharon my mentor. And I have the honor to work with her as a colleague, as an artist. And we are privileged to have Sharon Day as our board of director. Sharon, thank you so much. Thank you for being here. It is a deep, deep honor to begin this journey with you. Sharon Day. Yeah. Thank you so much, Dipankar. That was very kind. And I'm honored to be here today. I want to thank Dipankar and Andrea for inviting me. And I think where I am right now is in Center City, Minnesota. And the sun is going down. And so you can see it a little bit coming through the window. I think that any place you are within the United States, within Canada, Central and South America, please know that you are on Indigenous land. And I think that it's so important that whenever we begin something and we are on Indigenous land, it's so important that some of the language, Indigenous language, be spoken. And so I'm grateful to be here tonight. I also just want to give a little bit of a reflection on what's transpired since the last time we were together back in 2018. And we were gathered, I remember at one point, at Frogtown Farm. And we were on the land. And we had some time just to walk, to connect with the land, and to be silent. And since that time, we've experienced a lot of despair, frustration, hopelessness, and also a deep, deep anger. And some of us are not new to this. Indigenous people, people of color, we've been dealing with many of these issues that have occurred this past year with COVID and also the George Floyd uprising here in Minneapolis. But we've survived. And not all of us. Some of us did not survive. But those of us that did, we're still here. And we're here because of the values people of color and Indigenous people hold. And I look at my window, I see the garden. And when we plant a garden, we plant those first seeds for the children. And the next seeds of the produce that we're planting is for the elders. So we try to take care of those who are most vulnerable. And in January, I was in New York City performing with Spider Woman Theater when that first case of COVID came. And by April, we lost two of the ensemble members, Kevin Turant and Tyrell, who's one of the actors in the piece that I was working on. And we've lost many people since then. But we've also been, as theater artists, we've lost performances, jobs, income. And yet, we're still here. And we've been innovative. We've found ways to do our work, to make our voices heard. And we continue. I mean, the fact that we're gathering here, people from all over the country are gathering here today through this technology speaks to the innovation. I want to thank DePonker and Andrea for being able to bring us together in this time. And so we're going to continue to do our work. And I remember back in 2012 when we first gathered and we all talked about our values, what we're bringing to our gathering together, to the circle. It was a huge circle. And we talked about those values. And those values are what is going to keep us moving forward. And I think I will just end with some words from a song I was listening to you today. It was Alicia Keys and Brandy Carlisle. And the words are, I have a voice. Started out as a whisper, turned into a scream, made a beautiful noise. Shoulder to shoulder, marching in the street. When you're alone, it's a quiet breeze. But when you band together, it's a choir of thunder and rain. Now we have a choice, because I have a voice. And I think we have voices. For those of us who live through HIV, it was people in our community who were the first ones devastated. And there's so many people that I still miss from that epidemic. And so we must take care of each other, support each other more now than ever. And support our work, because we are the ones who are going to make this shift. In Minneapolis, it was our youth who were in the street. 200 buildings were burnt down. It was our youth who were in the street saying demanding change. And we're at the brink of that. We need to get over the top and get to that. But we need to support our youth so that we can make those kinds of changes we need. And as artists, that's our job. To push, to make our voices heard, and to make the kind of changes so that there will be artists seven generations from now telling their stories, singing their songs. So I want to say thank you for inviting me. And also, I want you to welcome Andrea Asaf, one of the masterminds of this. So thank you so much. Thank you so much, Sharon, for those beautiful words and reminders and grounding. It's always a pleasure to see you. And we're always honored to have you with us. Thank you, Sharon Day. And just a plug, you'll see Sharon again later this evening in the next session if you stay with us for the equity conversation, which we hope you will. Thanks, Sharon. So I am Andrea Asaf. I'm the artistic director of Art to Action. And I'm calling in today from Tampa, Florida, which is Seminole Land. Tampa is actually a Seminole word. And we invite you, I know in the chat, if you're following in the chat, there's a link. If you don't know the First Nations and First Peoples of the land that you're on, we invite you to do some research and look it up using that link, nativeland.ca. And to put in the chat a hello, a welcome, a greeting, and let us know where you're watching from and whose land you are standing on right now. So I have the honor to tell you a little bit about the National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation. Some of you have been on this journey with us for many, many years. Some of you joined us for the first time last year or have been watching from afar as this program has grown. And some of you are just learning about it, perhaps if you're tuning in tonight on HowlRound. Shout out to HowlRound. Thank you so much for live streaming with us throughout the weekend. So here we are in 2020 in virtual space. And it's the first time, actually, that we have the opportunity to share out with the rest of the theater field and wider communities what we've been doing at the National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation all this time. It's been an incredible multi-year, going on multi-decade partnership between Pangea World Theater and Art to Action. And I'm just going to tell you a little bit about the history. We started this work because we felt that there was a lack of opportunities for peer exchange, mentorship, and training for particularly artists of color, directors of color, women directors, LGBTQ-identified and two-spirit artists. And we wanted to create a space that would center the artists who are practicing in all of these traditions and cultures and lineages to come together and actually share our practices. So the first thing that we had to do was do some field research, which we did from 2010 to 2012. And some of you might have seen us popping up at convenings at the National Performance Network, MPN, or the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, or various convenings around the country, certainly the consortium of Asian-American theaters and artists, CATA, where we gathered Asian-American directors. And we did a lot of questioning and digging. We went to see other institutes. We visited Urban Bushman's Summer Leadership Institute. We visited La Mama's Directing Institute in Umbria in Italy. To learn about what was out there, also Lincoln Center and other directing programs, and what was unique about this space that we could create as artists of color, women directors, and LGBTQ-ensemble leaders and two-spirit folks. So in 2012, we were able to do our first pilot institute to gather colleagues and elders and folks who wanted to learn from and with and explore this idea and do some curriculum development. And we have a clip from a video that we made in 2012 that we'd love to share with you. So you can hear some other artists talking about their experience about why it is important for artists of color, women, and queer directors to come together in this way. So we're gonna share that video from 2012 with you. And perhaps we'll also share in the chat the link to the full longer documentary. Here we go. We can go ahead and play the video. They are very few opportunities for people of color to be able to grow in a specific art of directing as a very challenging role and having an institute to be able to provide the structure, the opportunity to exchange ideas with other directors and learn from each other really will push the envelope of what is ensemble directing. The impact will be there's a kid that I don't know who's 12, 13 years old, who I know 10 years from now, if they've decided to become an artist we'll be impacted by this. And that's a beautiful thing to know. I know it. All our training has been the legacy of three basic things. One, genocide against the Native Americans. Two, slavery about the African Americans. And three, colonization, which is the history of most of the immigrants in this country, North America. So once in the context of these three that's the legacy with which all these structures that exist now have been created. And so for us to come over here and dream of an alternate there is no role model for us to follow. We are crafting the dream as we speak with elders in the room, with intergenerational participation in the room and with one sort of stewardship that we will all take accountability to shift conversation for the future generation. So the surprise was a constant, constant participation that we can do it. We people of color and women can do it. We are no longer going to wait for the mango to ripen India. There's an analogy they say that, you know if you keep waiting under a mango tree for that particular mango to ripen and fall into your lap you will keep holding an empty basket all your life. So instead of waiting for that particular mango to ripen we decided to start telling the field and plant orchards of mango trees. There's a teaching in our that's come to me that talks about the sacred tree that stands at the center of the medicine wheel. And I can talk about that the rest of the week because this, what we've just discussed and what our intention is, is what that metaphor is for me is that every point on that circle every person has a perspective that's different than the next one. That we see the sacred tree at the center of the circle differently because we're sitting in a different position around. You can't describe that tree in the middle without having every perspective around. So every point is valid. Every perspective is needed to describe the sacred tree that stands at the center of the medicine wheel. Thank you so much for playing that video. I hope that you enjoyed hearing some of those voices some of whom you'll hear more of throughout this weekend. So from 2012, we learned so much and we continued our journey in 2015. We were able to do a specific gathering for indigenous artists. And the reason is because we realized after studying the field, as Dipankar mentioned that there was no network for theater artists who are Native American or indigenous or First Nations peoples who are creating contemporary work. And unlike the National Association for Latino Arts and Culture or the multiple networks that we have for Black and African American directors or CAata for Asian American theater, there was no infrastructure for Native American artists to gather in the theater field. And so we decided that it was important to put some of the funding that we had to support this work toward that gathering. So in 2015, we had an indigenous artist gathering. We had another peer exchange and we continued peer exchanges in 2017 and then opened our first next generation institute for artists who were emerging or not already established in the field. And we had a faculty structure similar to other institutes. And in that experience, we discovered that what people really were expressing a hunger for was mentorship. Both the next-gen artists and the elders and mentors and leaders in our field wanted that intergenerational exchange and an opportunity to learn about mentorship and create mentorship relationships. So later in this weekend on Sunday, we'll have a whole panel conversation just about that process. In 2018, we shifted to a mentorship model and in 2019, we continued that mentorship model. So we're gonna play you another video just a quick two minutes sneak peek into what that experience was like in 2019 and how the institute has been growing over these years. So we'll see the next video. Thank you. It looks like we might be having a little technical difficulty with getting it to play. So I'll tell you a little bit more and then we'll come back to that video in just a second. So we'll see a clip of our 2019 mentorship model and I just wanna say that it is wonderful to see the field shifting in a way that centers BIPOC meaning Black, Indigenous and people of color artists and lifting up queer and trans folks in all the multiple ways that we are such a diverse community both as theater makers and as a nation or a colonial construct of a nation at least in the United States as we call it. But the thing is we have always centered BIPOC artists. We have always centered women leadership and LGBTQ and two-spirit leadership. And we want to say that that journey continues and we hope you will continue it with us. I think we're ready for the video now, let's see it. Our task as directors is to dig in from our own perspectives. So many different people from so many different places come together like this. And I believe that this is fundamental to our growth as an American theater consciousness. Connections that we've made here today I think will impact me for the rest of my life. It's deepening my practice in ways that I didn't know that I needed. It's affirming things in myself that I didn't know I needed to be affirmed to keep opening up the doors and the windows in one's craft. Just the humanity in the room is going to change my bravery. BIPOC, BIPOC, BIPOC, BIPOC. There was a moment where I looked around the circle and I felt like I loved every single person in the circle and was learning from every single person in the circle. And that coupled with the fact that we are also different and we're from different cultures, different theater practices, different parts of the world felt very, very, very special to me. So that was a little taste of where we were last year in July in Minneapolis and we look forward to being able to gather in person again. And in the meantime, we're so happy that you've joined us on this virtual journey for today and we hope for the weekend. I just want to lift up that today is Trans Day of Remembrance and I would love for all of you to take a moment to honor and remember and lift up trans folks and two spirit folks in your lives. And if you wish to say their names in the chat and remember that we are so grateful for trans activists, trans leaders, trans artists in our world. And with that, I'd like to invite Mina to join us again and to talk about some other folks that we'd like to honor. Thank you so much, Andrea. We also want to honor those who've been an integral part of our institute and who've joined the ancestors at this time. One of them is Laurie Carlos and many of you know her. Laurie was a dear, dear, dear friend. She was a respected colleague and a visionary artist in the Twin Cities and beyond. Many of you have experienced her fierce energy and her uncompromising spirit. Laurie was part of the 2012 Pilot Institute. And another person we would like to remember as part of this journey that we're about to embark on is to honor and remember Diane Rodriguez who was part of the 2019 Institute. Diane was part of the Center Theater Group for many, many years and was a prolific director, a former and an actor. And she opened the doors for many, many, many people of color and theater makers of color. At the Institute, she told me once how much she enjoyed being there, how much she enjoyed building the solidarity with each other and how much she enjoyed the pluralistic nature of our Institute. We're going to share a couple of photos from the Institutes with you. And I invite you to join me for a moment of silence as we watch these beautiful photographs and remember these two brilliant human beings and artists. Thank you, Mina, for that beautiful moment to send love and remember and honor Diane Rodriguez and Laurie Carlos. I also would like to take a moment to lift up William Yellowrobe who is currently in the hospital and William Yellowrobe joined us in 2015 at the Indigenous Artists' Gathering and was such an important, powerful voice and mentor to so many as he has always been. And we just wanted to take a moment to honor William Yellowrobe as well and say that we send our love and blessings to him and we hope that all of us in the theater field will send love and support and honoring to William Yellowrobe in hopes of a strong and swift recovery. Thank you so much, Andrea. Thank you for that. And yeah, let's remember these people who are such an integral part of our Institute. So just want to give you a little bit of context of where the Institute took place. All of the Institute gatherings so far have been held in Minneapolis which has been an epicenter of what began a nationwide movement for equity and justice right now. George Floyd was murdered here in late May followed by an uprising. Many of you who've been at the Institute have experienced what it means to be on Lake Street where Pangea is located, where many of our venues are located and our welcome dinner has always taken place at a restaurant called Gandhi Mahal which is immigrant owned which has been which has burned to the ground right now as a result of the uprising. So many of the businesses on Lake Street in and around Pangea have been boarded up and we are deeply involved at Pangea in an effort to rebuild our neighborhood and our streets and bring art and culture and theater to the communities affected in a socially distant kind of way. Because of what we experienced we find where we find ourselves now in all our cities, in all our countries because the relevance of time, the relevance of politics, it was so emotional to see our elders whom you shared, Diane, Laurie and cannot just fill my soul and I miss them so much. So the relevance is so important. The politics of location is pivotal. So where we find ourselves now at this moment, the fact that we could not meet in person in 2020. Yes, we are moving to online and that's what we are doing right now. But I miss, I miss everyone. I miss you all. I miss our teachers. I miss our elders. I miss that circle. I miss the mentees where vibrant energy discussion conversation happened for years. And now we move to online for the first time enables us to share our work with the National Arts Field. This year's National Institute offerings, mirrors are in person Institute to the best that we can. Of course, we see ourselves in the square, in the squares on our screen, but you know each other. You know how full of energy and excitement each of these bodies are and you've seen them work. And so I just, I just feel, even though we are in this one dimensional square about in my head, in my, I imagine the three dimensional energy that you all are. So we have panels, we have movement workshops, we have master classes, something that we will continue to offer throughout 2021. So please watch out for them. We are so thrilled. We are so grateful. We have missed you. And I almost feel that our family is getting together. So thank you, thank you, thank you. You can always watch all this, that all the online work that is gonna go on, you know, in the Howl Around website. And now friends, I would like to invite Suzanne Victoria Cross, who's our bedrock behind the scene and an incredible artist and an amazing organizer. Give your energy to Suzanne Victoria Cross. Thank you so much to Punker. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I think I've been your local coordinator when we're here in person in Minneapolis. And I'm so excited to be your coordinator and work with this amazing tech team throughout this week or this weekend. But we'll actually see me in just a little bit. I'm gonna pop back on and kind of help close this out. But right now I'd also like to invite Andrea to come back on because there's a little more programming to phrase, but you'll see my face in just a moment. Hi Suzanne, I'm so happy to see you. I did this face with you. I just wanna give it up and take a moment to thank not only Suzanne, but everybody else behind the scenes, Kayla and Tanya, who you all will meet later and the entire Pangea staff for all the amazing work to bring us together for this virtual weekend. Thank you so much, Suzanne. We'll see you soon. So now we have a very, very special treat for you. One of the things that this challenging pandemic time has allowed us and brought us to do in virtual space and as we figure out how to gather and reach and share with each other without being able to physically be together. We also, it has also brought us to looking at some of our archival material, which we will be increasingly sharing with you through the end of the year and into 2021. We have so many videos of so many wonderful artists and we have a special treat for you tonight, which is, I'm so excited. Back in 2015 at the Indigenous Artist Gathering, Joy Harjo was one of the participants who came. And as you may know, Joy Harjo is a poet, a theater artist, a musician, a saxophone player, and an artist extraordinaire who works in so many genres and has touched so many, the lives of so many artists and influenced so many and is currently our poet laureate of the United States. Not only that, the first Native American poet laureate. And we found this four minute interview with Joy Harjo talking about her experience in 2015 and just dropping some wisdom as she always does. And so we're gonna share with you this very, very special moment from our archive as a way of honoring Joy Harjo, poet laureate, and a theater artist. Enjoy. Well, what attracted me first of all was several things but because I have a deadline and it kind of came up and I thought, you know, I needed the food, the spiritual food from it. A lot of us writers, storytellers, we work along, we don't really, we work along, we just take care of what comes through us. And, but if that's a job that's often alone, there's, you get, you face a lot of doubts. You, you know, struggles, you deal with your ancestral struggles, you know, all of that and what needs to come through and sometimes you have to remove those blocks. And so to see a gathering of indigenous theater people who are, we're story gatherers and story makers. Yeah, I need this. Yeah, it comes in the middle of all this and getting ready for so many things. But I needed to be here in this circle to, I knew that I would find what I needed and I have. I was the last person to get into theater, although I always lived, I always wound up on the stage even as a kid and I was really shy. And even I was, somebody said recently, I was the shyest kid at Indian school and that's pretty dang sorry. It is, but there's always something larger than me that would push me forward, you know, even with the music and the stage has been one of my biggest teachers. It's taught me that I just have to let, I was put here for a purpose and I just have to let it come through. So I've been writing, you know, I have been doing the writing theater. I haven't been doing it necessarily actively, but I guess with the music, doing the music, the poetry first in the music, but then the music was a love long before I wrote poetry. And but theater is, it's really, what I see theater is emerging of, I mean, even our ceremonies and our dances, that's theater in a way. Because there what you have is emerging of storytelling, usually with dance and music. They all, you know, words, poetry, they all came into the world together. They like to be together. I think it's great there's poetry and books, but it always wants to climb out and be spoken and be around in a group. So to have this, I don't think there's been a gathering like this. At least I haven't heard of it. And I was one of the first all Indian drama and dance troops way back at Indian school in the late 60s. And for me, I was still transformative as somebody who had been very broken. There's so many of us are, you know, it's historical trauma that gets carried forward unless it's the face to take care of. People do what they can do. And to be in that kind of space really puts you in the space. It does put you in an ancestral space. And so I think it belongs with our people. I think we need more of that kind of expression with our young people, even the older people. Our circles have become the computer screen, but there's no touching. There's no, you know, the others, it's really cool. I love Facebook and I love being able to punch in and deal with, you know, my friend from India. You know, so there are these large circles, but it's like that. But to sustain yourself, we really need touch. We need to hear, there's something about the voice and the vibration of the voice and the stories. You know, what stories are forming, whatever stories we tell now have everything to do with how the generations, how they follow. That was a wonderful treat. I hope you all enjoyed hearing some of that reflection and wisdom from Joy Harjo. And I think Mina and DePunker are joining us again. We hope you will join us throughout the entire weekend as you are able. We have movement sessions coming up, a masterclass with Sharon Bridgeforth, an incredible panel, incredible panel this evening on equity and our journey, understanding what equity looks like and what it means and how we learn together at the Institute as well as conversations on mentorship and a Saturday night open mic showcasing artists who have been a part of the Institute from 2012 to 2019. So we really hope you will join us for all of these events. And I know that Mina and DePunker are joining us again to give a final statement for this session in just a moment. And I'd also like to invite Suzanne to come back on as well as Mina and DePunker. It is so nice to see you all and to be with you all again. And I will see everyone at the next sessions. Good night. Good night. Thank you so much, Andrea. It's so wonderful to really do this again together in spite of not being in the same room together. And also just, we have just an absolutely incredible team and we'll bring them back at the end of our session on Sunday and introduce you to all of them. But just really wanna say thank you to Suzanne because Suzanne has been really a bedrock for us and taken on so much and made this happen really smoothly along with Tanya who is part of Art2Action. So thank you, Suzanne, and take it away. Yeah, Suzanne, I've always told Suzanne, I've had the fortune of working with Suzanne through various, various productions and now this online is its own different life. I always tell Suzanne she has to write a book on grace under tremendous tension, under tremendous mess ups, you know, Suzanne comes with a smile and just continues the journey. So I want to honor Tanya, Suzanne, Kayla, and all the people who even some of us, people whom I'm not naming, but I know how hard everybody has worked. So thank you. I really be bowed to you because we are able to do things because there's a lot of you who are holding it together. So here's Suzanne Victoria Cross. Thank you so much. Thank you, Meenitapankar. I deeply, deeply appreciate that. And thank you, Andrea, for earlier. And again, we just have the most amazing team, which you've all seen, we've come here in person, just we have an incredible, incredible team with us, which is why all of this is possible. So yeah, hi, hey everyone. Suzanne again on the kind of holding space throughout the weekend and I'm very excited to be with all of you and thank you for joining the welcome session, but there is more today, not just any today. We have another amazing session that'll be starting. Andrea had mentioned the equity and ensemble and collaboration panel will be up and we can start perfect Kayla plans and slides here. That is our next session because we are again, this national institute, we're working on a lot of different time zones. So this next session will be at 4 p.m. Pacific time, 6 p.m. Central, 7 p.m. Eastern. We will see you there, we're very excited to see you. And then also, I got a few other housekeeping tips to go through, which you all know me, I love some housekeeping. We're gonna thank our funders and our partners. Thank you all so much. If you are our partners in making all of this happen, I'm gonna kind of put my screen out here so you can see that a little bigger there, perfect. We would not be able to make this work happen and come to fruition without our incredible partners. So thank you so much. And the last thing I have to say before we go out, yes, thank you funders, is that we have two birthdays that we are celebrating this year. Pangeo World Theater is turning 25 years old, yes. And Art to Action is celebrating 10 years. The amazing happy birthday. And so for that, we would love to invite you to resource this incredible work. Both of the website's links are up there, pangeoworldtheater.org and ww.arttoaction.org slash donate. Also, please go to those websites to learn more and what's next for these incredible organizations that are providing this amazing weekend. Thank you so much. I think that is what I have. And I'm so excited to see you all at the next panel. Thank you.