 like this for some months, almost half a year so it's time to bid adieu to good and good friends. Sponsors, you're all in the business, you know we cannot do this without sponsors and are more than 100 that work so hard to mention all this happen to the 2017 conference committee. Some of you may have heard me, Scott Stoner works with this conference committee. Co-chairs, if you recall a couple of years ago on staff we looked at who was leading what we realized that we wanted to have an artist, agent and manager, presenter and we've been doing that model for the past couple of years and I want to acknowledge the amazing Liz Lerman, the amazing Simone Eccleston, and the super amazing Kevin Spencer's and this is one of the most proudest moments that I have and that is to introduce takes a lot to keep this organization running and at this point I'm going to ask all of you as I call out your name to stand please hold your pause until the oh we have a slide they took it. But I'd like to thank Marcus Stevens, Taylor Rambo, Vicky Abrash, Megan Redmond, Judy Moore, Cristiana Bondermail, Natanya Cashon, Brian Nelson, Keisha Shorter, Scott Stoner, Katelyn Saylor, Hannah Stern, Jenny Thomas, Sarah Martin, Natasha Mascali, Melinda Lambert, Teresa Bennett, Jason Allen, Alicia Anstead, Kristen Cooper, Carol Miller, Phil Seaman, Betsy Selman, Jennifer Yonatan-Sapley-Stando, Bill Carlton, Martita Slayden, Katelyn, Southpournour Davis, and then also our signers, Beth Staley, and Joanne Cranes. So please give a conference committee to identify a speaker who will deliver a high level of enthusiasm and inspiration to culminate a successful conference. We've been so fortunate with the past speakers we've had. They have been on the mark of amazing, wonderful, inspirational, hilarious and all good things. This year will be no exception because we have with us a multi-talented award-winning artist who has graced the stage of many presenters in this room and received enormous critical acclaim for his recent project, a 24-decade history of popular music. I am of course referring to Taylor Mack, and certainly memorable. One of my favorite quotes about this artist who prefers the gender-pronoun Judy from New York Times as follows, fabulousness can come in many forms and Taylor Mack seems intent on assuming every one of them. Among the many reasons we have invited Judy to be with us this morning is that over the course of the past four days we've discussed the power of the arts to cut through prejudice, bigotry, and disrespect for the innate value of every human being. The personal and professional life of this Judy has been devoted to creating awareness, understanding, and acceptance of those who would be different from what society to offers to often considers the mainstream. Judy is a consulate champion of human rights of equity, equality, and inclusion and of the responsibility we all have to participate not to stand in the margin and let someone else determine who we are as a society. Whether for 30 minutes or three hours or 24 hours, this Judy knows how to make, how to bring everyone along into the flow. Ladies and gentlemen, please, please welcome as only our APEP family can Taylor Mack. Because I was like, no, let's make this about the speech and stuff, but then how should you would have done it? Luckily, everyone gets a little bored of putting their names, relation to all the faces and make a stir fry with it. I've made a part of my ritual now. It takes what's building up on the inside and makes it tangible because I'm responsible for it. You get to share the fear, celebrate it even. Everything might go wrong, perhaps nothing will. If I acknowledge everything, it would be a delightful surprise. Perhaps it might be. What's gonna happen? It makes you feel better. I promise. Say it with me. What's gonna happen? You guys have heard a show called the 24 Decade History of Popular Music. It's a performance art concert that consists of the performance, deconstruction, and reframing of United States history through popular songs, 246 of them, to be exact. All of which were popular in one community or another in the US within the last 240 years, from 1776 to 2016. Research, arranged, orchestrated, and reimagined. Each decade in the US history is given an hour's worth of material, so when added up you get 24 hours worth of show. Usually the work is performed in three-hour chapters over the course of many nights, but last October we performed the entire thing from beginning to end. Starting on Saturday at noon and ending on Sunday at noon. One time only. 76 with an orchestra, four musicians, and after every hour we lost a musician until having performed for 23 hours pretty much non-stop. I was on stage alone, left to somehow make my way through the final decade, using exhaustion to dream the culture forward. You saw the bedazzlement in the boat. Those are pictures from our show and we performed it over and over in sections. The repetition was key because we wanted the audience members to get to know each other. Over a course of many years we wanted to build their connection alongside the building of the work. As a theater artist I'm a community organizer. I bring people together and give them some kind of shared experience, not a homogenous one but a shared one. Something they can use to help us a foundation for continuing community. So on the road we set up a system where we perform a section of the work in a city and then our extraordinary producing team, pomegranate of arts, would begin the organization to keep returning to that city until we ultimately present every decade there. It's a Ponzi scheme. So we'll be touring it for many years and come but we have finished in New York and this is what happened. Each time we would perform a section of it here, audience members from previous performances would return. They began to make a ritual out of it. At the shows I'm always asking the audience to do things. I help rowboat across an imagined Atlantic Ocean, slow dance with someone of their same gender, play beer pong with each other. They had to know the people around them and they see them again at the next show. They go out after the show for drinks. They start planning the next trip to the show together. The goal was to make something tangible out of an ephemeral art. And it worked. Friendships were made and were strengthened. Collaborators found each other. Businesses were started. As a result of people meeting at the shows, more artistic projects were created. I got two wedding invitations from people who met at the shows. Multiple babies were conceived as a result of audience members. We rehearsed very little performed. We used the no theater process where everyone primarily learns their part separately and then gets together and makes it for the first time in front of the audience. This meant every single performance had the precision of a polished work but also a major element that had never been incorporated into the work before. Never even been rehearsed. Stuff like blindfolding an entire audience for an hour. Using the audience to remove 800 chairs from the space and the length of a short song. And of course, in the 24 hour work sleep deprivation. How do you rehearse sleep deprivation for an audience? Use strategize and then make your rehearsal the performance while hoping for the best. What's gonna happen? The fun is not no. It came time to put the whole show together. 24 hours of performance. That element of the unknown could be described as stressful. So much money. Although not as much as an off Broadway run of a four character single set intermissionless play. But still. So many years. So much anticipation, press, work, so many hurdles, hurdles of assumptions and logistics and doubt. The fear was that a microcosm of what just happened that Hillary Clinton would happen to us. With the audience members who have been with us from the beginning shrug and say, Well, I guess all that time we put into watching the show didn't ultimately amount to anything with the people who hadn't been with us the whole way. And each performance was primarily made of people moved to the product. Would they get it? Would they recognize how much work had gone into this piece? Or because of its uniqueness, wouldn't get equated with anything else odd? Would we get equated to the Queen down the street who lip syncs badly to the latest pop craze? Or the cabaret performer who memorizes 10 songs and tells stories about their famous friends? Like our political climate, would it all get normalized? That's the year of the word, the word of the year. But it all get normalized for our need to dismiss anything that is extraordinary and like progressive action, and replace it with that which is accessible, like nostalgia, with our diligence, experience and vision be overshadowed by our inability to pull it all off. Worst of all, when our failure to become the topic of conversation, rather than the ideas in the work. And there were ideas. Ideas that involve the excavation of alternative histories. Ideas that involve using identity politics as the reference for contextualization without making them the point. Ideas about minorities becoming a metaphor for America instead of its niche. Ideas about how drag is what you look like on the inside, worn on the outside. Ideas involve humility existing in authority through questions, but not a relentless cynical questioning. Not through cynicism's reign, but through its incorporation and play. Ideas that are free of the Puritan dominance over expression. I thought ideas about turning that which is harmful into catharsis. 240 years worth of ideas. But would I even be able to sing past hour 15? I thought it was possible, but not likely. We've been marathon training. We started with 90 minutes shows, went to two hour ones, three hour four, five, six, then discoveries, trials and pops, carrying the acclaim and damage with us like a female politician buying for a symbolic win. If we get there, others might be able to get there as well. If we don't, it's back to the freaking drawing board. We perform. I might have another three hours in me, but truly more than that seemed unlikely. What was I thinking? Was this the ultimate self sabotage? If I couldn't keep going past hours 15, what was I going to do with the remaining nine hours of performance? My voice teacher had warned me that I might have a vocal hemorrhage, in which case it was strongly advised I stop. With the final nine hours suddenly become one big audience karaoke night. You want to sit through that. Reducing the work to a durational art party. That would be making the extraordinary act of progression, an act of accessibility of nostalgia. It was not the vision falling apart was the vision. It was in some way the whole point. The work when we put it together in its entirety is about how communities build themselves as a result of falling apart. Being torn apart, we the audience technicians and performers, we're going to put ourselves through 24 hours, staying up little to no sleep, watching the watching and listening to an immersive narrative, an onslaught of music relentlessly moving forward all that history on our backs. But as a result of going through together, our exhaustion, we would be building models. Dramaturgically, each decade was was focused on a different community in America, which was built as a result of falling apart. Those of us who were experiencing this 24 hour period together would be lunging towards those communities. Our experience would be a way to see them and their struggles in a different light. Perhaps then we could be able to take that experience and use it to dream the culture forward to give aid to other communities going through similar trials. It's important to know that the work is intended to help people. It was not about communities going extinct as a result of being torn apart. It was about them building themselves. So somehow I did have to make my way and help the audience make their way to hour 24. We could not go extinct. We would need to keep the wonder of possibility alive in our bodies for 24 hours. What's gonna happen? The afternoon of the performance, the audience started screaming and applauding the second the house lights began to dim. This was our crowd. Most of them had been with us for multiple years and they weren't here to decide whether they would like it. They were there to celebrate that it was happening. They were thankful and open. Most everyone knew we weren't making something accessible but extraordinary. They had been making it with us and they were going to continue to do so. The first hour was all about a colony. 1776 trying to build itself into something new while they were being torn apart by colonization. My voice felt strong despite a pull that got the day before. The orchestra, the orchestra members, all 23 of them, they were on point. By the ensemble of 24 radical fairies, super numeraries, passed out drag to the 700 audience, 700 people there so they could wear it if they wanted throughout the entire piece. And people did they put on the draft. The jokes were landing. The ideas were clear. Everything we've been working towards was happening in the room except one element. The element of what's gonna happen. The element of calamity. We did such a good job of polishing our show. We taken the danger out of the room. It's not that the circumstance of us performing for 24 hours had suddenly disappeared. Everyone knew we could all fall apart at any moment. But really we thought we were not going to fall apart at least for another 12 hours. So we were all resting in a way. We all collectively agreed to hit the designated arcs until the exhaustion brought the element of surprise. But that's when the dry ice spilt. 1786, the 1796, 23 hours ago, the decade is dedicated to the star of the women's movement in the United States and focuses on a housewife who wants to be more 1780s. So our divine madness costume designer whose name was machine. The solution and it was wonder. Time to take the smokestacks off in the second saw of the second decade. Water spilled all over the stage. Not such a big deal. Just a couple of water on a stage easily cleaned. But it was the first hint at the possibility of calamity. How would we build ourselves as a result of the spill? In the moment I did it through humor. Through making the character of the decade the housewife I was portraying add to the injustice of her circumstance by having to clean up the mess. It was a funny improv and more so because of his dramaturgical appropriateness. But more importantly it was the moment we'd all been waiting for. Calamity and our ability to incorporate calamity to overcome oppression. We're going to ignore the flaw and let it sit there while we continue to hit our marks. We were going to we were going to be makers instead of markers. People who transform obstacles. Making the world we want based on learning and openness to the world that is. It's so much fun being that kind of. Which one of our performance was fatigue began to build a little defensiveness. But more fatigue dismantled the defense the original fatigue had built. The audience became deranged in their emotional availability to see what you're capable of. If you design your life around the result people keep asking me that obnoxious question. What's next? Like this when they ask me that. Next is that two weeks after the 24-hour performance we went back on the road. To Northern Ireland to perform the decades of 1906 to 1926 in the Booster, Inc. Belfast International Arts Festival. I wanted to be in Belfast but I've never performed in Northern Ireland before and I couldn't quite figure out the way in to our first audience there. They seem so hardened by the troubles. They were almost the polar opposite of the 24-hour audience we just had in New York. Their arms were crossed before we even began. Eyebrows were raised. They were guarded instead of game. You have to do what I usually do when I'm on the road into your place and spontaneously change things in the show to win them over. To open them up to a different kind of theater from what they are used to. And usually that's fun incorporating the calamity. But two weeks before I performed our 24-hour show which had made all those progressive intentions tangible and performing in Belfast was like starting at the beginning. It was like going on a first date even though you met the love of your life two weeks before. You don't want to cancel the date because you set it up before you met your love. It's somewhere else in the wrong places. When I asked all the women in the audience to sing along at a certain point all together, a male voice rang out louder that seemed like a hockey. This is sexism and homophobia. I've experienced this before. Straighten in who act out because they're uncomfortable with not being the lead in the story. They heckle or throw things. My philosophy is if something is threatening to take the story away from the storyteller then you have to incorporate that threatening thing into the story at all costs. Usually that manifests itself in the form of a quick response. Something like if an audience member is verbally offended by my liberal politics which happens. I'll just stretch my drag and say what about this? It's false advertising. Sometimes the audience needs to see the heckler. The heckler's anonymity needs to be taken away from them. So the squawk gets put on them. Mother flawless Sabrina once said to me about some homophobes who saw her walking down the street in drag and proceeded to take out a gun and shoot her. When I called them horrible she said no Taylor not horrible they just want it to be part of the show. On stage and I'll work that freaking homophob until he is making out with me. Let's carry one of them out of the event. On stage hoping it will be a comedy but sometimes it turns into a tragedy. This is the art in the room. Then the challenge is how to make everyone see that the tragedy is the art. How to direct the purpose. Make the obstacle the thing that brings us all together. So in Belfast I thought I should take on that straight guy in the audience who is making fun of the show because it makes him uncomfortable. But two weeks before I finished a 24 hour performance and I was tired. So against my philosophy I basically ignored it and kept the show going. But there's a moment in the decade we were performing that I'm particularly fond of. Towards the end of it it's a reading of the last page of James Joyce's You Decease. It's certainly one of the more beautiful passages of any piece of literature and I love using it as catharsis as an example of something reaching you because it goes on longer than it should. Usually the audiences with me sometimes while reading it I hear people solving. But in Belfast a woman could not stop laughing all the way through the reading. It was one of those laughs that become the story of the room and leave no room for anyone else to have their story. The sound was coming from the same direction as the guy who was mocking me earlier. They seemed to be part of a group all angry that a queer would be taking space. People had warned me about Belfast. I've been told over and over again how homophobic it was. It was like the Polish presenter who wanted to take me on an Eastern European tour to entice me. He said you will sleep on doors. You won't get paid anything. People will try to kill you. It will be fabulous. And I'm totally game for a good cause to do two out of those three. But not all fast. In the final moments of a two-hour performance this is where I was going to draw the line. I couldn't let that woman ruin Molly Bloom, ruin all those yeses with her no. So I asked and slowly with laser precision I made my way up the steps to that laughing woman now. The audience held their collective breath after became hysterical almost demented like I climbed to her over her community of homophobes one after another who sat next to her as a way of getting to her but diminishing him. I settled myself in for the long. Starts with when the red-red Robin goes bebopob and she is laughing like this. She laughs. I hold her. I sing slow. She laughs. I repeat. She laughs. I stay with her. Repeat the opening line of the song over and over again. All the while she laughs. I ask her to take her hair down. She does while laughing. I ask her to uncross her arms. She does while laughing. I hold her and repeat the opening line of the song. She laughs and again and again and again and tell her laughter comes. Laughter has a limit. It will tire itself out eventually. You just have to be willing to exhaust it. So that's what I did. Eventually she was still. Matt, my musical director and partner in crime and all of this. Instinctually knew when to continue the song into the next verse. And I just sang to her sitting there calm. Some other things happened but the evening ended with her feeding me cake on stage from her fingers and a great triumphant bow. Her chest off center. Bowing with us. Until after the show that I found out she was special needs. In fact the entire back section of the audience were all special needs. Nobody from the festival knew. The busload of special needs people were last, were last second ticket lines. So nobody told me before I went on. The guy who was mocking me singing in a weird offkey voice. He wasn't mocking me. He was singing and created the entire conflict. The audience loved the show but my assumptions and past hurts had framed the current circumstance away from truth. The way two months ago. Belfast. I immediately had to fly to her home in Orange County California because it had become clear that she wasn't going to be able to take care of herself anymore. She had been sick with breast cancer for some time. She'd been hiding it. Nobody knew. Not her friends, her sister, her kids, nobody. She isolated herself as a form of denial. If nobody was allowed into her life to tell her she was dying she wouldn't die. We knew something was wrong before she'd isolated herself. We saw she had lost a lot of weight. Her I thought it was Parkinson's but I didn't know because we couldn't get a doctor's prognosis. She was a Christian scientist which meant she didn't go to the doctors. She believed everything spiritual is the truth and everything material is a lie. I would joke with her. Everything? She never got the joke. To her there was nothing funny about a religion which to me is kind of funny because matter was a lie to her. Her illness was a lie. She couldn't have cancer. To her calamity simply didn't exist. Could God get cancer? No. But are you God mom? No. But the Bible says I'm God's perfect image and likeness and God is perfect so that does mean I'm perfect as well. Can God get cancer? No. Then I can't get it either. That was the philosophy I grew up with. It's not what I believe now. I left the religion when I was 14 and I want to be clear my mother's interpretation of Christian science is not the only way to practice the religion. All philosophies have practitioners who take things to extremes. They leave no room for relativism and my mom was one of those people. She was in it. She believed and preached like an authoritarian but not like an author. An author who has authority questions. They get their specialized knowledge through an admission of doubt and the practice of incorporating doubt into considerations. My mom's version of her religion didn't work if you welcomed in doubt. To doubt or question would be tantamount to destroying her medication. If you acknowledge the cancer, the calamity, you'd feed it. If I brought doubt with me from her perspective, I would essentially be responsible for her death. So we played a game. She wouldn't acknowledge what was happening to her and I wouldn't take her power away from her by forcing that acknowledgement on her. So as not to be responsible for what was happening to her. As heartbreaking as it was to see her suffer, she did the whole thing without pain killers. It was remarkable to watch someone commit to their belief system regardless of pain, regardless of all the facts were dismantling those beliefs left and right. Especially during the election. I began to see my mother's obstinacy as again a metaphor for the political landscape for climate change deniers, Hillary demonizers, Trump apologists and left wing arrogance and naivete. She believed the only way to heal was to reframe facts as falsehoods. Everything material is a lie. Everything spiritual is the truth. Everything? No life. No medicine meant there weren't any professionals to help. So hospice work was left to my sister and I. We fumbled our way through it and did okay but there were times when having a professional to share their authority with us even a little would have solved a lot of problems and brought more grace. There were moments of actual wonder in my mom's process. There was even beauty in the fierceness a body has when preparing itself for death. Her constant and intense rhythmic breathing would sometimes transform into something trans like as if her body were forcing a meditative state. I started singing her to sleep to ease the panic that was building them both of us. There was a wonder at having 246 songs to pull from it. Despite her conservative politics she never missed singing a new work of mine. She budgeted her yearly expenses around being able to apply across the country to see that. But because of the illness she wasn't able to come to the 24-hour performance and I knew it upset her. So at one point I decided to start working my way through the show describing what we did decade by decade showing her pictures and singing the songs in each one. Normally I would incorporate her illness into the work. It was the elephant in the room and incorporating the elephant is how I do things but here I couldn't do that without becoming responsible for the illness. Unlike in the 24-hour performance here with my mom we weren't able to build bonds with each other by acknowledging and using calamity. We got through about half the show a little bit at a time cutting the more lascivious political erroneous songs and emphasizing the lullabies love songs and hymns sentimentalizing and editing from all like all sentimental things that go on too long and started to become an exercise in nostalgia instead of progression. Listening began to hurt more than health. Working to ignore the pain in the room hurt us too much. The day she died she had a visit from a Christian science nurse. This isn't a nurse who has medical training by somebody who will sit and pray with you and then I'll give you a back up or change at the most change of damage. The woman was dear if a little much. She gave my mom some advice joy. My mom's name was joy. Joy. If everyone says there's an elephant in this room and they want you to acknowledge the elephant. Do you acknowledge the elephant or do you get smart and realize there isn't an elephant in this room. She was essentially saying my mom's philosophy was right. If she acknowledged cancer she would feed it. But the tactic she used to prove her point was that interpret the metaphor of the elephant literally. She was invalidating the artistic expression of a metaphor in order to disprove a fact. She was saying my mom wasn't going to die. She was going to have a healing because there wasn't an actual elephant in the room. It made me laugh. It made my mom happy for a few seconds on the day she died and because at that point there wasn't any use in doing anything other than what little we could to make her happy. I didn't debate the literal use of a metaphor and I saved it for what's next for what's going to happen. Mom did die because true there wasn't an actual elephant in the room but there wasn't a large tumor. We are living in a time when people are making metaphor literal to disprove facts. No there's not an actual elephant in the room but the arctic is melting. Hate crimes are up. The electoral college did elect a cheerleader of hate to the presidency. Speaking about hyperbole a lot lately. Maybe you'd assume from the pictures I work in hyperbole. I don't. Sometimes I joke that I do but really I work in expression. A bit different from hyperbole. I'm trying to use less extreme adverbs and adjectives to call out the ridiculousness of a thing without making it apocalyptic. It's not too late for us. It's not the apocalypse. We in this room are not on our deathbeds. Sure we will be one day but not today. That means we don't get to pretend without being challenged. We believe art is going to change the world that we can simply imagine our vision and it will happen. But so did my mom. So do climate change desires and those committed to nostalgia. The facts show us living in a chameera doesn't work. No matter how many metaphors we dismantle to convince us otherwise we do have to grapple with calamity. But how? How will we summon the energy after all this? What's going to happen? What's next? I'll tell you. Audiences and we'll say you. We'll burst into applause before the work has even begun. You'll do this because you'll be part of the process of making the work. As a result you'll know that each performance is a special day unlike any other. You will greet the new work the way you would a newborn baby. No matter how tired you are when you see a newborn baby you put your stretch fingers out to hold it if it's not crying. Part of a show. Making a ritual. That's what's next. You will delight in the possibility. You will commit to its natural wonder. You will praise its inner beauty and intelligence. You will cradle it. Become teary-eyed while holding it simply because it exists and shares space. Because it is vulnerable. Because it is a little bit of you and so much of itself. Because it needs you. You will be committed in a game. There to consider rather than decide. Communing with all others in the room and they all outside. You will start the ritual with an embrace. You will love it before it even begins. Next. This theater will be a place for communion rather than competition. This will happen because our creations will no longer conclude or peak with epiphany. There will be no closure. No implication that things finish. That a character or idea or show is frozen. Ready to be repeated exactly like an assembly line which dehumanizes the human communal experience. What's next is theater will perpetuate capitalism by forgiving the oppressor and vilify the outsider. It will instead hold the oppressor accountable and lift those at the bottom of the culture up first. What's next is theater will divide gravity by replacing trickle-down humanitarianism with trickle-up. What's next is theater won't ask permission to participate in the creativity of its own survival. It will not gatekeep itself. It will simply make. What's next is theater will see naming rights for what they are. Those with power pissing on the culture instead of participating with it. Nobody will get in above the title Trennage. With what's going to happen because you will spend your energy on legal paperwork. Patrons and they're walking into a theater called the David Coke democracy or even a democracy and instead will be made by people with authority. Remember one person has knowledge and experience in a field or subject because they have a continuous commitment. They made a continuous commitment to learning about that subject. And if you actually and you actually listen to what that person has to say and trust their authority. Trust with an open mind towards option but trust. It seems to me our political problems lie somewhere in the confusion between the two definitions of authority. While trying to stop someone from having power over you you decided nobody knows more than you. But I progress. It's a ritual sacrifice of opinion. Vaccination to the plague of opinions. Audience's critics and artists will make a commitment to perpetual consideration because we'll convince them it is a place that is a risk fit from decision making. It will flock to plays and live performance in order to be free of opinion. It will be America's weapon of choice. It will be this way because we will make theater a place where young men and women without means can get a free education and degree simply by going to the theater. Plus, what? Theater they'll run and jump and hurtle while experiencing the ideas in theater. They won't sign up for the military to do those things because they'll get it all out while being audience members. What's next is all work will last at least as long as your 40 hour work week. Not less more, not shorter, longer, not reduction, but expansion. Does that mean no minimalism? No, minimalism is a part of the full expression of who we are. So I love minimalism. Let me see the dream for the forest ever so often. But when living in a culture that allows a grandeur to become president, you must protest the tools of reduction. What's next is theater will be brave enough to talk about the subject rather than around the subject. Subtlety will be seen as cowardice. It will stop being confused with authenticity. It will be seen as a tool used to maintain the dominance of the heteronormative narrative. As a casualty of anti-intellectualism. Extravagants will be seen not as indulgence or a lie, but as an expression of that which is normally hidden, dismissed, or buried as a path towards our collective authority. What's next is there will be no auditions, no submissions, no pitches, and zero networking. When we see each other's work, find each other because we are making, working, and participating. What's next is all the work of main stage. Fox, you aren't giving them a voice, but making sure the majority is in charge of them. Able to frame them, put them in their place. It is on our largest stages that the work of minorities won't suffocate. Some high-end artistic director who has never booked me at his high-end New York theater, even though I've been making objectively thrilling work in New York for 20 years. He said a 24-decade worked because it was the right timing for it. People weren't cynical now, so they could embrace it. No queen. The show worked because the theater booked it. If you had booked it 20 years ago, it would have worked then as well. The patient will be seen as an opportunity towards profunding, as opposed to a joke or something that people refer to in the standard, oh, I don't like audience participation. As if saying, I don't like books. As if all audience participation were the same. In the future, audiences will get specific with description. They will learn to discuss art through description, consideration rather than likes and dislikes. They'll do this because artists and presenters will set the example and do it themselves. What's next is the barrier between the user and the maker. The audience and professionals will be diminished without diminishing authority. That means the talk-back will be seen as a failed experiment, but communing through the practice of creation will increase. We'll hang. Everybody will be in it primarily for the hang. What's next is a potluck. A gathering where we cook individual dishes but break bread together. One where I never eat unless you're able to eat too and I only eat enough to keep growing and never so much that it stops you from growing as well. What's next is we'll check ourselves when we start to allow past hurts to frame our current circumstance away from truth. We'll hone our observation skills so we're aware that the back section of the audience is filled with patrons who are special needs. We'll know when the emails are being used as a distraction. We'll keep showing up again and again no matter how tired because we are tired. We'll use our exhaustion to keep the wonderment of possibilities in our bodies. We'll use forms where our art can be more than imagined but in actual manifestation. We'll build an authority from considering the world as it changes. We'll acknowledge the calamity without feeding it. We will instead transform the calamity into communion. We will make a ritual out of wonderment, the wonderment of what's done. These two angels are fantastic and we love them very much individually right now. Soon those worthy please stand. I wish you a fantastic 2017 in this conference.