 Good morning, everyone. How y'all feeling? Feeling good? I think we got, do we got two more minutes? We got two more minutes, two more minutes. I just want to say this. This is the Love Force Ensemble. Give it up for Julia, David, Allison, Armando, Alamog, my name is Sonny. Rhythm and Frequency is what connects us all, yeah? Thank you all so much. Enjoy the day, enjoy the week, and enjoy the week. Love you all under the radar. Everybody, welcome. Sonny Jane and Love Force. Sonny Jane and Love Force, and give it up. You know, that's just the musical part of a full show that they do in case you're interested. So, thanks for coming. I'm Mark Russell, the director of the, or the festival director of the Under the Radar Festival. When they told me that Under the Radar was no more, I had another idea. So a lot of people came together and joined and made this happen. It was a big effort, and thank you, and many of them are in this room right now. We are at the NYU Skirball Center, and I wanted to welcome Jay Wegman to the stage, the director of what? Give us a little welcome. Hey, I'm Jay Wegman. I have three tasks. One, welcome to NYU Skirball for the best Under the Radar Festival yet. I want to also thank the fabulous people out who are making coffee for us. It comes from Joe's Coffee. They've been here since seven o'clock making these tasty espresso and coffee drinks. Thank you, and three, this is also the place that's hosting Cliff Cardinal's performance for As You Like It, a radical retelling. I know a lot of you are coming. It's tonight, or tomorrow afternoon at three, or tomorrow afternoon at 7.30. You can come to all three. So that's it. You know, when I got this news, one of the first calls I made was to Jay, and he said, Mark, Skirball is here for whatever you want to do. We are open for you. It's an amazing gesture. It meant to me that things could go forward. Now I'd like to introduce Pat Sweeney-Coffman, the commissioner of the mayor's office of media and entertainment. Please come on up, commissioner. Hi. Thank you so much. Oh my God. I don't know how you're going to stay under the radar with the kind of energy and sound that was coming out of the stage. Just a few moments ago. I'm so happy to be here as I was introduced. Pat Sweeney-Coffman, mayor's office of media and entertainment. Most of you may know it more as MoM. So we're here. We're a familiar type of group. We're here to support and grow the media entertainment industries, because they are so important as they continue to make their home, New York City, the creative capital of the world. Thank you, yes. And I feel really safe saying that today because who could dispute the idea that we're the creative capital of the world when we have such an international program as under the radar here and such an international week with APAP and such an international month with Jan Arts. So we are so thrilled and delighted that we can continue to be a magnet to people far in New York and from around the world. Because when all these people see New York City on the screens, they then want to visit here or live here or work here or play here or make great music here. So we have a wonderful environment in New York for international arts. So that's why when New York City says that when the creative industries thrive, the New York City thrives. And this is such a perfect example. And I want to thank Mark Russell for this great opportunity to talk to you for a few brief moments about MoM's support for theater and live performances. Especially at this extremely critical time for everybody. And that leads me to wanting to introduce Jan Arts, New York City. We take pride at welcoming and hosting Jan Arts NYC and the 45,000 people that it attracts and who participate. What is Jan Arts, you might ask? Well, in a way it's a brand name, an umbrella of sorts for this month long series of convenings, performances and events. And it takes place every year in January in New York City and it's done so for 11 years. And once a year a stream of the convenings, congresses and panels come to New York to meet others, to find new products, to develop new relationships and partnerships and to encourage performances and collaborations. As I've already said, Jan Arts attracts a global audience, you, and reinforces why live performance industry wants to be in New York City. 45,000 performing arts leaders, artists and enthusiasts are here from around the world. They come to New York to celebrate the new rounds of production and work from artists in theater, dance, opera and musical performance. And for 11 years, Jan Arts has centered itself around APEP. And APEP starts today and I'm sure many of you are going to be a part of that and go to that. It brings tens of thousands of creative makers, producers, presenters, educators and audiences to New York. I mean, what a great time to be wandering around New York and just rubbing shoulders with somebody talented people like you. The theater community participants descend, thanks to APEP, the theater community participants descend on New York City every single year. And Jan Arts, which kicked off last week with the start of Under the Radar Festival is the beginning of the heart and soul of it. So we will continue hosting throughout the month all sorts of performances like Winter Jazz Fest, Prototype Festival and so many more. So it's great that all of you can be here, listen and participate in the important conversations about the industry and share and exchange ideas and meet new people. And I hope you can continue to take advantage of as much as you can. I can tell you will. We're all facing real challenges right now in this industry and these challenges are real. Audience habits are changing because of the pandemic. The city is experiencing budget cuts as a result of the strains of the migrant crisis. The sector is finding that it must continue to identify new ways to make and attract new audiences. And we at MoM are here to help chart new courses and to get to the vibrant and sustainable future. Once again congratulations to Mark and Under the Radar team. I mean they are a shining example of resilience of how they, I mean they've already been through hell excuse me for saying that. They've already been through such a challenging exercise. Great fun wasn't it? And they did generate new strategies to survive and they are a wonderful and inspiring example to all of us. So congratulations to Mark and his team. And thank you for having me here and giving me this chance to say a few words to all of you. Have a great day of inspirational discussions as you take advantage of as many events as you can. Oh sorry, I don't want to repeat that page. I've already said it. Anyway, thanks so much. Have a wonderful time. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It's really beautiful. Thank you Commissioner Kaufman. Thank you very much. Okay, for 18 years under the radar I was asking its artists why do theater now and each answered in their own way. And then this year I was faced with why do a festival now. It's sort of like turn about fair play. What is the relevant relevance and usefulness of a festival at this time? And could we reimagine under the radar for 2024? A brain trust of friends came together and helped me dream this up. And then I want to really thank archetype Tommy Kriegsman and Sammy Pine who came to me and said, Mark, let's do this. And that's when I didn't have a dime. They did it all on spec, if you will. This symposium is brought to you by HowlRound, the International Presenters Conference Commons, SIPA, Creative Independent Producers Association, and the Under the Radar Crew with support from the Mellon Foundation. Thank you. And I want to thank the Public Theater in Oscar Eustis for giving Under the Radar a home for 17 years. It was a really amazing, supportful time. I'm forever in their debt. Thank you. One of the things, most important things that's happening at the festival this year is almost unseen. And that is the Festival Academy Atelier for Young Festival Managers. They've been meeting since last Sunday at BAM and spending intense amounts of time talking. They're from all over the world. They're here in a minute. And an amazing program and amazing artists and managers. I've been able to talk to them a little bit. The person who invented, or it does this, is Inga Kustamans. And she will talk to you about the Atelier now. Please welcome Inga. Thank you, Mark. And it's really amazing to be here. I'm really grateful because we started preparing this actually four years ago. And everything has been kind of against us, like COVID crisis. I don't know. And then in June, Mark told me, or May, like the festival, you know, the Public Theater is no longer supporting it. And we decided to go for it anyway. And here we are. We are here. It's amazing. And we are 80 festival makers coming from all over the world from more than 40 countries. And I feel very alone here. So please get up and make some noise. Make yourself visible. It's amazing. And not only do we have this Atelier group here, who is meeting for seven days, reflecting on the role of festivals in society today, like how do our festivals impact on decolonization, on inequality, on wars that we are going through, on peace-building and all, and the like. But we also have alumni who participated in previous programs. We are a community of 1,400 people from more than 100 countries. We're a movement. We're the future. We are here. We are present. We are curious. We are loud. We are silent. We are angry. We are struggling. We are hopeful. We are a radical space for hope today with everything that is going on in the world. We are reimagining a space for reimagination of our structures that oppress us. We seek places of co-creation for love and care. We are energy. So it's great to be here and I hope everybody who wants to join us in our struggle feel welcome. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. There's a lot of thank yous and we could be here all afternoon, but I want to first of all thank the people that put this together. The venue partners, if they could stand up, all the venue partners that are in the room stand up. I would list you all, but there's like 17. I must thank our staff and volunteers working to make this festival a success. They're all listed in our brochure and on our website. And I want to thank my brain trust and you know who you are. I can't list you. I also want to recognize Olga Goree, English. Under the radar would not have come together without her visionary support back in 2003. We would not be here today if she had not insisted on making the symposium happen along with Colleen Jenning-Rogensack and all the people of the IPC. I have to recognize our fiscal sponsor, the tank. I don't know if you get to over the tank, but it's an amazing place. It's the future. I want to talk about our national partners, Terry Dwyer, Kelly Kerwin, and Maria Goianas and PS21. And finally, our funders and friends, the Mellon Foundation, the Abrams Foundation, the W Trust, the Tamarin Foundation, all the people that signed up for our crowdfunding campaign. The Mayor's Office, Wendy Bandon-Huvel, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Select Equity, Kevin Lee of Levine Lee, and Mark Krueger. And thank you, most of all, to the over 200 artists that are performing this weekend under the radar events. And last but not least, the New York City audience, the best audience we know. Thank you. So now, I'm going to get out of your hair. I'm going to hand this off to a really amazing person. And you know, I feel like he's also the future. And he's been a longtime partner under the radar while he was director at Redcat. And he's most recently been named the director of PAP UCLA. And I can't wait to see what he'll do there. Please welcome Edgar Miamantes. Please. Hey, hello, hello. I feel like RuPaul is entering the workroom all of a sudden. For those who watch RuPaul. Good morning. It's so nice to see so many of you hug you. Thank you, Mark Russell, for the introduction and the invitation. Most of all, thank you for finding the collective opportunity and reimagining what under the radar can become and have this important festival and symposium continue. You're going to be thanked so much, but let's give them another round of applause, please. Today I have the pleasure to host this morning, keep things moving, be in community with artists and colleagues I admire as they deliver their reimagining ideas and provocations for activation. And who have so much to contribute to our changing world. As we know, nothing is certain and change is inevitable, especially in today's climate. I hear my ancestors and the generations before me saying this, we must change with a keen eye on social justice, building trust, experimentation and risk where failure is looming but reaping with expansive opportunity for us in our field to be as inclusive and imaginative as we can be. I continue to propose to have artists lead, lean into the artist's creative ways, their approaches, practices as they are inherently always imagining new possibilities and futures. To create is to bring something into existence that wasn't there before and artists know how to do this. You all know how to do this. What am I doing in this hour work? I recently finished a grad program where I met two extraordinary Boston based artist disruptors, Kenneth Bailey and Laurie Lovenstein, who lit a fire under me with their design studio for social intervention book, ideas, arrangements and effects. I highly recommend it and some of you may already be onto it. With the simple premise that ideas are embedded in social arrangements, which in turn produce effects, this radically accessible systems design books makes a compelling case for arrangements as a rich and overlooked terrain for social justice and world building. I'm packing how ideas like racism and sexism remain sturdy by embedding themselves in everything from physical and social infrastructures to everyday speech and thought habits. This resource provides a few tools to sense, intervene in and imagine the arrangements. So I ask, what are the rearrangements we are needing to seed in our field? I'll leave it there for now as we have our wonderful keynotes that will are doing just that changemaking and world making. But before I do that, I and the staff of under the radar wish to dedicate this festival to two of the most amazing individuals in our family of friends. Norman Armour, the former director of Push Festival in Vancouver and a good friend to me and under the radar. In fact, Mark tells me he used to attend the festival even before his was about to start. And Mika Ernest Jennings, one of the most gifted performers I have had the pleasure to meet. He's worked with so many artists. Young Jing Li, hidden man's big art group, transformed whatever he was playing with into something unique and powerful. We will hold their spirit closely, especially during this festival in recognition as they all gave so much to the field. Take a deep breath. Now I'd like to bring up our first keynote, Hanna Sharif. Hanna currently serves as the artistic director of Arena Stage at the Meets Center for American Theater in Washington, D.C. She has enjoyed a multifaceted theater career, including roles as an artistic director, playwright and producer who is a special, who specialty is strategic and cross-functional leadership. Hanna has held various roles at theater companies around the country, including Nassir Productions, Hartford Stage, Arts Emerson, Baltimore Center Stage, and the Repertory Theater in St. Louis. When she was named the Augustine Family Artistic Director of the Repertory Theater at St. Louis in 2018, she became the first black woman to lead a major regional theater. Hanna holds a BA from Spelman College and an MFA from the University of Houston. Let's welcome Hanna to the stage. Good morning. Oh, we can do better than that. Good morning. It is a gift to be in this room today. To be in communion with this motley crew of luminaries, fortune tellers, social agitators, subversive co-conspirators, cultural architects, and spiritual archivists. It's good company for a Friday morning. The lovers, strivers, the survivors determined to transform into thrivers. It's good company. 20 years ago, just one year before Mark birthed this dream, the Under the Radar Festival, I was introduced to the late great Ellen Stewart. And the magic of the home she fostered for the groundbreaking, the performance artists, the avant-garde, the international spectacle, the folks in hot pursuit of freedom. La Mama cracked something open for me. And a few years later, my first experience at the Under the Radar Festival solidified it. There were spaces that could contain the wild rage and joy, the vulnerability and fragility that transcends language and culture. The hoodoo folk samba ballet funk acapella, stop rock your body. Punk gospel, speaking to the divinity in all of us. The silent exploration of death so you could better understand life of it all. So it is a gift to be in this room today. Because this is the room they said was impossible. There are more than 25 partners supporting this year's festival. This room is a testament to the power of tenacity, collective work and reimagination. A seedling blueprint for the future waiting to write itself into existence. A little less than four years ago, the world turned on its head. The country went into lockdown. Hundreds of thousands of souls were snuffed away by some invisible disease. And just as the isolation was threatening to suffocate us all, dancers started performing on rooftops. Musicians played from open windowsills, playwrights, actors, performance artists gathered in virtual rooms to remind us of our collective humanity. The line between audience and artists all but disappeared as TikTok and Instagram became platforms for storytelling and curation. Now, I know there are purists in the room who would rebuke the notion that those platforms host high art. But what we do know is that they democratize access in artistic agency. They birth radical collaborations and undoubtedly save lives while redefining our world. So perhaps there might be some lessons there. Part of the unprocessed trauma of the last four years has been the desperate chokehold fear and scarcity has had on our industry's structural imagination. We've borne witness to the unprecedented loss of new work incubators like Sundance, Humana and the Lark. We watched the final fracturing of a fiscal system that had been failing for 30 years. We experienced the most seismic generational leadership shift since the birth of the American theater just in time for the global shutdown of institutions. And then we watched theaters crawl their way back, opening doors, believing thousands of our friends and colleagues on the outside of the walls they helped build. And I am one of those leaders forced to peel away the remaining vestiges of the illusion there was a sustainable model, business model waiting to re-emerge. So what is left on the other side of delusion? What we know is that disappointment cannot give way to defeat. Toni Morrison said, I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge, even wisdom, like art. This is precisely the moment when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, and no room for fear. I will tell you today, my friends, we cannot be unmoored by rebirth, reimagining, remembering the roots of our work. The search for truth that bursts the space that can hold the wild rage and joy, the vulnerability and fragility that transcends language and culture. The capacity for a truth that redefines our character, exalts our compassion, ignites our ingenuity, and breathes into the spaces of our bodies that have been devoid of oxygen. The alternative is atrophy. I often say to my class of artistic leaders, some of whom I see in the room, thank you guys for being here. We are called to this moment in the artistic continuum. The universe has proclaimed that we are the right people for this job of reclamation. Pushing past the doomsday rhetoric of an imminent implosion. What if everything fractured was in service of building a more equitable system, fueled by democratized access, artistic agency, radical collaborations, and folks in hot pursuit of freedom? If you have the privilege of rebuilding, then you have the responsibility to build it better. Abundance rejects the mythology of singular success and instead embraces communal harvesting. It clears the table of perceived truisms and encourages deep investigation, including challenging the homogeneity of form in our mainstream opportunities. Making space for the unexpected and the untamed. Abundance rewards innovation, it honors our history, and it prepares the ground for our future. My three-year-old daughter, Asha, and I just want to take a moment to say, if you ever want your soul chin checked, you should talk to a toddler born during the pandemic. My three-year-old came to me as I was packing for this trip. She sat on my lap and she took my face in her hands and she said, why do you work too much? Why do you do this work? They were sincere questions born from her attempt to understand the thing that keeps me from tucking her into bed so many nights. And I told her, I do this work because it is a spiritual calling of service. This is how mommy helps transform our community into a better place that can more fully see you, honor you, and love you. In a world careening towards authoritarianism, xenophobia, and genocide, our work is essential to help elevate humanity. We have never needed these voices more. I call only a few. Aya Ogawa, Mona Mansour, Taylor Mack, Luis Alfaro, Alicia, Bemuti, Toshi, Young Jin Lee, and more. We have never needed your voice more. So here's the provocation. If the universe is conspiring to deliver us to the future, what are you willing to release to meet the moment? If the universe is conspiring to deliver us to the future, what are you willing to release to meet the moment? With curiosity, fearlessness, and a belief in the power of the collective, I will meet you there. Yes, yes, yes. I was sitting back there going, yes, let's do this. We're going to do this. Yes, this room is a testament for reimagination. So beautiful. Transform, transform, transform. There's more where this came from. Now I would like to introduce Toronto-based stage director Ravi Jain. He's a multi-award-winning artist known for making politically bold and accessible theatrical experiences in both small indie productions and large theaters. As the founder and co-artistic director of Why Not Theatre, Ravi has established himself as an artistic leader for his inventive productions, international producing collaborations, and innovative producing models which are aimed to better support emerging artists and to make money for their art. Welcome, Ravi. Even though I went to NYU, it isn't often that I get back to New York City and to be here as part of Under the Radar. It's a festival I've always wanted to be part of, and to be here having this opportunity to share some ideas with you, it's just really moving for me to be here, and I really appreciate the time to share some experiences with you. So my name is Ravi Jain. I'm the founder of an international company based in Toronto, Canada, called Why Not Theatre. I started the company when I returned to Toronto in 2007 after training and working abroad for about eight years. I had the stellar international resume, however, there wasn't a ton of imagination to hire me as an actor or director. I was constantly reminded that I was South Asian and that my skin color would limit what I could do in the Canadian theater. But I grew up in English-speaking Canada, in a Hindi-speaking home, and went to French immersion school. So identity for me was always hybrid. It's the fusion, the in-between cultures that excites me. So I founded Why Not as a provocation. I wanted to challenge not only how I was seen, but the status quo of what stories are told, who gets to tell them, and most importantly, who those stories are for. So when asked to share some thoughts about the future of international touring, my first thought was the audience. When touring, I'm always surprised that people come to the theatre, and it's so strange to think that I'll never see them again. And so what kind of relationships can international artists, I know, I just can't let go, I don't know, I gotta let go. What kind of relationships can international artists have with audiences in other cities over a long period of time? And what relationships are possible between artists and presenters, especially if the presenter is dealing with new audiences? So new audience is a term that I hear a lot in Canada. Since 2020, I've seen huge shifts in programming at local theaters and international festivals. I see more access being created for new voices with an eye on engaging new audiences. New seems to be the stand-in for not white, straight, able-bodied. Now, pre-pandemic at Why Not, we had mostly been touring small shows of about two to five people, but all of a sudden there was a lot of interest in two of the biggest shows we've ever made, and those shows reached those new audiences. So in 2022, our production of Hamlet, a fully integrated bilingual English and American Sign Language production, toured across the states to seven cities. And in 2023, we toured our newest production, a three-part, seven-hour adaptation of the Mahabharata to the Barbican Center in London. So a common thing that these two shows hadn't shared is that they were made for hybrid audiences. That is, audiences that were from two distinctly different cultures. For Hamlet, the show was bilingual and fully accessible to a deaf audience, so it was important to us to welcome a mixed hearing and deaf audience. And for Mahabharata, both an audience first in Western theater as well as many first-ever theater-going audiences from the South Asian diaspora. So over time, it became clear to us that while keen to get new audiences, many institutions didn't necessarily know or have the experience to understand what the needs of that audience might be. But we, the artists and producers of the work, with deep cultural and lived experiences in those communities, we were able to anticipate needs. So I just wanted to share a few examples that I hope will show how artists and presenters might work better together to share that knowledge and experience in order to find new ways to welcome new audiences. So we had premiered Prince Hamlet in Toronto in 2017. The production featured a deaf artist, Don Jenny Burley, who played Horatio, and our adaptation centered Horatio as the primary storyteller. So while the other actors are hearing and speaking, the audience is simultaneously receiving the entire story through Horatio's lens, which is physical and visual. There was no ASL interpreter, all the translation was happening in the artistic world. So from the ground up, the production was made for both deaf and hearing audiences, so the experience of Prince Hamlet is like experiencing two shows simultaneously. Now beyond the artistic success, we as producers of the Toronto production were most proud that we achieved a mixed audience. Don, a third-generation deaf person, advised us on particular marketing strategies for the deaf community, and we spent a ton of time on grassroots... How interesting! That was not a plan. We spent a ton of time on grassroots marketing, video and social media, and most importantly, by words spreading through the community, because Don assured us that deaf audiences who had never been to the theatre would not come to Hamlet without a credible source. We also had really accessible ticket prices, the lowest ticket price is five bucks, and we staffed the front-of-house team with interpreters before and after the show so that deaf patrons could actually engage with the creative ensemble afterwards. It was awesome. So then five years later, when we toured the production throughout the U.S., we were working mostly with American universities for the first time, and we were so overwhelmed by a bunch of factors. We were touring the biggest scale of show we'd ever toured with 17 people on the road. We were still coming out of, still in COVID, and there was so much change over in leadership and staffing and people starting new positions. It was so chaotic. And we were also in a more traditional presenter visiting artist relationship where the presenter manages the marketing and the artist brings the production. So as a result, we weren't really able to have enough deep conversations with each presenter about how to reach the local deaf community. We had a ton of experience on our team, but we didn't have the mechanisms or time to really share that with the presenting institution or for that information to get to the specific people in the marketing and outreach group. While there were some deaf audiences at the shows, it was a far cry from the 50-50 that we had in Toronto, and if only there had been a way for us to have a deeper connection with the presenter, we might have reached a larger audience and those critical new audiences together. The second example I just want to speak about is Mahabharata. So we premiered it at the Shaw Festival in Canada. It's a regional theatre that's an hour-and-a-half drive outside of Toronto. It's one of Canada's largest institutions and for its 60-year history, it's mainly catered to an upper middle-class wide audience. Does that sound familiar? So it was a huge move for Shaw to commission and develop in premier Mahabharata, both because of the content, but also because they never partnered with a small company in its 60-year history. So our major concern was that South Asian audiences wouldn't come out to see the show, because of lack of familiarity with the Shaw, lack of accessible and affordable transit, and high ticket prices. So since we were a co-producer, we were able to help address the accessibility concerns. Shaw's hard to get to, so we encouraged them to charter buses that would travel directly from South Asian communities to the theatre and back. While Shaw's marketing was largely focused on digital press and radio ads, we did a ton of grassroots, nitty-gritty temples, gudwaras, the restaurants, the grocery stores. Newcomer community groups. We were producing outside of their regular season, and all of our approaches led to us exceeding the box office expectations, and a whopping 42% of our audience was first-time visitors to the Shaw. Thank you. It was amazing. To see all the new audiences mingling in the lobby after the show, after spending the whole day together, it's why I do it. It's a one-cultural collision I'd love to share. It's of the culture of the theatre itself, which can be a real barrier for new audiences. So before one of the performances of Mahabharata, I was in the lobby, and the show was about to start, and there was a little panic from front of house to get things started to hurry people in. And as the rushing people in a family walks in, an auntie, an uncle, a grandma, a grandpa, and two toddlers, one passed out in the stroller. So they were late. And they came in, and they wanted to change their seats because they'd seen part one, but their kids were vocal and they felt bad about annoying other patrons, so they wanted to move up to the balcony. So the front of house manager is imploding. He couldn't compute the request to manage that and the pressure to start. And so one of our understudies intervened and got the box office manager, who was an awesome guy, to start changing their ticket. So as they're walking up the stairs, halfway the grandparents changed their minds, and they were discussing in Bengali whether they should walk up to the stairs or they really liked their own seats. Front of house is going bananas. The understudy is going Jaldi, Jaldi, which is in Hindi. He's saying hurry, hurry, total mass of cultures. Everybody gets to the top of the stairs. They park it, she picks up the toddler, passed out, and they head into the theater, and they started about seven minutes late. Now, this is a shortened version of the story, but it really demonstrates the clash of cultures in the theater. So the culture of the theater, of that theater, and its rules which are really rigid, and the culture broadly speaking of Indian people where time, tickets, everything is flexible. So now, to me it was hilarious because I could understand the stress of the situation for the staff of the theater, but the chaos of it was so recognizable to me. It was so comforting to witness because it was my culture and it felt right. And if we truly want new audiences, it might not be on our terms. And it has to be our job to make sure all feel welcomed. So finally, a different kind of cultural collaboration, a collision that happened for us was our collaboration with the Barbican Centre in London. So beyond the Western and South Asian audiences, we had also anticipated that there were going to be two different working cultures and styles between Why Not, a small Canadian POC-led company, and Barbican, a massive British institution. We knew that there could be potential for friction as we had had with many predominantly white institutions in the past. So very early in the process, we got all the key folks from both Why Not and Barbican teams to sit together and have a conversation about values. To our surprise, Barbican welcomed the invitation with open arms and they were thrilled to discuss the ways we each worked, our expectations, how we would practice values-based decision making, how we would handle conflict if it emerged between the teams, and what we hoped the audience experienced to feel like. Now, most importantly, Barbican's entire marketing team was there, so it became evident through that conversation and the values meeting that we needed to hire a South Asian marketing consultant, which we recommended through one of the actors in our company, just to ensure that we'd reached those first-time theatre-going South Asian audiences that we were hoping to. Not only did we sell out the entire run, but we were the second most successful show in 23 to bring new audiences to the Barbican. So it didn't feel like a presenter-visiting artist relationship, and we weren't a co-producer. It really was a true collaboration. And standing in the lobby, being miles away from home, I really, truly had the feeling of being home. So Norman Armour, our beloved programmer who recently passed away, who was invoked, the founder of the Push Festival, he used to speak to me about touring in terms of hosts and guests. And I think there's a potential for presenters to work with artists to create a new category of guest host, where we, the guest artists, can play a significant role in helping venues host new guests. Now, of course, not all artists are going to want to play this role, nor should they have to, but I offer the learnings as a way of helping to think about more deep and long-term relationships in touring between artists and presenters and audiences. Because being a good guest or a good host, it's really about understanding the importance of generosity and what it means to share. And I think if we share the resource of the building, the theater, the venue itself, between artists and presenters, then we might find a more creative way, a more creative way is not only to engage and welcome new audiences, but we might also immerse ourselves in another's story and another's culture. And this is true at the local, national and international contexts. Now, I'm sure there's a ton of really smart people in this room, and I know that you're all hard to work on this, so I hope that sharing some of these experiences will help build on your conversations and ideas. And again, I'm just so grateful to be here today. Thanks. Thank you, Ravi. There's so much to think about. I keep thinking about a series called democratizing access, curating access. What does that look like? New audiences need to be met on their terms. Thank you. Jeremy O'Harris is our next keynote. He couldn't join us today. We have a video that will play. Jeremy is the playwright and creator of the Broadway play Slave Play, winner of the 2018 Kennedy Center Rosa Parks Playwright Award, the Lorraine Hansberry Playwright Award, and many others. All right. I think we'll just go ahead and play the video. Hello. Sorry, my name is Jeremy O'Harris. I am a playwright. I am sometimes an actor. I am sometimes a producer, but I'm mainly someone who has made a religion out of theater. It's truly the one temple I go to. I say my prayers within. I dream of better lives for myself and my countrymen within, and I commune with people there. And I'm so happy that you guys are all here at the symposium communing together and attempting to keep the flame at our hearse alive, burning bright. We are in exceedingly dark times for litany of reasons, not just all of the horrid things that are happening abroad, but everything that's happening at home as well makes me fear for my nieces and nephews and makes me fear for the generation of playwrights who are coming right after me. The generation of theater makers who are coming right after me and just the generation of humans that are maturing and living in and around me right now. The ability to connect with other people was sold to us. It was sold to us by many, many corporations, and when we bought it, we sold actual connection out. I don't want to be some neophyte, some luddite that is afraid of change and evolution of the new tools that are at our disposal. I love all those things, but I do see the ways in which a rapid acceleration into late capitalism not only helps fund more and more horrific wars where we see thousands upon thousands of dead people right now in Gaza. We are seeing thousands upon thousands of primarily children dying in the name of safety, but truly in the name of capital. I'm also seeing every day new announcements of different artistic organizations, theaters turning their back on artists and looking towards capital as the one saving grace, forgetting that without the art, without the artist, the people who are imagining differently, we cannot create a safe space for new politics to foment and grow and evolve inside of communities that reach these or meet these ideas. The theater is my church, like I said, and growing up in the south in the black church, I saw the way that a church could be a community hub, a hub for politics, a hub that shifted the culture around it. It is where the civil rights movement began and continues, and it is where new ideas attach themselves to your body through emotion, through story, and make you want to stand up and shout and move and speak and do new things. And great theater does that, exciting theater does that, dangerous theater does that. The kind of theater that Mark has been championing has been presenting through Under the Radar Festival. The kind of art that shifted me. I remember seeing a Dickie Bow show that changed how I understood what it meant to be a queer artist making work. I remember seeing a 500 High Women show that changed how I imagined my work could live inside of a community. And last year we had a very frightening thing happen where a theater that was created to support the public of New York, to inspire that public and to present to them theater that was accessible that was primarily free. A place that had been a home to Under the Radar Festival, a place where I met Under the Radar Festival, had to turn its back on this festival and on the many, many artists that were a part of it. For a litany of reasons that I do not know. But what I do know is that in lieu of doing this show, they did a show that was written by a billionaire, or multi-millionaire, about the life of that multi-millionaire. And with an eye towards a commercial term for this show about someone who has had a very exciting life, but a life that we have witnessed on many, many television screens across the radios in countries as far reaching as the countries that end up coming to the Under the Radar Festival themselves. You can hear her songs in Russia, you can hear her songs in Africa, you can hear her songs in Japan. And that is scary to know that we are living in a time when institutions that were built with true social immediacy and understanding of community are turning their back on that community. In a last graft to save themselves, not realizing that the only way that the art that we do can actually be protected, the communities that we serve can actually be protected is by protecting the least among us. The people who are making the work in the smallest of ways for the potentially the tiniest of audiences to make the biggest emotional shifts possible. I'm very sick right now. Please bear with the fact that I am trying to hold on to a monologue I wrote, or speech I wrote many, many days ago in a fury that I left in my home and it's not with me in my quarantine. But know that I hold a lot of passion for this festival. I hold a lot of passion for you, each of you and what you do and what we can do. And what I have done in the last five years, in the time since I got this amazing opportunity to take my tiny play that I've made for a basement with my friends at Yale. And I got to see that play go to the highest reaches of the commercial landscape and thrust me into a spotlight that capitalism used to center me and celebrate me as the first, the only whatever other superlative they wanted to give in order to sell more magazines or get more viewers. I decided to start using that opportunity to not look to the government to save us, to not look to stars to save us, but to look at myself and say how am I saving, saving, helping, preserving the work of my fellow artist. So I began taking every opportunity I could to create some under comments of presentation, some under comments of audience development to create within my own community, the type of theater that excites me the most. So I got to invest in the work of my friends, Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley and their genius, genius theater company, Fake Friends. I got to work with Larry Owens on an amazing, like, you know, orgasmic sort of celebration of his voice and his music that we presented at Carnegie Hall and online. I got to work with the playwright Will Arbery. I've been developing the queer work of Jordan Tannehill and that doesn't even mention all the playwrights that I attempted to help with. A project I did with a Bushwick star called the Pet Project grant where I gave $500 grants to 1,000 playwrights around the city during COVID so that they could alleviate themselves from the anxiety of paying their light bill to maybe just write a scene for a play for a day to work on some pet project that might end up at under the radar someday. I tell you this not to self-aggrandize but to say that, like, the key to our salvation is presenting, preserving and celebrating the work of our peers, like Edward Albee did with Adrienne Kennedy in the 1960s and, like, a litany of other people did in times far flung from our own. We have to imagine differently in order to save ourselves because I think that we have been socialized to imagine that there is some pipeline that we need to go through, some organization that needs to stamp us on the back and that is not true. We can save ourselves and our communities. I got my own light by investing in each other. So take this time. Take this day to invest in each other. Thank you all very much. Please, please forgive me for not being able to be there. I'm so excited about this festival and everything that you guys are doing and everything that I'm going to be able to see next week because this is my favorite festival in New York and I'm literally about to cry right now because I am so upset. I can't be there. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jeremy. We miss you if you're watching. We miss you. There's quite a bit here. I feel like as institutions are moving towards more of the same, I am committed to protecting the least among us. That's a really great quote and I encourage us to talk about more about what that is. Now I would like to bring up the dear friend, Kanesa Shaw. Kanesa is a New York City based artist. Yes. Working in theater, opera and film. Most recently she directed the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning opera Omar, which I have the pleasure of seeing. Thank you for that. Which showed at Spoleto Festival, LA Opera, Boston Lyric Opera by creating performances that speak many formal cultural, historical, aesthetic and experiential languages. She seeks expansive audiences. Shaw's work has shown in divergent context from NYC galleries to courtyards in Vietnam to East African amphitheaters to European opera houses to US public housing to rural auditoriums in the United Arab Emirates. You are doing the work, girl. Let's welcome Kanesa Shaw. I have a picture. Alvinique, will you put my picture up? I was, hello everyone. I was sitting with my aunt this summer and I was telling her about all the work I'd been doing and I was very proud. She and a bunch of my family had inspired all of this work thinking about investing in collective practice and how to invest in young artists who don't have generational wealth. How do we take risks? How do we bet on ourselves? How do we build careers? This incredible team of lawyers helping me figure out how to build a home for that in the developer nation that is New York City. And we were in her little house and farm in Kigali on the outskirts of Kigali in Rwanda. And, you know, telling her about all of Ravi, Ravi, that nimble audience work at institutional scale and, you know, what it felt like to fill an opera house with vastly Muslim audiences watching this opera about a Muslim scholar. Thinking about intergenerational ecosystems between black women theater makers and how we do not lose all of our black women Gs to Hollywood and that that inherently requires thinking about reproductive health and access and families. And we're going to lose them all if we don't figure that out. And so I was telling her all of this. I was really proud and she said, ooh la la. And she had she had smuggled herself to Paris to go to the Sorbonne. So whenever she speaks to you in French, it's with this kind of like colonial irony. You can't tell if she's making fun of you or if she's praising you. She was definitely making fun of me. She said, sweetheart, I need you to help me move this table. I have a meeting. And I was like, what? I came here to have lunch with you. You have a meeting. Tried to be a good Rwandi's daughter, failing constantly, but tried, moved the table, sat in the corner where she told me to sit. And people from the neighborhood started walking in from the village. A man who owned a few goats, who sells meat and milk. These two young guys who sell mobile phone money at the kind of clapboard kiosks along the road. These three women came in who were farmers. They were not farmers. They were three women who had homes and that overlapped. And there was a little patch of dirt between them. And they started this tiered farming project, et cetera, et cetera, people going into this little room. And they put this large metal box on the table. And they all took out little booklets, which accounted for the 50 cents to $10 that they had contributed. And the multiple pools, the multiple books of investment, investing in each other's businesses, in each other's lives, who had borrowed what. And celebrating the small interest that was due to the group and the income that had been generated within this community. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. Here I've been thinking about spaces of home, how we've lost all our alternative spaces, the rise of the permanent alternative. There's no more artists run spaces in New York City. And it was that home has never been the brick and mortar. Home is the set of practices between us on every scale, whether it's artists and the collectivity through which we work, or whether it's all of us in this room, politicians, funders, presenters, administrators, all of us, and the collectivity through which we practice. Real talk, I wish we could turn the lights off. Everybody's broke, right? Is there anyone in this room who is not running a deficit this year? And not just that structural deficit that everybody always has, but like the tools to patch that don't work anymore. And it's like, we're out here talking about new work, a lot of us, this time of year. And it feels like the house is on fire, and we're talking about the curtains. That's what it feels like. The danger that I see as we all process war globally, and as we nationally enter our terror of an election year, and as we all encounter the immediate and utterly existential crisis of global warming, there is a danger to strap up and go it alone, to kind of get our proverbial guns and sit on our proverbial porches and protect our own. And that's real. That impulse is real. I think if any of us say that there are not days where we feel it, we're freaking lying. But the thing that all of us know better than most is that we don't do anything alone. We create from collectivity, and we're given to collectivity. It's what every person has said, and we'll see what Mack does, but I imagine Mack will have some tone to that too. And I really think that today means something, that it can. That this is an ecosystem, and how do we invest in it as such? How do we get out of going it alone? And that's a really huge task for the humans inside these institutions with capitalist 501C3 boards of devout, practicing successful capitalists. But I believe that you brilliant humans inside these institutions are going to wield these beasts into honoring that this is an ecosystem, and that we're in it together. And I mean, talk about poetry, under the radar, right? Home of independent art, becoming independent, and doing it through the ecosystem of the many institutions, continuing their commitment to experimentation. For me, every work that I start, I start with a question, an inquiry, and build a team to ask that question with me. And ideally, that's a lot of different artists who think in a lot of different ways. And that's part of why working internationally is so important to me. That's part of why working in different mediums and media is so important to me. And lately, I've been thinking about war, and how we process war, and that around the world, whether we're in Honduras, or Cox's Bazaar, or Cairo, we've got war on our minds, and we are processing it. You know, being in Rwanda 25 years later, still individually, collectively, politically, spiritually processing war. Art and performance has always been used for this process, you know? You've never been to see the tomb paintings in Luxor, the Iliad, the Ramayana. And we have some mighty artists today who I believe continue in that tradition, and do that work for a contemporary moment. And so my next project will gather around those ideas, Ocean Vong, Christopher Myers, Tuan Andrew Wen. So when I look at this room, what I see is the thing I love best, which is a group of different kinds of people who work in different kinds of ways. And so my provocation is, how do we do it together? It's that lockbox. It's for 10 minutes if we can lay down the mantle of our 501C3 capitalist empires and our individualistic American training, even steeped in that it is hard to let it go when we live here and really think about how do we do this together in unprecedented times? We're good at this. All of us. Thank you. Thank you, Canesa. How do we do this together? We do this together, indeed. Here we are, now at our final keynote. And only five minutes late. All good. Okay, let's do it. Let's do it, Taylor. All right, Taylor Mack, dear friend, here we are. We don't need to buy it. Let's do this. Am I performing with you? Hi. What am I gonna do? I'm not talking about collectivity. Oh, that's what that one was. Oh, this is one I wanted to play. If I'd known there was going to be a face of myself where you could see me while looking at my face, I would have chosen a different face. Also, I was challenged to release something. And so, like an 11 o'clock number in a bad movie, I wrote a speech but I'm giving it up. It's gonna improvise. Oh, no. Mark told me, Mark! Mark told me he wanted me to give a little blessing. For us. So it's not a keynote. It's not my responsibility to give a keynote. Lower your expectation. So he asked me to give a little blessing for the events of today. So that's what I've been meditating on. I did actually write a speech and then I wrote another one and then I broke up today and thought, no, I don't want to do that. This week I have seen a few of the more inspirational things and moving things I've seen all year. And also I saw one of the more disturbing things I've seen in my lifetime. So I feel conflicted with blessing. Blessings are, I don't know, maybe it's because I'm queer, but blessings have always felt a little bit like the Christian God or some new age snake oil salesmanship is sitting on me. But I think there are also the context of the blesser's heartbreak. So that could be a blessing. I was blessed one time by the Dalai Lama. I was cater-waiting an event at the old stock exchange. And I had the Dalai Lama on this table and Jocelyn Wildenstein on that table. She's an oligarch who got a lot of plastic surgery and now looks like a lion. So it was interesting. It was kind of like everything that's right with the world and everything that's not. And the Dalai Lama, he touches your head. Well, he said he would bless all the cater-waiters, so he came backstage and he blessed us all. And I can still feel his fingers on my head. And I can't say that the blessing worked at the moment. But it's kind of nibbled away at me over the years. So I'll try with a blessing. A blessing in the form of gratitude, maybe. I'm really grateful for the Under the Radar Festival. I hear some things I'm grateful for. I'm grateful that we actually have a time every year where we can get together and see each other at the bar and complain about other people in the industry who have done us wrong. Passively, aggressively thank the public theatre. And sincerely too. And I'm grateful for even the regret I have when I go take it a little too far, the venting about the person who's done me wrong in the industry. I feel bad because oftentimes those people are also the people who have done me the most good. So I don't know what to do with that feeling. But if you do, please find me at the bar. I'm really grateful that we're running around from shows to shows to shows. And it can sometimes feel like we're consuming culture. It's a shopping spree. And not to dismiss shopping sprees, they can be fun. It's fun to find your taste and try to share it with other people. But what happens at festival time is it often feels like we're not consuming culture. The culture is consuming us. So I'm very grateful for that. I'm really grateful for the nibbling for how I can see a piece of art here in the festival. And even if I don't like it or I dismiss it or what my dramaturg friend and I call it, it's the theatre of the unimpressed. Even in those moments, because the festival under the radar and all the festivals that are going around now, they've been happening for many years. And so I have some perspective on all the work. And what I've found is that the work nibbles away at me over the years. And it's helped me, I think now that I'm 50 and I'm going into the inner peace stage of life. No! It's helped me step away a little bit away from the thumbs up, thumbs down concept of engagement. Because the things that you're like, no, no. Ten years later you're like, well, maybe. And I think that's liberating us from being influencers. At least I hope it is. Instead I hope it's making us wonderers. I hope we're wondering more. So those are some gratitudes. And then here's another gratitude, which is, I love how at festival time I often don't know what I'm about to see. Because even though I know you work really hard on the programs, I don't read them. And a lot of the artists are under the radar. So I don't know them. And even those of us who've been around a long time, we don't often know everybody. So I like to just pick a slot and go, you know, a slot that works. I think you could probably save a lot of money if you all just got rid of all of your context. I know context is how we're saving the American theater or the theater at large. But maybe you could get rid of all the context, just pick a time slot. People show up and then the lights go down and we don't know what we're going to see. And I'm really grateful for that moment of, I know people talk about it all the time. They love that moment when the lights go down and you don't know what you're about to see. It's like a bubbling of excitement. And we spend a lot of time and energy and money trying to tell people what they're about to see. And context really is going to help us save the theater. I love how every year we get together and try to figure out how to save the theater. And I love that obviously we haven't done it yet. Maybe today. Melanie Joseph and Mark Russell have come up with a bunch of questions later on. And a lot of you are going to go and ask them and maybe you will come up with the solution. It is worth saving. But I love how probably we won't. But it's the trying is way more fun. Maybe, maybe. I don't know if we ever actually did save the theater. Maybe we'd be like, wow, all those years we wasted. And it actually is more fun to solve the problem. I love the dichotomies. I love the dichotomies. I love how we're all trying, you know, like everyone, we want to include everyone now. And we want to pay everyone equitable rates when we couldn't include hardly anyone before or pay anyone equitable rates. I love that dichotomy. I love this. And if you can figure this out, this cracks me up. I love how everyone is saying now for, you know, as a kind of independent producer, lead artist type of person, you know, I love how my job now is to decrease your hours and increase your pay. But somehow I have to figure out how to do that without increasing my hours and decreasing my pay. I mean, that dichotomy cracks me up. And I love it. It's a worthy assignment, but I do have to recognize that equality or equity rather doesn't mean that the performers get paid and don't have to work, but the producers all have to work more and get paid less. Right. So just like, consider that, Queens. Anyway, it's a worthy thing to, you know, it's worthy to figure out. Anyways, I got off track. That's what happens when you release. Okay. So I do love the dichotomies. I love that we're all here trying to figure it out together and every year we'll do it. I hope so. And every day. So, and I love the moment of not knowing what I'm about to see what I'm about to experience. And it kind of feels like this moment right now, we don't know. We don't know. So I thought, usually these symposiums start with all the lights on and we just launch right into it. And so I thought maybe we could take a little moment where we just spend a little time as the blessing just sitting in the dark, not knowing what we're going to see or talk about today. And I know you all have your opinions and you're probably all right, but maybe you're not. Maybe you don't know what's going to happen. And so, and maybe it's okay for us to not know how to solve everything. So let's just, can we take the lights down? Can we get rid of my face, please? It's okay. I can wait as long as the technology takes to get rid of, ah, there we go. Okay. So you're in the dark. You don't know what's going to happen. Have a good day. Thank you so much. Thank you, Taylor. Thank you to all the keynotes. Thank you all for your attention. I hope there's much that resonated there for you all that it moves you into action. Thank you again to the keynotes to mark under the radar and scurball staff. Mark, do you want to come up and say just let's move them into the next. So we're going to all, well, most of us are going to exit this theater and go around the corner to the elevators and go up to one of the floors that the volunteers will tell you, which might be the fourth floor. Anyway, and then we'll there might be some lunch or something like that. You never know. So please. So, okay, this part is done. I think if sunny Jane is in the house, he has something to say. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Ask everyone to hum this tone. Collectively here. This is a C 528 Hertz noted as the frequency of love resonating within us. So put two hands up in the air and make that Punjabi fist pump. Before you exit, you're going to exit like this. Punjabi fist pump. Shrug those shoulders. Twist your wrists. Now turn to your right. Turn to your right. Say hello to your neighbor. If you have a neighbor there to your right. Neighbor, I guess actually some of you have to turn right and left at the same time. Introduce yourself to your neighbor. Cause you're about to pump hips with your neighbor. All right? We got this going on, right? I want to see y'all move your hips now. Come on. Follow me.