 number three and then Mark and Betsy will anchor group number four and we're gonna do some counting off to get into these groups and then we're just gonna make our way to a table that will hopefully be large enough. You might need to do some shuffling and moving around a furniture to accommodate everybody in our groups. Is that clear? Yeah. Okay great so Carrie do you mind starting counting on? two three four great five one oh one sorry do you all okay two okay do you wanna okay three three four one two three okay and up here Susan four four okay Seth one one yeah I'm with you back in the back three four one two and then back here three four one two three four and Todd did you already go one okay two three four one two three four great three four great so I'm gonna say group number one with Morgan and Claudia we'll go over to that table where Morgan is group number two with nickel and ebony right here group number three with BJ and myself over here and group number four with Mark and Betsy back there with Mark all right good this is group number three three first maybe just a quick go around my name is Matthew Farty I'm director of the Royal Club I've known a lot ofuğ my name is Bari here I'm from New Orleans Louisiana and I'm a producer and he works here on Boulton and this is my right handside your Yes. And I'm Javier Ethics in the Common Good, Hampshire College. It's not London, I'm a School of Dr. at the University of Washington. I'm Jennifer Gowley from the board shoes, a little town called Millerton, working with some visual artists, actually, who are building community. I'm Virginia Matthews, I'm with Calron at Emerson College in Moscow. Any lingering or percolating questions on the Common Good, and selection of your pieces? Well, I guess it's about the language people use and how you can just broach the whole idea of, when you say collective or alternative, everybody just goes, you're over there, let's get on with the world. So what do you find is helpful? I had these issues 10 or 15 years ago where my liberal friends would say, it's just not markable, it's not a good message. And that's the slippery slope down to simply not achieving results. And so I find that having the hard examples are the best ways to neutralize that. Because ultimately you're trying to create a whole different mental construct and there's no substitute for doing that. Or at least having those cultural norms in place. But I agree with some of those words. People say, oh, it's communism. But of course the state's not involved. So you have a lot of these pitfalls, but a lot of other people I encounter are immediately positive. I think it's just a culturation process. I don't know of any other substitute. Can we start with the negative examples like Monsanto and the C's? Well, that's why I start with enclosures because people relate to and understand the enclosures. And then from that into the constructive alternatives. I guess another way that I try to talk about it is interesting because I feel like I was hearing a lot of what Carlos was saying about this. A lot of these, you know, this is like a total incursion of my way of thinking. So I have a lot of these structures, you know, that the enclosures, you know, are very deep. And so I think it's interesting that we're here at Artists Revival because I'm starting with that kind of conversation to a lot of very deep free visioning for people doing the artwork. Because I don't know, I feel like it is. It's like a very, it's a hugely, you know, that's kind of like my way of thinking. Big, huh? But without, I mean, it's big precisely because the problem is systemic. And it reaches down to our inner being, but it works at this macro level too. And that was the problem. Don't you think also that the money and the vocabulary play like a parallel role? Like they're both instruments. Or being used as the instruments of the imposition of the system that we're sort of like debating. So we need to be like extremely careful about the words. And I also think like it's important to, the educational piece that you're talking about is crucial. But also I think that there's something about the physical actions like working on the land together without necessarily talking to create that different. Or I'm just using that example, but it's not the only brain football together. Like in the streets, like I think a lot of the people in Argentina is that, is a response to the others. Once you get enough of these divergent examples of self-identifying as commenters, you start to see kinship and affinities and it becomes a culture unto itself. And I think that's partly what the building strength, that's how you build strength by having this shared culture. I mean the seed people are facing the same problem as the self-proclaimed people in terms of enclosures of what belongs to them. So why shouldn't we have a shared language despite radically different domains? A lot of the cultural activities suffer the same. Like the painters being locked out from the galleries or the theater not being able to be produced outside of the system that one of the things you're trying to do is to tell people it can be done in a different way. But immediately everybody tends to not imagine that. I think it's ultimately this profound personal and social paradigm that people's imaginations can't get beyond the business startup. That's the way you solve a problem. Or in some ways entrenched systems. So for me the how-round example is a great example of success because what my history of it is that those of us who were looking for some sort of alternative system and another way of sharing information and getting other more voices into the conversation were hitting our heads against both an institutional theater system and its magazine essentially. Which I've been a part of for a hundred years. But what happened with how-round despite the sort of grading against that system for a long time and being seen as an upstart in challenge of that it has now defined the conversation. And a mere five years in the theater community opened it up to hundreds of people who've never been part of it. And now the institutional system is reaching back to how-round and saying hope us do what we're doing because we can't do that. I'm wondering if this is a good opportunity to ask Vijay to speak a little bit more about the project. I'd be really interested in hearing about one like lessons learned in doing this and then also just questions and challenges that you're actively wrestling with that you don't have answers to yet. I think the biggest lesson I've learned just living with and living with this evolving comment is that I really learned that people's personal intentions most people in our field are liberal progressive and they can have wonderful things that they say and feel but the power of the institutions that they live in and our institutional theater are not for profit theater for the most part the ones that are medium sized large are kind of mini-adopt the kind of behaviors of for-profit corporate behavior that's just ingrained and the way that people decide to be administrators or managers or producers is it's not really different if they were working in a for-profit realm and they bring this mindset into a non-profit realm and so a big huge lesson is that in a way how around comments has been foisted without really people knowing into the field and it has radically changed the behaviors of large institutions. An example, a very concrete example is that five years ago or eight years ago, I guess five years ago, you wouldn't ever see a theater promoting or talking about another theater's work in just a completely unselfish way. I'll give you an example. Hey, I'm a theater company in California, check out what Mixtec Theater in Minneapolis is doing with their radical hospitality initiative giving free tickets or allowing anyone to come to their shows. Just that very simple behavior was unheard of and I think it's the system of the commons and the way that it's changed social relationships that these large institutions have the potential to have the same voice as someone who five years ago no one has ever heard of, that equalizing force and I think that this open invitation for people to become peer producers in these platforms, that mindset is we're going to make the assumption that everyone has potentially something to contribute that's of great value to the overall community and that's a very different mindset than the pre-commoning field that we have. Yeah, big lesson is that it's really the structures that we live in enable our best behavior to come out and no matter if we're stuck in an institution that doesn't enable that or promote that we're kind of screwed no matter what we really want to do with ourselves. So my take on that on what you've said which is incredibly moving is that as we sort of move through this particular field with all of our deepest desires and wishes to be good and collegial and all those things we sort of eject some of those things along the way even though we may not tell ourselves that and that what your example has given the field is the ability to say oh they're doing exactly we can't do radical hospitality but we're part of that you know we can't open our magazine to everyone's voice but look they're doing that and look at the conversation they're generating and it allows us in a way that may even be a little marketplace co-opty to kind of own a piece of the goodness, do you know? Is that accurate? Absolutely, there's this shift, a mindset shift of people feeling like they can actually participate in collective good and a collective mission for the overall field where that existed less before this commons... There's a great example of the Buffalo commons in the Midwest Plains where these sociologists say let's just create a Buffalo commons and it was a somewhat fanciful thing but the term put in play this cultural orientation that pretty soon you had ranchers talking to land trusts and people sort of entered the proto-commoning just because the term was put in play so I'm reinforcing what you're saying And then also practical behaviors around just resources that have shifted, for example, Howround TV is an example it's a shared technology that we as a Howround staff administer on behalf of the field anyone can livestream on it and it's self-selecting what gets livestream so for the most part people know that if they have something that they feel can benefit everyone else in our field, then they'll livestream so it's very rarely used in the old model self-promotional kind of thing people are livestreaming events, conversations that are useful for everyone and the fact that you can actually show this kind of technical infrastructure is a huge radical departure from the older kind of corporate for-profit enclosed model, I need to own this channel it's got to be super granded us in order for it to be effective and to be something that our organization can even consider using So as we do, what would you say the role of imagination is in your work? I think it's... Yeah, the role of imagination is just I think really figuring out how we've internalized for-profit behaviors being aware of that and then reconditioning ourselves and all of us and re-educating ourselves and really questioning every given impulse that we may have about how do you run an organization and how do you serve the field I don't know if that leads us into how do you make your art but definitely how you support your art but definitely how we run arts organizations Don't you think that those things are interrelated? Can you produce something that is like this, is different than how you produce something and you have it so you need to imagine it Carlos, you could probably talk to this about ensemble theater because for the most part the well-funded not-for-profit theater is a freelance, completely market-driven freelance system where everyone is freelance and that's a completely different way of making art and so it seems very natural to adopt for-profit behaviors when you're already your not-for-profit system is just set up to produce art in this particular freelance market It's expensive in big urban areas and relies upon huge audiences so it's self-patuating I thought in a question which is the I was interested in the example that you gave about how like five years ago theaters were sort of cross-promoting if they didn't have something to gain from that because it's the thing that people say the most about New Orleans theater like when people who come from New York from San Francisco from wherever come to New Orleans meet the community intermingle with us and the thing that they often say is like oh my god it's so supportive here like it doesn't feel competitive and I think that there's something underneath that that comes from like we already know that we kind of don't have enough like we already know that our resources are super limited in New Orleans like we don't have 90% of our arts funding comes from out of state like we as small ensembles are like in competition on a national scale with people from bigger cities so I think because there is this actual lack of resources it makes us behave in better ways where I think that like when you actually have enough it's the capital mindset rate that says like if I share with you what I have but there has been less for me and less for me now I want to hold everything I've got for some of the future that I'm imagining so even sharing the resources that are just like our publicity or whatever has dangerous or detrimental work but I think that that's not happening in places or at least it's not happening in New Orleans and I think it's really large at least on the fact that we have such a lack of resources so I think that there's like that may be true in some places and it hasn't been true for us and I think that it comes from we share resources because we have to because if you need a sound board, I'm going to lend you our sound board if you need three microphones like we've got three microphones you can have them I'm not going to charge you money for them because I know that later it helped me edit the grant that I need to turn it into whatever and there's this true sharing economy that's based really largely on need it's not just like it's not just like a fantasy based on some ideals it's like it's happening in real time in reality because otherwise you don't have your microphones and so yeah and there's probably a lot less resource inequality in New Orleans where other cities there's probably the bigger organizations that get all of the funding yeah yes and no I mean certainly there are bigger nonprofits that have lots more access to resources but maybe less in other cities I'm not sure I mean it's interesting I have to kind of work off that I moved to Minnesota recently you know probably it's like number one or number two towards funding for everyone really responsive foundations beginning to do like rural networking work with folks in Minnesota while also doing it in Kentucky Iowa which has a lot less I mean the governor tried to destroy the Arts Council in Kentucky a couple months ago and I have seen the exact opposite of that and I'm going to paint slightly broadly but the exact opposite of Minnesota where there is a total abundance of funding and it feels to me that that abundance has more loss cut off collaborations it has definitely cut off innovation on some levels you know whether it's critical innovation or aesthetic innovation so it seems to sort of reinforce where you are going with this these are all of these nonprofits that are guarding us all of my former colleagues managing franchises proprietary franchises as nonprofits as opposed to having the poorest boundaries of collaboration so obviously no movement that's going to make some matters you know I was just going to jump in and say trust me at this point it's interesting though because what Jay was saying I do feel like the conversations are shifting very slightly but they are shifting like in Minnesota I agree that we've had a history but there's a lot of conversation about like oh so and so it's taking from these people and it's real real true but I've also seen like more funders gravitating towards collaborations I mean intrigued by that and is it a process and all that stuff it's little by little you know I hear you Well just in terms of human behavior there are studies that show that people who have fewer resources like people who live at or near the poverty line are more willing to give like to lend or to just like outright give like a much bigger percentage of their income to each other like if you needed a thousand dollars I could lend you a thousand dollars even if I only make 12 grand a year or whatever where people who make more money than that like relatively speaking are not going to be giving away 10 percent of their income to anybody else or even lending that money and so I think that there's yeah I'm really I'm really interested in kind of like what is at the heart of this you know like how are our individual behaviors like where does that come from that sense of that sense of not having enough like even when we have enough we still pursue ourselves as not having as like being living lack right and then noticing for whom that's not as challenging right because I do think I mean for some people commenting is much more accessible it's something that they have either have done growing up or their parents did it so it's not so far-fetched and I think for others it's more far-fetched it's like many generations ago and I think it's just interesting to notice where you fit in that social context some are more plausible than others and people who have lived in a wealthy market context that's you buy it what do you mean what do you mean by imagination in this conversation it feels like part of what we're imagining is different structures or infrastructures but I also I guess I take the call to imagination also to mean some other kind of deep work that manifests itself as this part but so it's a question it's a good question I mean maybe I'll just jump in and share some reflections and maybe it'll get to that and maybe it won't and then we can go from there so I'm working in a small liberal arts college primarily with 18 to 22 year olds although there's a lot of other people of other ages in that context mostly working and I'm directing this program on ethics in the common good and our mission really is to cultivate collaborative leadership you know for creating a more equitable and resilient world so so in thinking about and I think I mean for me imagination at least in this context when we're thinking about creating systemic change has to do at least about imagining new possibilities and then finding ways to create those possibilities and I think they are about systems and infrastructure but I think they're also about relationships and ways of being and I think they very much relate to the earlier conversations about mysticism and our relationship to land it's like who are we and what are we doing here and how are we living so kind of with that in mind and sort of as I started building this program in collaboration with other people I think one thing I've realized is that there's a relationship between remembering things about ourselves and our capacity to imagine I think that we have to create the right conditions for imagination I don't think that those conditions just exist and so in the context of Hampshire and in the context of the work I've been doing people who are really passionate about creating change they have that passion and they're eager there's some work to be done around creating the right conditions so that the way they go about it doesn't just reinforce or recreate the things we've inherited and so we're totally experimenting and I think that we're at the very early stages but one thing that we experimented with last year was a practice a storytelling and deep listening practice that sort of enabled people to remember and think deeply about who they are where they come from kind of what support has enabled them to get to where they are in their life what choices those supports have enabled them to make what impact they're hoping their choices make so that it's clear so that it's not just some sort of fuzzy thing and also what what values kind of are underneath all of that really helping folks get clear about what their values are and where they come from and we've been doing that through a storytelling practice not on like the story circles that we did although a little bit more codified like there's a series of questions that we asked first to reflect on and then we do it in a small group and in a circle and then once somebody has shared a story we invite people to reflect back what they heard in a really specific way so it's a practice that we call resonance and it just invites people to share the moments in the other person's story when they felt the most moved and so it's just this it enables both the storyteller and the listener to really connect and really identify those moments of connection and I think that that's been just a starting point of a practice for helping people remember things about themselves and recover their own stories so that they're not just functioning in the world with the stories we're told about who we are and what we're here to do but they're able to sort of rethink their story and make the meaning of it and connect it to what they want to do in the world where they do the thing that you want to do and so that's just something and to me that's also a very liberatory practice so I think I've been thinking about the relationship between imagination and recovering our imagination and creating liberatory spaces where we can experience a fuller more robust version of ourselves in relation to others so I feel like all of that's kind of it's like pre-organizing right it's like over the summer I had the opportunity to co-host a workshop in Holyoke where I live and Holyoke is a post-industrial city it's very economically poor it's like rich in people and possibility but it's a struggling town and we had this cultural organizing workshop where we were really exploring you know the power of art and culture for community development and community building and changemaking and we invited this artist Ricardo Levins Morales to speak and he's a visual artist out of Minneapolis Puerto Rican and he does a lot of work around the medicinal power of art and he talked about going to his hometown in Puerto Rico in the center of the island him and his sister who's a poet and they wanted to organize they wanted to sort of connect to people and organize they hadn't grown up there but their parents had and they had connections in the community and they got there and they realized in all their enthusiasm that a lot of stories hadn't been passed on so the new generation didn't really have access to the stories of their elders and those elders were dying and so there wasn't a foundation from which to organize and so they realized what they needed to do was pre-organizing which for them meant collecting stories and making them visible and sharing them and sort of inoculating the field with the stories that would then enable people and give people the courage and the sense of purpose to create the changes that they wanted to make so I think that there's a role that to me is related to imagination too and kind of what's required there one thing that has been in my mind for many many years when I was at the community foundation and asking myself questions like how can we you know make lives of everybody better where do you start and I think for me what happened was I began to answer that question with really young people like young children and so by the time I left we were launching an initiative for children between ages of birth and five because the data now is that there are more and more children entering kindergarten with absolutely no stories, they've never heard the alphabet song, they've never held a pencil or a crown on their hands they entered kindergarten with either teachers who are faced with this huge learning gap and vocabulary gap so as everybody while talking about this issue I'm always looking for ways to fix the world I thought it would be great to have a fabulous children's story that you know was all about these different kinds of values of caring about somebody else and of wondering how you can work with your tiny friend and build something together but you know holding a narrative that is based on a different set of principles that we're talking about but in this very charming attractive way so it's like I need a new doctor so that all the parents read a hundred times over to their child this little book that just prepares the way so that these ideas like when you get them at the age that they are they're ready to they're ready to collaborate my guess is if you ask the age that you're dealing with is you know where do they belong what do they want to do it is about generosity and about caring it's not about I want to extract as much as possible from the world and remove myself I think I'm a deep optimist that we engage with each other in a way that is mutually supported so how do we start that I think it's which starts now nowadays starts earlier but I think it's the educational system the whole system because it's been about 23-24 years of being in assembly land which is the opposite to imagination how to be quiet sitting now because of the ADHD and we started researching or saying to start researching that but to me it's not ADHD it's the natural tendency a kid needs to jump and you're trying to hold them sitting and focus and there's other ways of attention so I do think we do have a systemic and now it's aggravated by what you're saying there's no grandmother I grew up with my grandmother because my friends were working but I learned a lot from her basic things including how to cook it's good that Double Edge is going into the schools really good the schools here because it's very liberated because here we then open and we just run we go to the forest it's a day that structure you erase the structure because the structure is more powerful than the land so for coal compare the school system to the geeks and the military camps and I think architecturally but also behaviorally like it's a flyer I agree with you I think everybody wants to be taken but if you're trained everyday to take and to be careful this is the right thing to say what did you take that is so encouraged faster so you turn into that beast I wanted to go back something that you brought up about the relationship of remembering and imagining so both of the projects that I'm working on right now have to do with going back in order to imagine forward the Deckard project which I talked about a little bit earlier I think it's doing some of what you're saying can we say something about that project it's an oral history project that has a theater it's an oral history and theater it's kind of intersecting so in 2013 the last was being closed and now there's no more gathering spaces for queer women at least no explicit spaces like that so I started my collaborators started interviewing elders women who had sort of come of age in these bars and so these stories were really robust and really vibrant and it was a history that many of us had never like even though we had gone to these bars and had been part of these communities we had not known the history and so now there's this really beautiful kind of intergenerational thing that's happening where there's you know I'm 32 but there's people who are a decade younger than me who are involved in the project and we're in collaboration with and building really deep relationships with these women who are in their 60s people not all of them are women and so I think really for us for those of us who are like the instigators in this project the idea of having that history is so important to be able to ground into an order to envision a future that is sort of beyond like if the bars aren't there anymore then what did the bars give us and what do we lose when we don't have those spaces anymore and if you don't know those stories that happen there it's really hard to imagine forward in that future okay so that's one thought the other thought that I'm having is that the other project that I'm working on right now is a new device called Jubilee that's white people white southerners dealing with white supremacy and so I think that there's like there's this like really complicated feeling of like what happens when the remembering isn't like what happens when the remembering isn't something that you want to honor right like I really you know with the Dykebar project it's like I can feel really good about most of the stories that we collected most of the things that we've heard but when we think about what it means to be like a white southerner like it's violent it's brutal it's ugly and it's like those are my ancestors right people who have done horrible things and benefited from you know these systems and so then how do we use also that remembering a better future and how do we and I think maybe the fact of how painful some of that is speaks to a lot of why we can't get to that imagining right because like for a lot of white people it's really it's awful to go back there it's awful to connect yourself to that and to see yourself as part of this real lineage of violence and social division and so yeah how do we how do we turn to that I was just one of the things that I heard you say and I guess close to Jay's story too is the sense of remembering who you want to be remembering yourself and it seems like part of that painful and difficult exercise is about getting to that I think that's the I mean I don't even know how you start but the kind of like Kalyana she's like well let me remember who you want to be I mean I think just based on my experience this year and at least in the context of the work I've been doing it's been really important to do that kind of remembering who we want to be but also in the face of whatever challenges we faced with other people to not do it by ourselves and I don't know I mean I think that there's also theoretically and practically I think that there's a time and place to do some work without others in the room so I don't think that that should be off the table but I think there's a real something new things become possible when you are in a group and your support is explicitly about that you share and that you are sort of figuring out how to give to one another in the face of like the pain and the challenges and the extreme discomfort that you might face so I'm wondering if anybody who hasn't had a chance to speak wants to say anything or has a question or reflection about what we've been talking about I do have a reflection I think it's very interesting everything that I've heard I haven't like heard it all but I do have a question about system like a system of people a group of people how does it work and for me it's very interesting to be in this country because it helps me to see my culture and one of the I'm here because I'm doing my own project about female minors and it works in a very particular way the minor copper system and I compared to this place for example like the U.S. and I think the Tilean culture is very despair it's very like if you do something or you make a mistake it's like oh you make a mistake then you can make another one it's very like out there it doesn't have order enough so you can kill in my country you can kill someone and you might not go to jail and that's like a fact you can kill like every weekend insane and they see this culture and they see the opposite for what I've seen in a very humble position it's very strict if you make a mistake you will pay for that mistake you will go to jail you will have a law and that's the same for kids that I see the time out we don't have the time out and it's like oh you have to go time out and they grow up in a very like or a obedient way sometimes because of that and I'm thinking about like how can I found a way that I can bring to my country and minors especially that it's a very like a jail culture it's very like you're not if we have an accident a very serious accident with a truck you won't say anything because you're a snitch if you steal something and I see you you won't say anything because you're not a snitch so we will cover you and I see in this culture that it's very open in that way it's very honest in that way also very hidden in some many ways but it's a question for me how can we create a system when everyone can talk and everyone can say something or it can be some order but I can contribute so it's like thank you all I'm feeling the heat and the like end of day fullness we have like five minutes before we need to close our conversation and come back to the larger group so yeah and survival survival of all of us future well the first thing that comes to mind is the Magna Carta was this armistice between commoners and the king over rights of access to the forest for their survival so in some ways it's quite literal but I guess I'm not sure what your question is except is that sort of in a way that maybe talking specifically about impacts of climate change and and commenting as a as a way to somehow help with that I grappled with that question because people say what does the commons have to say about climate change and most people think of big scale solutions at the transnational or global level which immediately involve the nation state or international treaty organizations which are dysfunctional and are not going to do it so I've been trying to imagine really decentralized local examples of comedy especially for ecological films and then start to build up in the federal especially through the years of online platforms but that's sort of the challenge I think in terms of how do you incubate a new sensibility towards the earth on a big scale fast I don't have a good answer I keep wondering about too in this political climate where we are now where some people don't even believe in climate change how do we especially all of you who are running theater organizations and you are creating acclimates for people how do you host a conversation across that terrible dimension I think here's an example some of you may recall the spot of how litigation controversy in Oregon years ago between environmentalism and timbre before the environmentalists won but there was such polarization and the forest service had no consensus for administering the forest that they said ok we are going to convene a council of all the stakeholders and create in effect a commons for the management of the national forest in which the forest everybody the developers all around and the forest service had the veto power and legal authority but they had these intense over the course of one or two years of the council sessions of all these people and they there's a film about it that's 30 minutes long about the Sousa National Forest in which they basically worked it through to realize each other's needs because instead of talking of each other as caricatures they had to deal with each other as human beings who in some ways had similar values or concerns but in short it was a hard negotiation not in a political sense but in a human sense I guess that's a framework to hold that's also true so it wasn't just warfare so that's not quite an answer but it's possible if the structure maybe it's breaking things down to a small enough level as you say taking one thing on at a time because the big structures are not going to be transformed and it has to happen outside of those structures and push up on it and so my strategic theory is build a sufficient integrity and scale outside of the system then you negotiate the system from a place of strength or a spot of battle councils but in terms of negotiation and not in terms of the power of example functional a moral rebuke the way Linux was a moral rebuke to Microsoft you know or the way local food is to agribusiness here's this viable healthier way to do it and you guys aren't doing it so I think the example we addressed your question about imagination at all no I mean I think it's we're meeting we're talking about activism we're talking about land narratives and we're talking about spirit and mysticism and all these things and I think we're and so we're focusing on systems and other ways of being and being together and some of the examples like the dike bar piece is a art centric way or when I saw chips pictures the other way or when we see the way you guys are working and living here those are the examples of imagining with artistic tools other ways of being and so yeah I just kind of wanted all the work to have them all at once just to spring from our table and then like those beautiful pictures over there suddenly the world is alive awareness and feeling generosity yeah so let's do that we have a minute yes totally we're pretty much at time so I'm going to call it and bring us back together yeah thank you all we're together yeah