 Enjoy, in anticipation, in wonder, we are gathered in the name of art and community. We've journeyed to so many places in our lives and have arrived here, to this place, to this theater at the same time. We bring our hearts and minds, bodies and souls, experiences, and dreams for the future. We arrive as individuals, but in arriving, we have created something larger, a circle, a circle that reaches beyond these walls, to the power that blesses us, to that which we hold holy, to that which we thank, when the perfect actor walks into the audition, flows through our pen, when the phone call offers the role we've been waiting for, when the letter informs us our grant proposal has been awarded. To that which we thank, we humbly ask, please help us to be present, honest, to trust that all that we have set aside in order to be here will run smoothly in our assets. Please help us to bring our communities into the circle with us, for we are ambassadors. Please help us to listen deeply to the words and to the heart. Please help us to hear the circle. Please help us to remember. Please help us to be courageous. Please help us to speak with respect, gravity, and kindness. Please help us to be courageous when we disagree. Please help us to suspend our certainty. Please help us to care for ourselves. Please help us to welcome whatever arises. Please keep us safe. Please help us to trust that the circle is stronger, wiser, and more powerful than any one of us is alone. We are a circle over, to discovery, to possibilities, to sharing our stories, and to writing a new story. We thank not which we thank, and we thank our friends, our families, and each other for their support. We thank our circle for its embrace, as we journey through the next few days together. May we transcend in the name of art, as you say. And Olga Sanchez will be woven through some of those that are big and visionary. And I'd like to read those questions for you. Some of you might be sitting in your seats right now, asking, why are we here? How did we get here, since the foundation of this three-day campaign? But tonight what we're going to do is provide a basic foundation for that particular journey. By looking at those three questions, we will touch upon the origins of the Latino theater commons, both conceptually and in terms of its organization. We will talk a little bit about the commons notion, and how it can be an inspiring vision for creating something together. And then the three of us will guide you through an overview of what this particular three-day journey will look like and feel like. And so we begin with the question, why are we here? And how did we get here? All of us in this particular room are here to serve as ambassadors. We recognize that our newer people are not in this particular circle, and it is up to us to be able to share the message with everyone who is not present, but is in our hearts and in our spirits. We became ambassadors through a very organic, natural selection process. We were aiming to create a cross-section of the Latino theater field, but it is by means not a perfect cross-section at all. But it does speak to the state of our current relationships with one another. And we are hoping to this day, three-day convening, we are able to build upon those relationships, strengthen them, and bring more people into this particular fold itself. This is about relationship building. And in this relationship building, we are going to spend three days cultivating, honoring, and reflecting upon the collective wisdom that we all carry with us that we just need to call attention to and honor. And in order to develop and cultivate that collective wisdom, we are asking you to join us in adopting a couple of six stances. These six stances will help provide a framework for this particular process. The first stance that we invite you to embrace is the stance of deep listening. We all know as individuals we have much to speak about in terms of our experience, and we all want to share those experiences, and we'll have plenty of opportunities in numerous ways to share our wisdom. But we also have to keep our hearts open, our minds open, and our ears open to really listen to what other people are saying. That is the source of our collective wisdom. The second is a stance called the suspension of certainty. It is embracing the unknown. All of us as individuals, wherever we come from, are usually charged with having to know the answers. And we move from that place. And so here we want to create a space where it is possible for all of us to embrace the unknown, to accept the fact there are things that we do not know, but that somebody else might know. And in admitting to the fact that we do not know something, it opens a wide door and allows those answers to emerge from it. So we're going to invite you to suspend your certainty. Next, we are asking all of us to embrace the idea of seeking out diverse perspectives in order to be able to get a bigger sense of what the field of decisions are like. We all have our own individual perspectives and our own experience, and this is wisdom and knowledge, but each of us individually do not make up the whole. We want to hear all those voices so we can get a more robust image of the entire community that we are forging here tonight. And in order to do that, we need to embrace the notion of respect for others and respect for the group. The ancient Maya had a concept called in-na-kech. You are my other self, and so we invite you into this space to cultivate that sense of mutual respect so that we can be perfect, beautiful reflections of one another through cultivating that respect. Even though we may have disagreements, it is possible to feel and see something different and come from an open space of love and respect. And next, because this is the first gathering in 25 years, things are going to emerge. Things are going to rise. And we want to be able to welcome all that comes in and be able through this respect to discern and sift through and find the wisdom that we all carry. So we want to welcome all the emotions, all the ideas, all the beautiful visions that will be filtered through the group process here. And we must trust in the transcendent. It's that all of us are individuals, but there is power when we come together that is much greater than all of us. And once we accept the fact that as individuals we come in just one place, we will allow the energies to flow through the group, and through us we will be able to weave a beautiful and inspiring vision of the future. And so those are our six stances. And as co-facilitators, we ask you for a moment to understand that we are guiding you through this process. And we would like for you to make a commitment with us. Will you accept our responsibility to shepherd this entire community through the day-to-day community on behalf of the entire community? And we ask you to show your commitment to this process and to us and to you through a simple gesture of raising your hand. So please raise your hand. And that is an expression of your commitment to this group. And now I will pass the floor. Can you step into the mic, please? Okay, yeah, projecting, right? So just a couple of housekeeping logistical things that I'll go through and then we'll dig a little bit deeper about who else is in the room, which is all of you. So this wonderful black box theater is going to be our home for the next two and a half days. This is where we're going to primarily operate. We also have the lobby. The bathrooms are outside in the lobby to the left and to the right. We also have the stairs. So when we break up into groups, and there will be times when we break up into small groups, sizes 8 to 12, they'll vary in size. You know, feel free to kind of roam but don't go too far, right? Because we need to come and get you at a certain point. So don't leave the building with your small groups. Also, to the back here, this small table. There are some flip cams. There are these white flip cams. If you're inspired to document, and there's documentation happening all over us, we have the cameras. A lot of this is going to be broadcasted on HowlRound TV. But if there's something that you want to capture, you know, feel free to grab one of those things and go ahead and do that. Also, your name tags, they're very, very important to keep them with you. I have a little yellow flower on my name tag. And that's for steering committee members, so you can identify us. So I'm going to ask quickly that our steering committee members stand. So you also can see who's been doing the work over the last few days. Refer to our steering committee members to help us kind of shepherd all of you through various transitions and moving of things and, you know, getting around. So, you know, we'll be calling those folks out. But also feel free to check in with our fellow steering committee members as an aside as something comes up or you need help with clarification around something. Lastly, you all have lotaria cards. Can somebody just pull one up real quick? Pull in lotaria cards. So these cards will randomly assign to you, muscle metal randomly assigned to you, right? And you're encouraged to trade them through the course of the two and a half days. But by Saturday, make sure you have a card on you because that card is going to play a pivotal role in a very important session that will happen towards the end of the convening. So they do serve a purpose and make sure you hold on for the years. But have fun playing lotaria, you know, as a game. I didn't grow up playing lotaria because, you know, I'm Puerto Rican, but. And lastly, you know, the genesis of this, you know, there's a timeline in the back where you get to that. But the genesis of this started at arena stage a couple of years ago. And we're going to ask that Karen's audience come up and kind of provide some context as to how we ended up here today. Thank you for our meeting. And I hate to tell you, but it starts in 1955. Ricardo Fernando is a small child waiting for Fionique to show up. He's the kind of uncle that always promises to show up on time and presents and never does. He's going to go to hell because he likes Mombo, but he shows up and Fernando's waiting for him. He goes, Fionique, Fionique, what did you bring me? And Fionique panics and he says, you see that airplane upstairs up in the air? And my dad goes, yeah, he goes, I've got a monkey with a green tail coming straight for you. And my dad waits outside for three days and the monkey with a green tail never shows up. So as we grew up, a monkey with a green tail was the story of his appointment of broken promises. And my father was working as a doctor and he had these crazy ideas that prostitutes should have health care and people in prison should be able to get inoculations. He came to his work and all his windows had been painted yellow and two of his coworkers were hanging from the rafters. I didn't know that, but suddenly we were moving to the United States. For nine months to go to school we ended up in Boston. Boston was really cold. I didn't understand it. I didn't understand why people would go trick-or-treating when it's cold and beg for candy because where I came from begging is a sign of misfortune, not of fun. And I was bewildered and crazy about it and I said to my dad, dad, when are we going back to Mexico? And he said, at the end of the year, trust me, it will happen. But then a disease started to happen. Gay men and Haitians started to die and nobody knew what it was for and the government asked my dad to stay longer. And suddenly before I knew it, we were moving to Atlanta. And in Atlanta, I said to my dad, we were never supposed to grow up in the United States. We were supposed to grow up in Spanish. What are we doing here? He's like, well, we're trying to make the world a better place. The whole band played on, lived in our living room. And we dealt with the fact that young men were dying, hemophiliacs were dying, actors were dying, children, the cast of Dynasty. And I remember the first day in Atlanta, a woman came in and said, welcome to hot Atlanta. And she goes, what brings you here? And I said, AIDS. One day my dad came back and he said, I think we found the source of the AIDS virus. It comes from a monkey, the rhesus monkey, the monkey with a green tail. And that's the moment that I knew that I would be an artist. Because all of a sudden the gifts that are out there come in different places. And the loneliness and isolation that I felt going from Boston to Atlanta and being an immigrant started to make sense. 20 years later, as I was going around the country, meeting up with different colleagues, et cetera, I was like, why do I still feel like I miss people? Why do I feel sometimes that I see family for a moment and then I don't see them? Isn't it time that we all get together? Because when change, the only way to make change happen, as I saw with my dad, and the people, is you first gather, then you organize, and then you make a difference. And so I talked to different people and put like, would you like to get together? Would you like to get together? And at arena stage I had the pleasure of working with David Dower and Polly and Jamie and BJ. And they're in the middle of a big transition, I asked them. I said, can we please bring some people together in a room? And they said, ah, we're in the middle of a lot of things. But yeah, what would we do? And I go, I don't know. I have no idea, but I promise if you get some of us together, something big will come out of it and it will grow. And that was the beginning of the Latino theater comments. We brought in eight diverse people from all over the country of Latino origin to just sit and talk and say, let's not talk about what makes us angry, let's talk about what we want to change. In the matter of 24 hours, we come up with a plan. And 17 months later, we're all here. So that's just the power of putting people together. There's not one person who's done it. It's been a flavor of love by a lot of people. But that's the origin of us coming together. It's our monkey with a green tail story. It's a gift that keeps giving in different ways and unexpected in different ways. So welcome you guys. Her name was mentioned. And that was Polly, Polly Carl, who is the director of Power Round. And we're going to ask that she come up and talk a little bit about the comments. I'm so delighted. I'm going to do a couple of introductions, and then I'm going to do just a brief overview of this thing we keep calling the comments. So I want to introduce very quickly the Power Round staff, just because they're going to be around all weekend. They're so awesome and we're all standing up here together. So the sole of Power Round is David Dower who's sitting over there. So our first sole is Jay Matthew back there. He's one of our fellows with us right now, Srila Nayak and Ruta Pofovic, who's also here visiting us for Romania. Thank you for those good things. And then really the sole of this convening from the Power Round side of things has been Jamie Gilliam. I'm going to have Rob Orchard, who is the executive director of the Office of the Arts here at Emerson College. And Rob, two years ago, almost to this day, David Dower and I had a lunch with Rob Orchard and he extended us an invitation to come and do our work here. And it's been a life-changing and wonderful experience for all of us. So Rob, do you want to come up just for a second? I'm going to be very brief. I just want to tell you how thrilled we are at having you here. I'm fully aware of how important this moment is. And this is a great room for it. I'm a newbie here and I had nothing to do with this magnificent facility. I just got a chance to play with it. But one of the things that I did do, I was on a hard-hat tour and they were about to cover that wall. And I asked them not to cover the wall. That's the common wall with the opera house next door. And beyond the opera house and the history of Boston Theater, there were many other theaters. It was a center of vaudeville. And I wanted a room that had a wall that extended back into history that would have a kind of porous relationship with what happened in the room. And so I hope that this wall contributes to your deliberations. The other thing about the wall, which the organizers will probably not want me to say, is it's a great place to daydream. It has lots of textures and crevices and different shapes in it. And I think anybody can see a level of their own history in that wall. So be mindful of that too. And now this is going to be a little antidote about the wall. Some of you can't see it, but there's this column here. And at the base of the column, there's an archway articulated. The building used to be owned by Joseph Kennedy, Jack Kennedy's father. And he got into the theater business because he liked, mostly because he liked the actresses. And that archway articulates a pathway that he had in the building to some secret sanctum. So finally, I also want to say that I'm really looking forward to the next iteration of this. There will probably be a variety of them, but I know there's going to be a convening in Los Angeles. That will be focused on performance, and that will be a great pleasure for us to be there to participate in that. And also to mention that in Los Angeles, Emerson is building a new campus. It's opening shortly. That's a magnificent building. Those of you who are from Los Angeles may already know about it. It's a resource for you too. We're proud to have provided a resource for you in Boston. And keep in mind that we also have a resource in LA for various purposes. So happy to have a conversation with you about that if you so desire. Now I'd like to introduce Michelle Whalen, who is the Chief Academic Officer at Emerson College. One of the wonderful things about being at Emerson at this point in its history is we have new energy. We have a new president who you'll meet tomorrow, and we have a new Chief Academic Officer who just started in September this summer. And she's also having an incredible impact. I know she wants to welcome you too, Michelle. Thank you, Rob. Mindful of the injunction to brevity, and yet also mindful of speaking to the here. I do want to say a few words about Emerson College. So on behalf of the college, I really want to welcome you. We're delighted to have you here. If you think about our origins in 1880, Charles Wesley Emerson, who's a cousin of Ralph Waldo, had this vision of teaching as something that empowered the whole being. And we started off with one classroom, ten students, and literally about three faculty. And here we are over a century later with 3,600 undergraduates, 830 graduate students, 450 faculty, and with several presences. One is LA, the other is the castle in the Netherlands, and of course our home here. So I think, you know, when we think about the here and who we are, this is very much a part of it. Emerson conjoins intellect and craft, pragmatism and creativity were grounded in, I would say, the values of respect, inclusive excellence, and engaged teaching and learning. I'm thrilled that you're here. I can't wait to see what comes out of this historic gathering. So I hope you have a fruitful, stimulating, and ultimately, emersonian. I think I've always followed David Dower, and I always wish I were an actor as well, but I'm not. So I'm going to give you a few words to talk a little bit about Hall around in the comments, and I feel like the words matter so much that I'm going actually to read them. So the impetus for Hall around comes from the idealistic notion that theater is for everyone. It comes in response to a prevailing sense of scarcity that seemed to be driving our behavior as a field, and a firm belief that the scarcity mindset will only lead to more scarcity. And if you look around this room, all I see is abundance, and abundance of knowledge and resources just waiting to be released. Waiting for me to be done. I promise I'll finish quickly. Hall around, for those of you who don't know, designs and develops online knowledge platforms and in-person gatherings for the sake of fostering a theater commons to release the abundance and to perpetuate idealism. But what is a commons, what is a theater commons, and well, what is a Latino theater commons? So simply, commons are resources owned in common or shared among a community for the benefit of the entire community. You know it through the environmental movement, the idea that air and water and natural resources belong or should belong to everyone. Well, we contend that social theater. The key words for us are access, participation, self-determination, peer-to-peer learning and sharing, and the concept of moving from I to we. That my access is not as meaningful if it somehow precludes yours. That the we of civilization trumps that I of individual success. In other words, a commons works from the bottom up. It's a DIY movement where artists, in our case, set and determine the agenda. Hall around has an online journal, for example, where everyone in anyone can pitch an article. We have a live streaming television channel where anyone can put themselves on the calendar to live stream. And we have an interactive data map that tracks new play activity around the country. Once again, anyone can put themselves on the map. And we just discovered this week that 88 theaters have put themselves on the map and their primary focus is Latino or Latina theater. So that was a surprise to all of us and really exciting. And this convening is the perfect example of how a commons comes to be. Many gatherings like this come together because a group of people are sitting in an organization and saying, we should talk about diversity. And so they decide to create a convening. It's a familiar kind of top-down approach where the institution drives the agenda and where the problem is identified through the institution. But in the case of this gathering, something different has happened. Karen Zacharias approaches us to say, I'm troubled about the state of Latino theater artists in this country. Where do we come together? How do we empower ourselves? She calls together a handful of people for a conversation that Hall around hosts. That group self-determines and writes a grant to host a larger gathering. They get the grant. The group creates a steering committee. The steering committee creates an outline for a convening. And it identifies all of you as ambassadors to that convening. You fly to Boston. But you represent cities all around the country. You represent your community. And your community is yet another circle of engagement and participation. Five cities, Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas, New York and Chicago will join us via Skype on Saturday. We will live stream this entire convening. So please know we're live-streaming this entire convening. We will post blog posts about what happened. I just like to say that because I'm always shocked when I later see myself on TV and I think, oh my God, why did I wear that? Yeah, so it's good. You just remember you're going to be on TV. And we have a blog post about what happened at the end of each day. We will tweet out on Twitter as we go. The eye of Karen Zacarias becomes the Wii of a nation. And that's how a theater commons takes an idealistic notion and turns it into reality. Howl Around welcomes you to Boston. I'm going to hand this over to the Wii of Anne Garcia Romero and Sla La Rivas who valiantly chaired this convening steering committee. And we're the co-chairs of the Latino Theater Commons steering committee. We're going to talk a little bit about how this all came together. This first part is called expanding our circle. In March 2013, the Latino and Latino Theater Commons held a meeting of our new steering committee to Boston to envision and plan this convening. And we divided it into three committees. Outreach, programming, and fundraising. Outreach, committee, can I get a move to the left, is the chair of that committee. And together, that committee dealt with the whole process of invitation, creating online surveys for all of you. And then also creating the satellite sites in Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Chicago, and New York. With the programming committee, Kenan Vales, who chaired the programming committee, his work included developing the goals, creating the structure, and generating a detailed plan for our convening program. I actually was the chair of that committee, and we meant to seek out funders on the National Regional The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Fund for National Projects, the Office of Arts at Emerson College, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and I believe Katie Stieger is here with us today. Katie, thank you so much. The Ford Foundation. I'm going to sound like a PBS here. The Edna Foundation. The Joyce Foundation. The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and we have here today Olga Garay-English from the City of LA. We're so happy that you can be here with us. Thank you. And in addition, we also contacted universities and individuals, Alyssa, which are over here to my left. So we want to thank everyone with their generous support without she, we would not be here right now. We'll talk about... So we also created a documentation committee to document our time together, and that includes Dr. Brian Herrera. What program are you in? Oh, awesome. So Brian will be writing a report about everything that's going to be happening in the next two and a half days. Yes, right here. How editing a volume of articles inspired by this weekend's community. I am the editor of Cafe Onda. Our platform is to create an online community in conversation about the current state of Latina and Latino theater. Cafe Onda will contain articles, blogs, live streaming of theater events, and is linked to HowlRound, an online journal of the theater commons. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the collaborative nature of who we are, which is the steering committee members were all volunteers who generated and whose generous contribution included their time and talent to the Latino theater commons. Our committees collaborated together through monthly, bimonthly, and weekly conference calls, which were moderated by Anna and myself. To date, we have had more than 50 conference calls in which we've discussed, planned, shared, dreamed, forged ahead together to realize our committee. We're hopeful that the gathering here in Boston will be the start of many more expansive conversations and connections that will continue the field of Latina and Latino theater in the 21st century. It's so beautiful to have you here. And now we'd like to hand the program back over to our master facilitators. We're going to keep this brief. What we wanted to do was just to provide an overview of what the three-day process will look like. In your books, which are great documents, on page eight, you will find the purpose, the vision, the big objectives, and the organizing plan. We put it in your laps here so that during the off hours you can peruse this book and study those. If you have any questions, you can ask us. But this convening has been designed to create an arc and a journey. And so tonight is the night of connection. In a few moments we will begin this connection process through an interactive array of experiences. But tonight is about connecting, knowing where we're coming from quite literally, but also figuratively, spiritually, but also getting to know who is in the room. Tomorrow Friday is about deepening our knowledge, learning about ourselves, what we do, how we do it, why we do it, what's up with what we do, what we love about what we do, where we would like to make some improvements about how we do what we do. We're learning, we're deepening our knowledge and deepening our connections. Finally Saturday we bring it home, we start to vision, we look forward and we come up with some next steps. And so that is a general overview. We are about to commence our convening. Are you ready? At this particular moment we recognize that we're all coming from various particular places. And so we are going to use the four directions in order to be able to orient and start our convening. This particular walk here represents the West. And in a few moments, you're going to line up from the West Coast. Those of you who are coming from the East Coast will line up on the opposite side. Those of you who are coming from the Midwest in this ceremony will be represented. I think you know that you will line up on this walk. And those of you coming from self-identified Vesau will be moving in this direction. We are going to create a circuit, but it's necessary for all of you to be able to create a space. So we are going to organically move our chairs aside as necessary in a second. But what you need to bring into this particular space is the altar offering that you brought or prepared for this particular moment. So take one minute, literally grab your altar.