 Okay, so you want to get this out of the way? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm going to go back to the office today. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you all so much for joining us tonight, I'm Heidi Taylor, I'm the Artistic and Evacuative Director of Playwrights Center and we're very honored to be hosting the book launch for From the Heart of the City, here at the Heart of the City Festival. I'd like to say hello and a warm welcome to our friends out in the digital sphere. We're live streaming tonight's talk on HowlRoundTV, so thanks again to HowlRound for supporting us getting the word out about all the great work we're doing here on the downtown inside. So as we do for all of our events, sorry Kathleen, you can shout it out. I just think John needs to move forward. You're in the dark. There we go. Thank you a little better. Okay, thank you Kathleen. We're very casual here at PCC on HowlRoundTV. So to begin, I would like to do as we do at all of our PCC events, introduce Stephen Litton to do our territorial acknowledgement. Stephen? You can actually step back a little bit. You actually want me to use my longhouse voice? Ladies and gentlemen, attitude is the pain brush that cars your world. I want to thank each and every one of you for coming to the Heart of the City Festival, the book launch of the Heart of the City. Without further ado, I would like to say that my name is Stephen Litton. I'm originally from Litton, P.C., part of the Interior Sailors Thompson First Nations. Out of respect for the lands of which we participate in and work, eat and play, I would like to acknowledge that we are on Squamish, Muslim and broad First Nations territories. And I would also like to thank them continuously from the bottom of our hearts that they've always been accommodating to our festival, for our festival and any other initiatives. We have people from First Nations and people throughout the world that come and participate here. So I would like to acknowledge them and thank the territories for allowing us to continuously allow us to do what we do. And that's to share the very beauty of who we are as people and sharing community. And that is the true heart and that is the very reason we're here. It's about the arts, but it's also about coming together, joining, weaving together our stories. Out of the ashes of the Phoenix, we've come here today to do that. But I would also like to thank all the women for being here as well and acknowledge their work, their commitment to community for you are the heart of our nation. Without you, nothing else matters. Thank you. Enjoy the festival. Thank you so much, Stephen. And as the heart of the city and Vancouver Moving Theatre have really had a tradition of incorporating music, dance and theater, so we're here to invite you and I more. So together, it's a different song. I'm not that short. My name is Gurdus. Just so we don't overpower the microphone. There we go. This is the Gathering Song. It's an Ishmael Bay song from Ontario. That was given to me by dear friend Cheryl and Sherry. And the Gathering Song, when this song was sung, it was sung for people to come together to gather berries and to gather food when they were on the land. So since we're here at the opening of this book launch, I'm glad that you can hear the little berries in your mouth. To sing this song. To have our third annual collaboration with the Heart of the City Festival and our friends, Terry Hunter and Savannah Walling, to launch a tremendous book. The Heart of the City gives a social and cultural history of some of the tremendous artistic movements that have been happening in the downtown Eastside. And we are very honored to have four panelists to give their personal window into that movement and their relationships to it. So the theme of this year's festival is nourished by community. Certainly, since PTC has landed on the downtown Eastside in the last three years, we've been incredibly nourished by the rich cultural community that lives and works here. And we're very curious, why? How does this wonderful artistic community arrive in this neighborhood? What from the neighborhood feeds the art? What from the art feeds the neighborhood? And so we're going to speak with these wonderful artists who I agree to join. I'll just give you a very brief intro to each of them. And then I'll launch you in this discussion. So of course, we just heard from Nora, who is a very talented, interdisciplinary artist. She works in music, film and digital theater. She's a singer and a musician, a writer, a director, an actress and a producer. And she's been a big part of the heart of this festival. Next to her, we have James Vagan Tate, an award-winning director and a writer who's worked with most of the theaters in Vancouver and finds the feasts coming back to the downtown Eastside. Evelyn Wickey, who's the director of the Carnegie Community Center, she's celebrating her 10th year at the Carnegie this year. So congratulations, Ethel, and is also an artist in her own right. John Endo Greenway, beside me, is the managing editor of the Bulletin. He's a founding member of the Atari Tyco and the designer for the Heart of the City Festival and for the wonderful book that we can all grab a copy of in the lobby after the panel. So I'd like to ask a question. How has your personal practice, the way that you make your art, been impacted by your work with the community to make the community engage theater? So a theater where we don't necessarily make a show and take it out to people, but where we go out to people and make something with them before we share it again with the wider community. Do you think you can start us off? Well, I just want to say it's such an honor and a privilege to be a part of this event tonight and to be a part of all the events with Terry and Savannah in the downtown east side and with all the makers. And I'm especially, I have to acknowledge the amount of goodwill inside all of the events that I've been lucky enough to participate. The goodwill from the community is the driving force and the real behind doing art in the communities and community-engaged art, however they call it now, there's so many ways. And in terms of the question, how does it impact, is the question, how does it impact on... On your work, on your practice particularly, I think you've got to put a little bit in the book. It's so brilliant. For those of us who haven't had a chance to read it, I think you can dive in there. Well, so I'm a director in the theater community and I have a background in being educated in a theater school, a traditional theater schools and a music school and as an actor and a director and the outcome of which was that I spent half of my life acting in half directing. And I think the thing about the community plays, which in the format that I've done them here in the downtown east side and with Abby Stubbington and Andrew B, we've used the model by Angelico. And Angelico was an English playwright who decided that she was fed up with doing a professional theater in London. But I moved out to the Colway Trust in the outside of London and started working directly with community using her skills. And so the one thing that you have to acknowledge when you come to the community, you're being hired to do this as a professional theater artist and you have to make an exchange with them. You have to bring the community your greatest expertise. The best thing that you do, you have to bring to them in exchange for the goodwill. That's what the deal is, the bargain. And that's what I've always remembered is that you have to strive for the excellence that you know in your craft. And so you keep your standards as professional standards and you are fluid with your expectations to make sure that you're able to draw the things that you know need to be presented. From the beautiful people who have so much to offer and who come with a goodwill and that's what you're faced with which is very different than a professional theater. In a professional theater, you can frequently encounter people that have done it all their lives and their goodwill has just run out. Impossible. They're a little bit tired. It's fair enough. But in the downtown Eastside it was so delightful to come into an environment with so much dynamic and interest and thirst to channel everything that they wanted. The people wanted to say, all of you here, or many of you here, wanted to say, wanted to express through theater, through music, through dance. And I think the thing I found out in an interview where I did one of my first ones and here is that you have to become incredibly efficient in what you do. You cannot waste time as a director. You have to be whimsical, you cannot just let a rehearsal go into whimsy. You really have to be responsible for a large number of people's time and creativity and how to channel it well. So I found that the predominant thing for me was learning very efficiently or found out what my efficiency was inside directing theater and how to best frame things if I had a group of, and the shows involve 150 people generally. And so if you have 40 children in the room teaching them something and you have four days, you have four rehearsals over a period of three months to teach them, you don't teach them something and then change it all the next time and then change it all. You have to know exactly how you're going to open the play before you get the first day of rehearsal. And then you lay it out. You can change things along the way a little bit, but you don't want to be re-blocking young people four times and have them so confused and turning in circles for opening night. You want to give them a real clarity. And so the community plays have always honed all of my practices into efficiency and clarity and also into a kind of economy, a language that's going to arrive at what I need, to what the play needs, and what the actors need in that moment without too much talk, without too much discussion. I also found that, like I said in many places, after I had done the community play here in an interview, that it was like doing a masters when I went to do it because I had to use everything at my fingertips that I knew in the theater and to use it. I never knew when in the room I would have to be called on to give that piece of information that might inspire that person from that experience back there. So it was one of those galvanizing experiences for me always, where everything that I knew, the stakes were very high for what I knew in order to maximize everybody's experience. Because this is about the community. It's not about me trying to get a particular, I don't know, it's not about my career, it's about making a community feel happy doing theater and introducing them to something that I have loved since I made plays in my backyard. I've been doing community plays since I was six or seven in my backyard, with all the people that I am. I wonder how many people start though that I am, some animals were there. Thank you so much. I think that looking at how we learn in our community part, this is a big part of the work and in the work that I've done in the community as well, it's made me a better professional artist. And so I wonder if we could turn it over to you and your experiences in the community or because you're coming to a different position working as a Carnegie and looking at the work in the commission from a different position, but how has it impacted you or is it your self or your practice as a professional artist? Well, I think rather than talking about myself as a professional artist I think I might talk about how it's impacted in my work. I'm not sure. I was not coming from such an organized context in terms of thinking about community theater, community-age theater as numerous because that's not what I do. I arrived at the Carnegie Center when, you know, I love the down-county side had always moved down. Terri Savannah had always started the hardest-hit festival. There was already groundswell there when I looked around the center what I could see were all these people engaged in singing lots of choirs and had regular writing group so singers, writers and actors, they were all there and there had already been some interest in opera what we did at that time was community opera and there was already an interest in opera in the community and it made perfect sense to me because the issues in the community are really larger than life and life so you know, brought together a small group of writers to write together unbeknownst to me in some ways but that was the thing that I had to ask my patient and I showed her I am a writer it turned out amazingly and it was a lot of work for the writers and one of the things that I was so amazed the product itself which really was a product of those writers and singers and musicians yes we had professionals especially in the music section but otherwise it was very much a community project and the quality of what came out of that was remarkable and the acting or singing against our expectations about what people brought to it I think that just really my understanding of that community what is possible there what continues to be possible there who people are it was a really wonderful way for me to begin working in that way and I really came to understand that my job is really to support those gifts that everyone is bringing in any way I can and so do you feel like you still bring a bit of that I didn't know what I was asking into projects after having done them for ten years did that still come up? well well first of all we have tried very hard to create another opera for ten years and have been able to put it together about the writing done but have been able to pull it off in terms of financial so it's not as if we turned around in every year did another one that would have been a whole other learning occur but in terms of do I still do I still do I still feel like I ask more than people can or that's fair to ask no because what I learned was in the end people did put that off and it's not too much to ask and instead have learned that there are ways to support their work about us asking to do it in any particular way there is one of the things we do now is small arts programs so people actually get individual programs but we're not defining that we're in any way very fine in making work so it seems like there's been a bit of a transference of agency over time thank you so John you've been a part of the heart of the city your imagery is everywhere in it and on the book how has working in community with Teran and Savannah impacted your practice which of course extends in a different realm you're working in graphic design as an editor, as a writer, as a musician how has been what was being in the heart of the city impacted you as an artist that's a good question I don't know if it's impacted me as an artist if it's impacted me as a human being for sure it's kind of funny my mother was Japanese-speaking my father was an English-Irish descent from Manitoba they ended up marrying against both their parents which is living in Europe they were living in a leading lifestyle decided to go back to Canada moved to Montreal and Toronto they were living quite happily and then my father got a phone call from Roy Keogh who was one of his close friends he said it was opening up in Vancouver so we piled everything up in it you hauled ourselves across the country and when I was 10 ended up in Vancouver and shortly after that my parents were involved in the creation of Vancouver so I think he was the first or second housing co-op so I'm not sure if it was the first or second I think it was the first and it was there my mother reconnected with her Japanese-Canadian roots which she basically left by the wayside when she married my father and it was here on the main street but I discovered that I was in that Japanese-Canadian myself I mean I sort of knew it abstract my mother was different but I started meeting other Japanese-Canadians I was in I used to play guitar in my room and I know you're not sure but I thought she lived in our complex and her new name said well you should play at this coffee house at Dira on Coriola Street and I did and like that I think it's unusual that you can identify and learn if that changed your life maybe but that might change my life and I met after the show all these people said well we have a band and these local corbeaus and it's an Asian-Canadian band we should join our band and we should write songs and that sort of from there it sort of changed my entire life trajectory and you know it's gone you know I live now in harmony with my family but to be connected with this community through my work with Thurian Savannah and the type of groups and my work in the Japanese-Canadian community is pretty profound and it all you know how it was planned it was all just sort of half-assured and you know well Terri and I had different versions of how we met each other well we were practicing at the community center for some reason but it was practiced there three times a week you know when we were practicing nothing else could happen in the center you know the drums were just mind-boggling loud and this fellow poked his head in the door Terri and was quite inquisitive and he couldn't go away does that sound familiar? and that was the start of a beautiful relationship and a few years later when I formed what became Zubintycle which was then called Hum Drums Terri Yashi Pirates for our first our first gig on just a few walks in here and then years later we were looking for a graphic designer I guess you'd see my work and I was just starting on myself and that formed the basis of a beautiful relationship so in a way you've grown up with the festival as a graphic designer and you have obviously a much larger practice but I think we see a real signature look to the program so you can identify this as part of the city and every year I'm always looking forward to who's going to be on the cover what's going to be that image that brings us to the unique feed for that year can you talk a little bit about how you find that image that brings us into the arts well one thing about the festival I think in terms of that you put a high priority on creating a powerful visual image and to the point that every year they look at what David Cooper did on some day long shoots and bring in things like hundreds for a day of shooting and often we have a big idea of what we're looking for but often we have a different image than what we started so David shoots Terry Durrack sometimes plays as an input and at the end with all pictures Terry basically goes through and says well that work, that work, that work I do a couple of mock-ups and generally it gets pretty obvious I think the image that really got reflected this year was Stanley Paul which when I first saw it I thought that's not the image but as we started working with it I'm a lot of finding it it's actually one of my favorite posters covers it's really a great quality which I think speaks to the heart of how all of the work at the festival comes to life so it's very consistent in terms of the ethos of art it's imposed it feels like it comes very naturally out of the community and out of the places and the energy to control those quotitions I think that's the strength of it Renee you've been a part of some tremendous projects at part of the city festival and I've been moving here so I'm wondering can you speak a little bit about how that's affected you as an artist because your practice is of course very wide and you have a lot of other work that you do how is working with the community here on the downtown side impacted your practice? I think it's the better person in terms of what do we mean when we're talking about community engaged art practices and I think that as I kind of go through the different processes in art and creating art has always been about listening when you were talking about being a director it's almost like there's times when we're doing this work and I think with Savannah's help with the story meeting it was almost like there was being a director and also being a facilitator there was something about engaging in the dialogue that needed to be said in terms of how this person or this particular scene and how those groups of people or that individual needed to find it within themselves what I was requesting what I was wanting to what I received and so the idea of deep listening and making those actions and those choices as a director based on those things in terms more of the facilitating ownership of what it is that we're creating and I think that yeah, it made me a better listener I just completed doing and I've been doing this for the last four years work in different First Nations communities on reconciliation and so I just finished two days of intensive listening to the quantum of the First Nation and what they experienced in terms of residential school and I don't think that if I didn't have the experience with story leaving of the deep listening and being able to give back what I'm hearing that the work that I'm doing today would be as deep as it is with this work with the facilitation of the surface Well I think that you did it just a beautiful segue there because I think my next question for all four of you and we can start from the same place but if you want to believe in, feel free is how you feel the work of the Heart of the City Festival has in turn impacted the community because I think we've heard some really profound impacts that being an artist in that context but I'm wondering from your experience seeing the audience at the Heart of the City Festival encountering the artists who have been making this work with you between festival times how has this work changed the neighborhood work and not changed it in some way I don't know it's like a chemical catalyst or something in the neighborhood Jimmy, do you want to start? I think and of course I've only been a part of maybe five or six projects but it feels to me that each project just creates a need for more you know, it creates a desire to people start practicing the art in different ways and they want to keep practicing and so it fosters a desire to do more and as soon as that happens the artists in the community become alive and so and then Terri and Savannah and other groups start providing opportunities where more can happen and then Terri and Savannah also galvanize the people who are doing different things across the country and bring them into the community to also share practices from other places and the community then becomes quite alive in its art practice so that's one way that I think I mean I saw it happen from the play in the heart of the city to the next year in the festival and I'm sure I thought you saw it with I love the downtown east side it just kept fostering new interest and a greater desire and it was almost like the community was leading it and not the facilitators who were brought in to be a part of it but I saw the difference between in the heart of the city the play and then in the heart of the city of the festival within a year like how it was legions of interest not just the people who were on stage the first year but people who wanted to be a part who had seen and then became interested and then there were more projects and then those projects would just attract more people who wanted to be a part of a community event that was art which is here today and gone tomorrow just to be around each other making something imaginary together so I wonder maybe we can bring it to Ethel do you think part of that has to do with people in the community to see themselves or what went on stage is that part of what drives people once they've seen a show to go that's what I want to do is that what's your experience well there's probably some of that but I think it's also about possibility and opportunity you know people have talent and skill and you know just sometimes don't have any place to put that and just flower and it was interesting last night actually at the event last night later I was it occurred to me that the festival particularly had kind of created a company you know and it's it doesn't call it something a company but that there's a large there is this group of people who comes back and interacts in different ways and takes different roles and everything you sat back and looked at has been created you know there's been times when I felt frustrated that there wasn't more resources and funding to do more you know that those people would then get a chance to do more and that was not last night I thought maybe that was probably the other way so organic I mean there has been you know the festival has brought lots of resources for everyone but if for instance we've been able to do more maybe it wouldn't have been as organic or as community driven in so many ways it has been so is there anything that you and I didn't find this shifted at the crime of being over 10 years at the festival that's changed in the world as well there's a lot of conflict with people then you know I'm not sure what people are good about it you know what they have to offer but it's as much so John you're part of a lot of intersecting communities and of course with the history of Japanese Canadian conversion into this community your own home being on the street your island on the street too so what have you seen change in the audiences in the neighborhood since the festival was born I'm hard to ask about because I do live in the suburbs sure and it gives me a different perspective I think I don't I don't even work here though I come down every year and even at the festival itself most of my work is sitting kind of at the 27 inch line at the images in fact I'm actually more involved in the festival doing a show at the thank you school and I also have a book called so this year I'm actually down here down here every other day I carry out an 8am radio interview tomorrow morning no rest it's a much shorter interview sorry what's impressed me about the festival approach is that you know they go big I think they think big and I think that's as they've said as well I think it's really fostered a sense in the community of pride and yes we can do this we can do it properly we can do it with our heart and passion and I think that's so if I see that from the outside it's really impressed me that this approach that they've taken I interviewed Terry over the years and he's always said that he wants to show the other side of the community because most of the time you know safe injection sites and gentrification of the issues and that's positive reality down here I think they really try to show a different side of the community to the outside world and you know when we advertise on a black coast outside of the front we publish ads in the Georgia street and we go big and actually you get a look over the years it's slowly picked up on but it's really happening to us it's obviously a little funky thing yeah absolutely I think as a newcomer to the neighborhood I've lived in Stratford for about six years and on this site for about three years um it is really one of the most dynamic neighborhoods I've lived in and also one of the types of neighborhoods that I've lived in I love Prandtl Island and we had a great time when we were there but I know ten times more people in the neighborhood who aren't theater makers you know a lot of theater makers too but you know we know people who are downstairs on the corner there's all kinds of new businesses in the neighborhood and there's lots of interesting questions about what that means for the character of the neighborhood but people are interested in each other they're interested in what's happening in making the stories of this place together so it is a pretty exciting place to live and one that I hope other people in Vancouver will come to visit for the work that's being made at the heart of the city festival because as both Jimmy and Edward indicated it's of an incredible standard and it's just a really exciting offering to the rest of the city to come down here and see the amazing artists and the amazing neighborhood that we have what have you seen in your wider work in the community how has the existence of this festival the kind of work that you're making here impacted the wider community whether artists or artists I think the I have to quote Rosalind Williams when we were up in entering Terri and Savannah were going on the train with and part of that journey we stopped at one of the comments that Rosalind Williams made actually it was at the in May about the conference tracks, thank you sounds like she said that art is way ahead of our apology and when you're looking at from an Indigenous from an Aboriginal standpoint and utilizing theater and dance and music that's something that I think very unique in cultural practices because that's always been our storytelling our songs and dances and just to share a story there's Lorelai Williams who was the niece of one of the murderers missing Aboriginal women in the downtown Eastside and she kept trying getting out of the victim trials and stuff and she finally went I need more people to hear what's happening I need people in this community to understand and hear what we're doing I need to do something artistic what am I going to do so what she did four years ago three and a half years ago is she started a dance troupe and they stopped traffic and and Georgia and they did a dance and what's so beautiful about what Lorelai's doing is that she's from this community she understands sort of the dynamics of what it is for the families of the disappeared and she recognized the importance of dance as a mechanism to bring people into a conversation that talking about missing and murdered Aboriginal women I don't know if I want to talk to the families that's over there but the fact that she created this dance it's called Butterflies in Spirit they have a Facebook page and so what's really beautiful but when they did the dance on Georgia in April of this year it was native and non-native people about the dancing and it was something that naturally this issue is not just an Aboriginal issue it's something within our Canadian fabric you know bearing the sins of Canada is one thing to say but it's also it's also the fact that in our practices we are able to glean a sense of healing and a sense of voice in what we're doing with what we're doing and have you seen that a real shift then over the life of the festival in terms of the voice for Indigenous artists? Oh of course, I think part of what I think that Vancouver would be fear and it is about is being able to to listen in and hone in on what is this being and in any in any human development our own human condition of dealing with social educational, political, whatever that is we have to develop that and there's also stories about that whether that's in the history of it or what's happening today and Vancouver movie theater Terri and Savannah have been able to articulate that visually, musically with movement and in the theater of the theater I wonder I'd just like to open up to our panel if you have any questions for each other for the audience any last thoughts to offer about your experiences with the Harvard City One of the things that I didn't mention before is that the way it impacted on my own process is that leaving the downtown east side and then going back into the professional world and doing a show it was very dry the palette was very colorless and it was a series of professional people who had been trained in the theater so one fact was a wonderful thing but it was then that it occurred to me that I couldn't work in a narrow structure anymore and I personally with other people started the practice of integrating professional students and community artists like Stephen and Kwame and Helen and people from the community into professional, Helen's a professional of course but how to integrate people all together so that the culture of the place was no longer the culture of what was called the trained professional actor but was the culture of community and to watch how young people how community artists how professional would all work together in contexts like crime, punishment or the idiot we did in the cooperation with Thank You for Moving Theater and those practices started changing my ideas about around all sorts of things including diversity in the theater being a really important mandate of things needed to occur everywhere at Barton Beach when I directed I was able to start demanding certain communities of people existing in the people that I directed at Barton Beach and so that kind of thing it keeps on impacting throughout and then Stephen starts working with Patty Allen and starts changing the way she acts or Patty Allen who's a great actor and professional professional community looks at Kueming Ling and phones me up and says what's she doing in rehearsal and I said she's doing her thing and she said yeah but what is it articulated so I can do it just now watching Kueming and Kueming came up to Patty the next day and said oh Patty you're so amazing you just put layer upon layer upon layer so what do you do I don't do anything I got it so I'm hearing there's this circulation of ideas of experiences that are coming back and forth between the professional theater community the huge artists community hearing that coming inside and that that porousness really just brings a richness to both kinds of experiences and possibilities as Apple was saying the thing about possibilities that was just one model but you can figure a million ways to come at it once you enter into a zone that has so much goodwill and energy and cultural history then you start flying as an artist yourself I think there's an openness to basically anything to ideas to train I think that's one strength of the festival it's not it's a mandate a mandate but to me the mandate is to be open and to celebrate I think a few models for a lot of other things and I think that certainly was a big part of the track symposium and the training thought project that for those of you in the HowlRound Lab aren't familiar with them please do check out Vancouver Women's Theater's website there's some tremendous research and gathering of information around how community work is made across the country and it's a tremendous project you should check out any other last thoughts we do have a couple of other things on our docket before we retire to the common area we are HowlRound fans to their own devices I'd like to do a little bit of pre-arranging I'll ask them to say a thank you to Jimmy and Ethel and John I'm going to get you to stay here we're going to get Terry and Savannah to come up and join us for the actual official launching of the book and then after we do that tonight is going to see us out of the room we're going to have questions in the common area afterwards so Savannah can I ask you to come out of the room here and Jimmy can we can trade you your tickets here I didn't organize an accident so so I'd just like to introduce the creators the tremendous book that's being launched tonight from the heart of the city Terry Hunter, Savannah Walling and we've had a few moments already with John and Ethel and I think they'd like to say a few words before we go up into the common area and celebrate the book go ahead well thank you everyone for coming here tonight for this really wonderful occasion it's been a real pleasure for me to be able to sit for the last 45 minutes really listening and I was very moved and very touched and pleased by what I was hearing and the impact that we're doing and others are doing in the community here in the downtown Eastside the book itself has been a creation that's risen out of this community it's built upon the work that we ourselves as a whole community have done together there's been hundreds and hundreds of people both professional and as many people who have been involved in creating these incredible productions that have been created here in the downtown Eastside in the last 12 years and this book is really a testament to the work that the community has done and the artists and the organizations and the community have created and the book is also being created through this amazing web of relationships that we've had with our community and they've had with us and we've had with each other and the work has been created through those relationships and the book itself has been created through those relationships and there's over 31 writers in the book the companies that produce the place thank the community theater profile the number of them within our work has been profiled in there but also the Carnegie Center Theater and the Valle the Lanagil Bowen Productions and Savage God are five of the companies that are featured in the book I think it's 12 different productions and so we really wanted the book to really speak and reflect to an honor and pay tribute to the work that's come out of this community and I hope that people really look at it from that perspective Savannah and John and I have the pleasure and the honor to be able to facilitate that process to bring the book into reality but it really is has been made possible because of the people in this community that have made these productions and helped us with this work I really want to acknowledge some people in particular Barbara Pooley came to us probably a couple of years ago we had produced an original a preview copy of the book and we shared it with our community and we started getting feedback on it and we really saw that there was a whole other way that we needed to move forward on the book and working with Barbara who's here in the house with us who's a professional editor and she she gave us tremendous insight and support into how we could how we could reframe the book so it had a better structure redo the design so that it was better understood from a reader's point of view of where you are in the book and and really helped us to find the shape of the book and what would be a better way for the book to live so thank you Barbara for that tremendous work and that support it was really vital for us in helping us move to the next stage of the book and we really appreciate the help that you gave which was completely a volunteer and my saves I also really want to thank Richard Barcus who became an editor within the book too in the sense of reading every line within the book and finding hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands typos and ways that dashes should be used that we had no idea that dashes had such a I think John was to decide himself by the number of words or phrases that required dashes and and really really helped us to move the book to another level in terms of its reading ability and so we're really grateful for the work that Rick did and the hours and hours and hours and and Rick unfortunately can't be with us in the night some other really key people or organizations I really want to thank by such a thanks Simon Fraser University in a very roundabout way when Simon Fraser University moved into Vancouver we were invited into the downtown in Southern Savannah to a big event and there was hundreds of people there and the president came up and he stood on the stage and said what's with the passage it was better than this one somebody in very high places in the organization and he stood on the stage and said and I quote we are going to bring culture to the downtown and Savannah and I looked at each other and said we have to do something I love this and that's when the book idea the book was born at that moment because we realized that there's such an ignorance and lack of understanding about what's going on here in this community that we really need to create something that would have to be used to educate people and to celebrate what it is for the people that participate in the books to the community about the incredible culture and the work that's going on there in the downtown and so further to that the Vancouver Foundation came on board and one of the program officers there, Kevin Burrell last name was Mariko she personally made sure that we got funding for this project and the BC Arts Council came on board supporting the project and the City of Vancouver also put up money towards the project too so I want to acknowledge and thank our funding partners for making this happen but to pull it back and gain it's really being a very community initiative and we've all done this together and my deep appreciation goes out to all the writers and all the contributors from all the projects that have made this book possible and it's been an honor to be able to work with them to make this happen and also with Savannah and John to pull off the book as John has mentioned earlier it's been a very collaborative process and I personally really really enjoy working with John he does approach his work as from a artistic perspective and accepts and listens to all my I should say accepts listens to all my crazy ideas listens to all my crazy ideas we have over the poster images but we always come to something I'll shut up now I just want to say that this the really important part of this book has been the contributions that have come to it from the part and what we have learned from the partners we've worked with the artistic collaborators we've worked with people from many different areas of the community that we've worked with and we structured the book in such a way that we wanted to be able to honor that so that we had voices from different aspects of the creative process speaking about the work and that it's been a great learning journey for us and also in response to that very interesting conversation at Simon Fraser and I will say that Simon Fraser's citizen has been making a real effort to reach out to educate themselves in different ways they're making steps but I'm 69 we ended in 60 years but a lot of what we've been thinking about is how can we share from the wisdom of this community and what we've learned over the years how can we share this work with people working in different parts of the country with new generations coming what are the ways that other ways to leave ripples for the future and I want to also add just on a personal note that for myself it has been a really artistically rich environment to work in over the years because of the extraordinary cultural communities that are here the different social groups the kind of diversity and I think that it's part of that has been making it possible artistically to begin to evolve and develop theater forms that are and theatrical and other performative type forms that are very unique to this land itself this part of the world and that are emerging from some of the more content concerns and values of this land of Turtle Island and also inform my people that have been coming here from the Fort Horners and so that it's made it in addition to being a rich experience in engaging with community and learning from community but of evolving really artistically rich and deciding work and feeling that we are part of a generation that is evolving and being fed with these forms that are emerging from this time, from this place with very ancient roots but new contemporary original forms so that is quite exciting and before I pass it on to John, I just want to remind that Ruth Howard from Toronto who is one of the contributing writers of the book is the artistic director of John Bruce Theater that is doing tremendously exciting work in Ontario and in collaborations with people across the country. Anyway Anna is one of the writers of the book but she has also created a silk screen fabric map that's inspired by the design of the book and I encourage you after we leave this room to go and to share any of the words that come to you from the book or any kinds of reflections that you may have had as a big part of the productions about productions witnessing them and wishing you'd seen them but anything that you might like to share from them but yeah basically come and write something to leave for Carri and Savannah because we're trying to make a beautiful thing to leave with them and the more people that do it it's really simple the more beautiful piece we're going to have to leave and I need people to do it in order to complete that little art piece there so come and join us with the table and then in in Delvis, thank you and it's fun. Oh and I'm sorry just before I pass on to John it has been a huge good honour and a pleasure to collaborate with them over these years and with the kind of artistry efficiency, generosity that you bring to the collaborative process and your capacity to listen and to really grasp and understanding of the festival or the production or whatever it is that we're working with and to really look into the heart of it and to bring that forward from visual point. Thank you. Well you know I generally feel that most heavy lifting is done by other people and I'm basically putting a beautiful video over top of it. It has really been an honour to probably gather from our side earlier with these people over the years and to bring it all together because many of those productions can be worked on together not a whole but the majority of them can be worked on together into a compact book like this. It's pretty amazing. You know often as a designer you are basically manifesting other people's patients and I was really moved and honoured when the short before the book was published that Terri DeVanage by taking writing credits from the book. I'm also grateful that he got the book out before he began the production. That should be stopped. We've been working on this book for a couple of years now. And as Terri said we did a prototype book that was what it meant. Which I thought was great. Then they started showing it to other people and feedback came in and we reworked the book based on Barbara mostly on Barbara's feedback and I think all over a lot of work restructuring the book really helped strengthen it and I will say if the train of thought hadn't happened we might not ever have finished it. Knowing that people were coming from all the way across Canada to see what was happening we thought we might do it. Well I wonder if I could ask everyone to just join me in congratulating John Savanna in Terri on this tremendous achievement and writing to the book could you put up your hand for me? Is there a hi, hi, hi? Do I need just up? Yeah, there's some words from Stephen and a introduction to some way to put up your hand. Right, so there's just been this whole tapestry that has been taking place and Roseanne and Stephen have been part of them as well. Well I wonder if I can ask you to sing us out and really wrap up the evening and then of course everybody let's go into the common area and contribute a lead to Reed's project for his wonderful work. Okay, so let's do so.