 in the chat for you, and it has our quick links. And that one also has our crowdcasts. Thank you, I have so many tabs open. 97 people signed up, whoo, registered for this event. That's gonna be, oh, we are streaming us. Yeah, so right now we are. I can go back to our landing page. Hey, welcome everyone, welcome. Hi, my name is Deborah Eleazar. My pronouns are she, her, hers, and I'm reaching you from the unceded ancestral lands of the Ramatush Alone's peoples, also known as San Francisco, right here at Intersection for the Arts. I'm the Artistic Director of Fulls Fury, and I'm so excited it's time to build forward with you. Thank you for being here. Whether you're joining in on our interactive crowdcast platform via the livestream on HowlRound or on Facebook Live, we've got an exciting two days of art shares, interactive discussions that are especially designed to inspire, support, challenge, and network with you. ASR captioning is provided in the link that Suzanne is gonna put in the chat. Thank you, Suzanne, which will open in a separate window for you. Let's move into our land acknowledgement with Emily Dedeques, Jihei Kim, and Yiyo Ornelas, followed by a song and a breathing exercise from our Art Share cohort member, Yihei, and then our production associate, Yiyo Ornelas, will return to share the community agreements. And I'll be back. In the meantime, put in the chat, what are you advocating for in your life, in your theater practice, your organization, or your community? Share it with us and we'll talk about it later. Here we go, thanks. The land acknowledgement that we share is based on Adrienne Wong of Spider Web Show and from Dr. H. Parakruti Sharif-Williams from CUNY Racial Justice and Performance Conference. We acknowledge that settler colonizers and imperialists from Europe took and unseated the land on which we gather from the peoples who had stewarded it for generations. The land has been and continues to be occupied and held by force. We acknowledge that we are contributing to that legacy now. We acknowledge that settler colonizers and slavers from Europe used stolen and enforced labor of African people to subsequently develop the land. We honor the lives of all who endured and continue to endure in the face of settler colonialism and white supremacy. Let's also take a moment to consider the legacy of colonization embedded within the technological structures, including the equipment and high-speed internet, which are not available in many indigenous communities. Even the technologies that are central to much of the art we make leave significant carbon footprints, contributing to changing climates that disproportionately affect indigenous and marginalized peoples worldwide. We invite you to join us in acknowledging all of this as well as our shared responsibility to make good use of this time. And for each of us to consider our roles in reconciliation and decolonization. Shibu, my name is Iye Chit and I go by Fei-Fair pronouns. And I wanted to start this morning with you all to do some breathing exercises. If you feel inclined to do this with me, please do so. If not, that's okay too. So let's start with just taking a deep breath in, holding and releasing. And let's do that one more time. Take a deep breath in and releasing and one last time. Take a deep breath in, holding and releasing. Thank you. Now that we're a bit more grounded, I wanted to share a Muscoboon song titled Swat Show, which is translated to English means good day. And the intention of this song is to check in on nature and Mother Earth, which I feel like as humans, we aren't prioritizing as much as we should. And I hope this song can be like a friendly reminder to do that more often. All right, so here we go. Swa-ba-ba shou-wa-ta-ka shou-si-wa-ta shou-shi-i-wei shou-shi-pa-ka shou-si-wa-ta shou-shi-i-wei shou-shi-pa-ka shou-i-cha-fi-ba-ga-a shou-pi-en-ching-ga. Thank you, everyone. You have been part of keeping my native tongue alive by just being here and holding space for me. So thank you. Thank you, Echa. Now I would like to go into the community agreements. So by participating in this digital community gathering, I agree to show up with full presence. I will recognize this as a brave space. Comfort is not an expectation in this space and transformation is all about discomfort. I will stay in my body. I will move, make facial gestures, use silence, and turn on my cameras to stay engaged. I will resist the urge to multitask. Parents and caregivers are essential to this space and all spaces. We will support you in taking care of yourselves and those around you as needed. Advocate for myself. I will speak in I statements. I have permission to speak in draft. My uncertainty will not be held against me. My emotions are safe and welcome. Exercise self-awareness. I will maintain awareness of natural or imposed power dynamics and imbalances. I will continue to recognize my own power, privilege, and authority. I will use chat as a means to add value to the activity rather than to, rather than distract from the activity. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Oh my gosh, thank you for the song and the breathing EHA. All of our participants and our community agreements. If you have any questions about our community agreements or you'd like to add to some, please put it in the chat and we can communicate with you and bring that up. Thank you so much. Well, it's 2021, my friends. We're almost done with it, but build from here, the digital meaning we created last year was to offer a space to connect and reinvent how we build when upholding existing structures is no longer an option. Today, we're bringing you build forward, advocacy, artistry, and adaptability, but how do we build forward? One year later, we're still living within a pandemic, wearing masks and being able asked to navigate a hybrid world of both online and in-person theater making. The human toll has caught up with me. So how are you doing? Are you sleeping? How is your heart? How is your ensemble? What's changed? What's still the same? In the wake of so much grief, loss, continued violence, here and around the world and healthcare inequities, resilience is code for keep going and pretend this is done so we can just all get back to normal. Let's move on from this messy, awkward, raw place we're in and just focus on theater making. I admit, there is a part of me that yearns for that familiar comfort. Am I, but am I even making space to grieve at all? The resistance to comfort is necessary and also just so exhausting. I just want to name that and that building forward is about naming what's true for us and recognizing that real long-term systemic change is a daily practice of putting one foot in front of the other and I am so grateful we can be on that path together. Today's sessions are designed under the theme advocacy. How do we demonstrate positive allyship that center the least heard narratives and bodies and where we choose to direct our attention? Today you'll hear from the newly formed Trans Advocacy Collective, a group which sprang from Fools' Fury's Ensemble Liberation Lab program, which we created to give emerging queer leaders resources in the space to investigate how to break the model. Stay tuned for tax presentation of what we need and their pivotal transgender theater research which is coming up this morning. After lunch, I'm also super excited for our discussion on Indigenous Digital Storytelling with Iye Che, whom you just heard from and Kenyan Sayers, roots in conversation with Nikki Martinez. So now let's hear from you. How are we doing? What are you advocating for? What are you advocating for? What is going on for you? How is it in your theater organization, your theater practice, your community? What are you advocating for? Put it in the chat. So thank you, think about that. I love that. And I really just appreciate that you're here and you've taken the time and the effort and the thought to be with us. We are gonna get into our next session. This is a really good time to take a water or a bathroom break. Please stretch, please stand. Do the things that feel comfortable for you in your body so that we don't stagnate and that we keep our ideas flowing in this community. Thank you so much and we'll be getting ready for our first session of the morning very soon. Hello and welcome. Hello, artists, activists, culture workers. Educators, theater professional. Friends, family, fans, ancestors, AI and other creatures. Take your time and your space, do what you need to do. The archers will begin soon. You can just listen to the sound of my voice. My name is Severin Blake. Pronouns, they, all, we. I'm a writer, artist and facilitator calling in from the unceded ancestral lands of the Lene Lenape, formerly known as Philadelphia. Welcome. It is an honor to art share with you. What is an art share? Well, well, well, I'm glad you asked. It's a love fest. An art share is an outpouring of innovative theatrical work by artists and ensemble as we learn, change and grow in adaptability. I had the great honor of representing my company, Applied Mechanics at the art share in 2020 in the first digital convening. The space was one of not knowing and uncertainty, but it was also a space of support and learning, learning about each other, learning about our privilege and positionality. It was also a space of unlearning about productivity, unlearning perfection and settler colonial authority. It was also a space of growing, growing to find comfort in discomfort and understanding that healing is not a destination, but a practice with each breath of the journey. A flash forward to 2021, when Deborah invited me to join the Fool's Fury curatorial team as a coordinator. The task, curate a cohort of 12 artists responding to the theme uprooted. Uprootedness in this context, included but was not limited to systemic inequities, giving rise to displacement and crisis such as shelter at home orders, which put so many careers on pause, digital isolation, financial housing and medical instability, upticks in mental health issues, our ongoing racial reckoning and the looming threat of climate crisis, such as fires and smoke pollution that destabilize both urban and urban wildland interface communities in California and beyond. The artists offerings were deep and multifaceted with an outpouring of creativity. We had over 30 applications to choose from. So we put together a team comprised of myself, Deborah, Vidu, Nicky, Yeo, Connor and Jesse. We created a rubric which included, how was the theme of uprootedness addressed? Are we lifting up marginalized and underrepresented voices? We also wanted a spectrum of artists with different points in their own artistic trajectory. And we also looked at ways in which people were using innovative methods of storytelling. We know that the ways of story, how is the story being told? People have different entry points to experiencing art, theater, life, story. And when the team gathered, we acknowledged that container was not perfect nor should it be. We got expansive, nitty gritty. We asked questions, we got into our feelings. We worked through our own resistance and came up with a cohort of 12 incredible pieces that we are so excited to share with you today and tomorrow. So you know, come back. We hope that you love these artists as much as we do and support their work in and beyond this digital space. Let us continue to build long lasting relationships as we continue the slow and sexy work of effective systemic change. May we connect, learn, laugh and relate. Now, just as we asked our artists in the meet and greet, we ask you to ponder two questions as you enter this art share space. One, how have I been uprooted? And two, what new seeds am I planting? Now that you have those answers or just those questions at heart and at breath, please engage with the first art share offerings. Rooting in the dark with Pepe Santamaria and plucked by Lady Charis, directed by Ricky Quintana. The shape of the sky above me is outlined by the crowns of trees, my kin. Family at this point is a mirror, a cradle for roots to hold each other, a web of interlacing patterns and expectations. My tree baby branches learning to reach, to see high above my greatest aspiration. The circle wraps their roots around mine, each tree in my family a spiraling outward of limbs, keeping me upright and anchored to the ground. Sudden, it was all so sudden, gripping, straining, allowed cracking of limbs sharply pulling me out of the grassy night. I was uprooted. The parts that kept me anchored, ruptured, become the point of pain, this arraigade. And one yank I am torn from my own limbs, soil slipping away from me fast, like sand through an open hand. Roots naked and raw, like having your nails torn out of their nail beds and feeling the air on your gaping wound for the first time. This pain has no end, it leaves you open, red and exposed. In the distance, people laugh, excited to break old grounds for new developments. But what about my dreams? Being uprooted means the web of connections gone silent, all at once. North yade, a nauseating disorientation distended from my normal direction. I am a dislocated shoulder, fallen out of the socket. Nothing left to hold me in place. The pain is throbbing and my thoughts are too, where is my kin? Where is my kin? All the time the air is sucking the moisture out of me and the life is leaving me behind. Where are you? My roots have no one to touch, no one to reach for me or hear me. There is no hope of a response. In the morning, a heavy rain comes down like soft plums crashing into puddles. I never felt the rain on my roots above ground before, never felt the plunking waters pool around me. A current comes, pushing me up against something cold, smooth, yet hard, it has no nature. This icy theme towers above me, what happened to my family? Once we are together, we'll be okay, right? Are they okay? The current picks up, it threatens to take me further south. I don't wanna go south, I wanna stay here. I wanna find my family. The current surges again. I push what is left of my roots down hard, swinging with all my strength to turn myself upright against the cold. I look around from up here, but all I see is muddy water flooding the destruction. All around me there is nothing, just brown water filling up empty holes, a perforated circle where we all used to live. Pieces of roots floating up on the surface are all that remains. The current comes up higher, she curls around my roots, coaxing me, go south, go south. This time I let go. At the end of the water, I feel the lightness of the water turn to sludge. Looking up, I see a circle surrounding me. Sharp greens pierce the emptiness in the air. Branches lifted high like brows look down at me. One reaches the roots to mine and asks, who are you? Why is your trunk that color? Where did you get that shape of your leaves? Where is your family? They're gone now. Something bad happened. Alarmed, the roots recoil. They act like I will bring the bad with me or that I carry it inside me. The wound in my roots cries out, I am not a danger, I am in danger, but they only pull further away. Another night approaches with no roots to hold. I look up at the night coming over me, but there is no canopy of kin. Only darkening skies full of stars. Their twinkling makes me cry. How can you laugh like that? How dare you dance at a time like this? A rage runs through me, rattling branches and leaves, twisting my trunk with agonies, even my roots are trembling. I wish I could rise up and pluck you from your perch on high. Would you dance here on this wet earth? I fling this heavy dirt up at them, but the mud flops back down. A single streak of light cuts across the stars. A shining teardrop falling in the sky, gone before it touched the horizon. It's sudden absence leaves a hole in the sky. Even stars fall from the heavens and cry. I'm sorry. I wish I could take it all back, unflop the mud and unstreak the sky. I feel my roots rise towards the sudden absence, a rhythmic rowing that carries me east. I let the wisdom within lead me to the edge of the forest. There is a clearing, an open space of midnight and obsidian silhouette made just for me. I come to it, ready to rest, tender roots digging into soft soil, a dark comfort melody, earth eager to hold me again, my very own blanket of peace, settling into sweet solitude. I know my roots have room to grow here. People, like plants, can be plucked from the places they are supposed to protrude from. Now, this piece be truth, the poetic proof of how the creative astute are often birthed from clipped roots. Plucked, then placed, in the foyer of some foreign place, displaced on a mantle in a vase. Where do your nutrients come from? When your future in soil to future soiled plucked day one, your wilted leaves are thirsting for morning dew, but you're in a new environment, ain't no dew for you. Your gasping, people are passing and life is flashing before your face, but you are stuck behind the glass in the foyer of some foreign place, displaced on a mantle in a vase. And you simply wait. Now, you see, people can be plucked from the places they are supposed to protrude from, but this piece be truth, the poetic proof of how the creative astute are often birthed from clipped roots. Now, plucked, new space, pandemic a foreign place displaced on a couch, no stage, and you wait. Where does your work come from? When your future in soil turns future soiled, pandemic day one, you're aching for some creative point of view, but in uncertain times, nothing's inspiring you when you're gasping and people are passing, life is flashing before your face with every rise in COVID case, pandemic a foreign place displaced on a couch, no stage, and you simply wait. Plants can be plucked from the places they are supposed to protrude from, but this piece be truth, the poetic proof of how the creative astute are often birthed from clipped roots. You see, plants and the foyer stand waiting for an open door, because all it takes is one sun ray, it's a brighter day in that foyer, who that foyer ain't dark anymore? With all the strength that they have in every single pore, they sprout root and begin to bloom, for even in gloom, they learn to light up a room and soon you outgrow the vase and be moved to a pot, and you will continue to grow, though the pot isn't hot, but listen outgrow the foyer, outgrow the pot, like outgrow the house, so you outgrow whatever it is that plucked you in the first place and they put you out. Side is where you were always meant to be and you were never a houseplant, so get back to being a willow tree. See if people are like plants, and this poem is true, then if you're a person who's been plucked, simply do as plants do.