 All right, thank you all so much. Wow, we did it. We got a bunch of people in the room. And for the IPC folks, we got a bunch of people in the room across the ocean, that's fun. So, I am Kevin Becerra. I use he and his pronouns. I work at Art Somerset in Boston, but in this context, I am a facilitator for the IPC. This, you're wondering, you're talking into a microphone, but you don't sound amplified, I'm not. We are recording this for archival purposes. We're not live streaming, but we are going to use the footage later. So, just a quick note that when we do speak, we'll be passing a microphone so that we can have quality audio for that recording, and then also these in the center will be picking up some ambient noise. So, I have a little bit of housekeeping, but I think because we don't have everyone forever, I'm gonna pass it over to my colleague, Colleen. Thank you. Welcome, welcome, welcome. First of all, we wanna thank you all for taking your time out from seeing all those amazing shows, and as soon as this is over with, we want you to go back in and see those amazing shows. We are so thrilled, the International Presenting Commons in Hallaround, to be co-hosting this discussion on strengthening the connections during turbulent times with our co-host, the International, the Edinburgh International Festival. And we are so thrilled to have with us, who will speak first, and then she has many things to go on to do, Nicola Benedetti, who is the festival director. This is her first festival. She's a series of firsts, her first festival. She is the first Scots to run the festival. She is the first woman to run the festival and the first artist. A violinist, since she was four years old, at eight years old, she commanded the British Youth Orchestra. She's had an incredible career. She continues to perform and tour around the world, so we are so honored, Nikki, to have you here with us. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much. It does feel strange speaking into a microphone. That's not amphibied. What's happened? It's such a pleasure to be here. It's so wonderful to see you and so lovely to see all of you and for us to be co-hosting the event. I love everything about the principles, but also the questions asked at this point around the turbulence of these times and how to strengthen ties and connection, especially when things are fragmented and a lot of things are more dispersed and disparate. So I guess it's useful just to explain a little bit about the thinking behind this year's festival. Some of it you can't miss with our massive big question. Where do we go from here that we're asking of everyone? But a lot of debate for us all internally over the last year or so has been looking at the very difficult push and pull balance between being a place where excellence in artistic presentation is not something that we will ever compromise on. And with that comes a huge amount of natural, sometimes restrictions or boundaries or it's kind of a tension that's constantly pulling you in a certain direction. It requires so much skill sets, so much professionalism, people that have spent their lives dedicated to knowing how to do a particular thing. All of that costs something. And I don't just mean infrastructure and money, it costs everybody, their internal being costs something to dedicate that much to such a high level of attainment. But equally, we're a festival that was born with extremely high ideals that speak to and are about and for people. When you're speaking about the human spirit, you're speaking about healing, you're speaking about reconciliation, you're speaking about breaking down boundaries, you're speaking about things that are non-hierarchical or breaking away from an us and them mentality and of course immediately post-Second World War that was as live and tangible as ever. You are, you must be speaking to everyone. You must be trying to speak to everyone. So those two things, they have a natural tension, so so much of our internal dialogue has been around how actually do we occupy a space that feels completely open-armed, completely welcoming, completely about community and that anyone is welcome in our spaces but that we're not then trying to say, okay, we're going to the things where the most people are occupying spaces within music, within presentation and because that is not going to be a Dvorak symphony. It's not like the entire world is sitting there listening to Dvorak symphony or, you know, so that's been a sort of a natural place of tension for us. So what we decided to do is this year, especially after the, we had a 75-year celebration last year and it was Fergus Linnahan's last year also and it was kind of the first outing post-pandemic that felt somewhat real, felt very real actually last year. This year, we decided to open that dialogue and question to absolutely everyone. So in every way we could possibly manifest, we've actually opened up the dialogue to the audience. Now, it's not obviously possible to manifest that in every space for every performance of which there are 300 over three weeks but there are lots of ways that we have started to try to do that. So part of it is how we communicate with the people that are coming to things. So through smaller, like not gifts, but smaller gestures, like sending a message that also has a podcast attached to it that has a little bit of information that feels a bit more sort of personally put together to just careful consideration as to how people are greeted and welcomed and increase in everything that encompasses our accessibility to the festival, breaking down any barriers that may be there that without the proper research and training, we're not actually aware of. So we've hired somebody full-time to look at that and has made an immediate impact, trialing different formats for how we present things. And that's been applied this year mostly to music but I think we'll sort of open that out more to all of the art forms from next year. Taking an example of the symphony orchestra, obviously being a pretty staid format of the whole orchestra on stage and rows of stall seats so that Usher Halls felt like a very different place for the last couple of days. We had, I don't know if any of you were there last night with all the beanbags around the orchestra. The audience and orchestra were as one, basically. And we also had big community events in the gardens over the weekend. On the Saturday we actually had 360 non-professional musicians of all ages from all over the country come together to create a piece of music of which they had all essentially composed and contributed to. So the idea that everyone is creative can participate and has something to say. They feel like the festival is far more theirs than others. So my dream would be that you have larger numbers than that to participating in the collective moment. And then they go and see the opening concert in the Usher Hall, which is a two hour long oratorio written by Tan Dunn. Like that for me, that encompasses that real natural but beautiful tension in what this festival, what is our kind of most honest home and honest place. And I just want to finish by saying that in trying to open up the conversation and having trust in people, it's always scary because the minute you permit everyone to be able to say more and to give more, there's something you're not gonna like for sure. And to both encourage a deeper human respect for one another to be constantly sort of reiterating in the soft powerways that the arts can that increased tolerance for an opinion that's so far away from yours. Actually the third invitation that we have of the three in this festival is called a perspective that's not one's own. And how much can we tolerate and enter into that perspective? But how can you create spaces that are increasingly tolerant but also spaces that are actually genuinely inviting and open, ones that you're not just play acting saying we want to hear from you and I want to feel where you're coming from but you actually mean it. And some of that may be being exposed to yeah, things that you don't like or find offensive. And so we're, but to trust in people and for the festival to know that we're not a machine and that yes, we're professional. It unbelievably professional. I just, I can say that because I'm this new. I'm like, so I'm saying it about the team. I'm not saying it about myself. I'm like, it's just amazing what I've kind of seen and interacted with and it's just, it's really mind boggling. But we're professional, but that does not mean that we're impersonal. It doesn't mean that we're not a collection of people that are just like other people. And I hope that we've started that sense of almost a shared, like it's like a shared communion between audience and artist alike and all of the staff that work at the festival that we're going, we're entering into something together with that sense of trust and exploration. So I hope that's helpful in some way to share, but it's just such a pleasure to have the chance to speak with you all. And I will stay and listen just for a wee bit and then I might just like sneak off, right? Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you, Nikki. That was fantastic. And it's wonderful that we're in this space and tonight we're all going to see Trojan women. So we're very thrilled and congratulations on your first year. It's my pleasure now to introduce our co-host of this event, Roy Luxford. Roy has been with the International Festival since 2007. He is the creative director. Now during that time, Roy's responsibility grows and grows and grows. And in addition to having expertly curated the festival in terms of theater and dance and other things, he also looks after the production of the festival. Previously, he was the executive director of Cheek by Jowl, the Michael Clark Company. He had Sadler's Wells, the Peacock Theater, general manager of DB8, physical theater, line producer for the first UK tour of Stomp. And he has been a dear friend and a colleague for many years. Roy Luxford. Thanks so much, Colleen. And welcome, everyone. It's great to see you here. Thank you so much. It's great to see you. I quite often just see you in a foyer, thrusting a ticket in your hand and going, go, get in before it starts. So it's actually quite nice to find a moment within a festival context to take a moment and to actually have this conversation. So thank you, Colleen. Thank you, Kevin, and all your colleagues for initiating this idea. And thank you for the introduction. But there is a huge team that actually delivers the International Festival. And my key colleague is Emma Hay here, who's the production manager. So some of you will know lots about us, and some of you won't know quite so much. So just to sketch in the essential details for you, the Edinburgh International Festival founded 1947. It was a moment post the Second World War, very much about international collaboration and this beautiful phrase, a platform for the flowering of the human spirit through arts and culture. It seems to remain as ever present as the day it was first coined. Of course, it's not just about the International Festival. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival was founded in the same year. Shona, welcome. Nice to see you today. We also have a film festival, a book festival. In recent years, an art festival has joined. So really the ecology in Edinburgh, in August, is about a series of cultural and artistic enterprises that make this the festival city. It's not just about August. We have colleagues. Mike, I can see you from the Lyceum and Linda from the Traverse, key producing theatres in the city who also host work during August. So the special quality about this time of year is this real meeting point between different art forms, between different makers, creators, companies, and I think what underpins everything for all of us is a spirit and an enterprise of internationalism and that is our bedrock. In terms of this year's programme for the International Festival, I will just take an opportunity to say we have over 300 events. We have 2,500 artists from some 50 countries. Our artists number about 800 from Scotland and as Nicky referenced, we had nigh on 450 amateur and youth music makers on the stages in Princess Street Gardens over the weekend for our opening celebration. And throughout the year, the International Festival has in this last year around 4,000 engagements across the communities in Edinburgh and we were through every council ward in the city. So it's not just about our August moment. It is very much about being part of the fabric of Edinburgh and playing our part in the civic society. As this year's provocation is where do we go from here? And I think the basis of the conversation this afternoon, just to put in some statistics around the festivals and speaking plurally, not just about ourselves, I think it's fair to say for all of us, we are fundamentally about artists and audiences and cultural experiences. That being said, a recently published impact study on the benefit of the Edinburgh festivals. The economic impact is 367 million pounds to the city or 33 pounds for every pound of subsidy. It creates 7,000 jobs in Edinburgh and approximately 8,000 jobs across the country. The annual audience of the Edinburgh festivals in terms of tickets is the equivalent to the men's football World Cup where second only to the Olympics in terms of a ticketed audience. And both of those two events I've just mentioned take place on a four-year cycle and they've never been in the city which has a resident population of half a million people. I'm not going to finish that sentence, I think that's exactly it. I'm just going to put out there a few challenges that may come up in the conversation and being deliberately brief so that everybody can join in. I think one of the major challenges in the UK, in the UK funding system, our model of subsidy is deteriorating. We're still all trying to work within this model. The key element is no longer a crucial and vital part of it, the actual grant in aid from our cultural organisations. There's a big question mark over leadership both in terms of government level and local government. The cultural infrastructure of this city, the festival city is well behind what that statement might suggest. There's COVID, we all will probably have similar challenges coming out of COVID. Coming out of COVID, the real impact of Brexit is upon us and particularly for artists who are touring from the UK into mainland Europe. And I think we were chatting at lunchtime and a skill shortage is definitely present amongst us all. And amongst that, I would just say a success story. The film festival that I mentioned, the longest continually running film festival in Edinburgh, the company went bankrupt just before Christmas. The international festival was one of the partners that stepped in to offer us an opportunity for the festival to continue. So with some great support from funders and other stakeholders, the international festival has this year added to its August program, a film festival, which will take place from the 18th to the 22nd. So I think amongst all of these challenges we face, there are solutions and there are opportunities to do things slightly differently. So keeping it very brief, welcome again, welcome to Edinburgh. Thank you for being here. Thanks Roy. I wonder, Colleen. Thank you Roy. We really appreciate your being here and I know Nikki had to sneak out but we very much appreciate the international festival co-hosting us. Colleen, before you give a little IPC context, would you mind introducing yourself? You know, I was going to do that. Also, I went, I introduced Nikki and people thought, who is that woman? I'm Colleen Jennings-Rogensack, Vice President of Cultural Affairs at Arizona State University and Executive Director of ASU Gammage. And what I'd like to do is ask all of our international presenting commons colleagues just to raise their hands so people have an idea who we are in the delegation. So please take time afterwards to meet and greet and talk to our fellow colleagues. The IPC began at a time during the pandemic when we said, wait a second, what are we doing to continue to support the exchange of international artists? So it was a gathering of presenters, independent producers, directors to talk about what are we doing? What issues are we facing? What has been our history in terms of American presenting and internationalism? We did that through a series of streamed productions through HowlRound TV and it was so wonderful that the team from HowlRound, could you just raise your hand, everyone from HowlRound? Thank you, both of them. Thank you, Abigail. Helped us to convene and have these discussions and then have them streamed out. We were able to do our first live stream out, went under the radar in New York City and then we met at the Hamburg, the Summerfest in Hamburg, Germany. Since then, we've also had gatherings in Chile and in the Netherlands and this then marks our third international. We are indeed looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say, how we can learn together, listen together and move forward together and it's more than just talk. We wanna be able to have some doable actions coming out of this. I'm gonna keep it that short, Kevin. I love it, I love it so much. Our colleague, Mary Louie Lesky, says, how do we move from a think tank to a do tank? And so that's always kind of the question the IPC is asking itself. It's great, we love hearing and learning and also thinking towards, okay, so how is tomorrow a little different from today after we've heard and learned? Okay, so some quick things for the room. We go two hours, we go until four o'clock. Afterwards, we'll convene in the bar for a glass of wine. So because it's a very brief time, we won't be taking any breaks. So if you need to take a break, stretch your legs, run to the restroom, please, by all means, run a beautiful circle, take care of yourself. And we'll be passing the mics around as people have things to share. Just ask that when you do get the mic, introduce yourself. We won't be taking the time today, unfortunately, to go around and hear everyone's name and context but just a quick introduction when you have been to share would be great. I would also add that if you are sharing context of the work that you do when you are answering a question or sharing a reflection, perhaps not the whole bio or mission statement of the organization, just like a quick, here's what we do. I will also add that Colleen and I, in the spirit of moving through the conversation, may redirect or lovingly and respectfully interrupt at some point. I think it's important to acknowledge that our work is very nuanced and different, of course, the challenges we face are nuanced and different, and also we are in many similar, we're in a similar storm, but in different boats, right? And so I think there are times when we're gonna really be with you. And so we may say, we hear you, we understand and we're gonna continue forward. So just putting that out there. And just making sure I'm not missing anything. Oh, yeah, to give you a kind of sense of scaffolding, we're gonna start with some questions that are pretty local and specific to our individual experiences. We're gonna be listening for some larger themes and then we're gonna see where the kind of big connections are and then to put my wonderful colleague from Emerson on the spot, David House will end with some reflection on what he's heard in the conversation. I hope he got that text message where I told him that he would be doing that. Maybe he didn't, we're all living here in the moment. So I'm gonna pass it over to Roy to talk about a little bit of kind of given circumstances for our conversation. Okay, so we don't get too bogged down in the things that we all know that are ever present. We really want to have a conversation about possible solutions, enterprising ideas. What is this way forward? Indeed, where do we go from here? So we could easily get into a very deep conversation about budgets and the lack of finance. But I think the conversation really is about how do we find ways of financing our projects? How do we keep the doors open, artists nourished and work created? If anybody wants to shout out any other things that we shouldn't get too involved with, we're good? Okay, I'm actually gonna interrupt just quickly. So you gave a great, quick look at the funding structure in the UK. And I wonder to speak other funding structure given circumstances, if we could just hear quickly from my colleague Mara Isaacs here about a kind of snapshot of the US funding structure and some of those challenges for folks in the room who may not be familiar. I'll try to do this quickly. So I'm Mara Isaacs. I'm an independent producer working both in kind of big Broadway commercial sector, also independent contemporary performance and touring shows to festivals, et cetera. Previously I spent over 20 years working in large US not-for-profit producing theaters. So when you say funding structure, I'm like, okay, well that's a funding structure and that's a funding structure and that's a funding structure. So very quickly I will just say the not-for-profit institutions are reliant on a combination of contributed and earned income. More and more the earned income is driving the budgets of these organizations and they really are reliant on ticket income for balancing the budget. Government subsidy is symbolic in our country. It's not substantive and the subsidized contributions are generally coming from individual donors, largely high net worth individuals whose funding priorities and WIMS vary frequently depending on what is happening. The commercial sector is commercial. I don't think we'll spend a lot of time on that. That's my snapshot. It's beautiful. It's incredible. Okay. So right now we know we are all in a challenging time, sociologically, politically, financially. But we're all here at the festival. Somehow through this we would love to hear from each of you what specific challenge you are facing and how you're innovating and be very specific. Do it in the framework of your work and whether it's presenting, producing festivals. And I will be very transparent. I will be seeking a Scottish answer. I will be seeking a non-Scottish answer. And so I'd like for us to like share and do that. And I might call on Shauna because she's in my eyesight. Wow. Such big questions. And I feel like I've already been on this treadmill for 10 days. I'm Shauna and I'm the chief executive at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, which is the charitable organization that kind of glues the fringe together but doesn't program or curate the work of the fringe. The Fringe this year, we've got 3,500 shows happening in this city right now. There's going to be 50,000 performances of them. We've got 1,200 street performers. We've got 17 country showcases. It's phenomenal. And the big challenges I guess are the mantra of the Edinburgh Fringe is to give anyone a stage and everyone a seat. It's really easy for us to say. It's a lot harder to deliver. And it's dependent on the whole fringe community being part of that kind of collective vision. And the fringe was really founded on that principle of inclusivity and access. It's a platform for creative freedom of expression. So it doesn't matter if you're a student at the start of your game or if you're Judy Dench, who's at the fringe this year. It has that whole spectrum and it's a real leveler. The big challenges for us, I think, are how do you keep that kind of sense of inclusivity? On one hand, our levers, our registration at the fringe has been frozen for 16 years now. The average price of a ticket is still around 12 pounds. Neither our audience or our artists will tolerate an increase in those costs. But on the other side, everything has entirely hiked up. So how do you kind of keep removing barriers to access? Some of the practical things that we've done is in the last few years, we've started to call on some of the incredible alumni who have come through the fringe. So you'll have noticed Phoebe Waller-Bridge is our honorary president because Fleabag was such a success story through the fringe. Phoebe gave 50,000 pounds into a pot this year. We matched it through other donors to give out quite simply 52,000 pound bursaries to artists. It sounds like a really small thing to do, but we had 677 applications for those 50 bursaries. But the response that we are getting, I have two emails in my inbox this morning from artists who got that 2K bursary and it made the absolute fundamental difference to whether they could come to this festival or not. So it's kind of, I mean, it seems like a small thing, it seems tiny, but it's kind of massive. Other things around access and inclusion, we partnered over the last three years with Deaf Action. Last year was the first ever Deaf Festival within the fringe. This year it is extraordinary. I went to see a show the other evening with Elf Lyons, the comedian, who's been working for the last year with a deaf artist. The show was speech, it was mime, and it was BSL, but the audience was a total combination of both hearing and the deaf community. And everybody was just laughing together. And it kind of, to me, that was like a model of integration that doesn't mean disabled people have to have something separate over here. It's just exactly how it should be kind of normalized. Got big challenges, all of us, and we talk about this a lot, the International Festival and ourselves, about the urgency of climate action, how do we continue to be these amazing international events, and the fringe has 72 countries represented on our stages this year. How do we maintain that internationalism whilst also stop our planet from burning? And again, a lot of things we're doing around that, our team don't really travel anymore if we don't have to. We are carbon neutral ourselves as an organization now. Because of that, we use digital technology as much as we possibly can. But even that, we're trying to make sure, is digital really? The answer are all those massive servers out in San Francisco or somewhere, actually contributing as much to carbon as reduction of print. So we've reduced the print run of the printer program by 50% this year. We have a really clear plan with targets year on year from now until 2030 for what we can do. And I think that's probably one of the biggest things is we've set out this sort of series of targets across all of our big challenges, and we've given ourselves a timeline through which to deliver them. Happy to circulate that kind of, our sustainable development goals after this. Thank you, Shona. No, thank you, that was just fantastic. Someone else? Yes, please, Emma. Hi, I'm Emma from the International Festival. I will sort of follow on on the climate subject and give you an example of a project that's actually happening right now. We're presenting, as hopefully you've seen and got your ticket for, the right of spring next week, Peanut Bouches Choreography with Le Co de Sable. And if you're familiar with the work, you know that there's 30 performers from across 14 different African nations that are part of this. When they tour, they rehearse for two weeks at a time before they present the work. So in order to think about how we can more sustainably present this work, which has sort of carbon but also economic implications, usually the company, they all travel to Senegal and rehearse there. So we brought them all to the UK first. So they have two weeks of rehearsal and switch. So there's 50 flights that are not happening to Senegal because they're traveling straight to the UK. So a kind of a drop in the ocean, but it's something. And then because the dates aligned with the presentation next week and their two weeks in Ipswich, 13 of them were also able to travel earlier in July. They came up to Edinburgh and we had a week of artistic development practice, which we did in partnership with the British Council and Dance Base. So we had 24 artists, 12th from the visiting company and 12th from here, sharing and exchanging in an entirely sort of democratic space where there were no outcomes required. But artists do what artists do and they created a 40 minute piece of work to share within that week. So actually instead of what would have been a five day presentation engagement, there's four weeks for 13 of those company members within the UK that's having economic benefit within Ipswich, but also in Edinburgh and also giving them sort of an opportunity to be in different parts of the UK. So it's not the only solution, but it's how you can just use your, just think slightly differently about what the project needs to actually happen and how you can affect that. Great, thank you. All right, who's next? Please. Hi everyone, I'm Tom Creed. Speaking as if I'm speaking into a microphone, but I need to use my big voice. I'm Tom Creed, I'm a stage director working in theatre and opera based in Ireland, Dublin, and a some time festival director, but not right now, and a board member of Culture Ireland. And we're supporting 11 shows this year at The Fringe, including two shows at The Traverse, as well as Lancome at the EIF and events at The Book Festival. And we, on the one hand, it sometimes seems in these contexts that like Ireland is some kind of utopia of unicorns where like the funding went up during the pandemic. We've introduced a pilot basic income scheme for 2000 artists. We're heading into the second year of that. And so there's more money for, the arts council have the biggest budget they've ever had, Culture Ireland, which supports Irish culture abroad has the biggest budget. It's not a lot of money by the standards of other European countries. But I think there are some of the things, particularly in this context where we're talking about international exchange and presentation, is that the two, our two main markets are the places, two of the places which are really in crisis, so the UK and North America. And so in a way, we're having to, you know, they're also English speaking countries. So those are naturally, they're both diasporic countries and also English speaking countries. So those are naturally the places where Irish artists and Irish productions would gravitate. And while that is still happening, to some extent there's a kind of urgency to find new presenting opportunities and new collaborations. And, you know, to kind of build on the fact that we are now the only English speaking country in the EU or the only English is our first language, I should say. So I think that's a particular challenge. I think the other particular challenge is kind of how to kind of fully commit to a sustainability agenda, particularly around international travel when we're in Ireland. It's, you know, I had an exchange yesterday on Facebook with a European person who's working in kind of cultural sustainability, kind of having a go at me for flying to Edinburgh and kind of going, you know, how long is the ferry? And I went, well, it's 10 hours with the train and the bus. And if you're doing a short trip and actually we don't have the luxury of being able to hop on a train between Paris and Berlin or a night train. And so how as, you know, with these two particular circumstances, one around our two main markets and also around being in Ireland, how do we continue to work internationally and grow internationally and also allow our international colleagues to benefit from the increases in funding, both to create work and tour work that's happening in Ireland, but while being able to be sustainable and finding new places to do it. So I think that's maybe a snapshot of where we are in Ireland right now. That's it, I'm going home to the airport. Thanks so much, Tom. I'm Mary Lulewski. I am the executive director of the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College. And I want to pick up on this story of our diasporic communities. You know, 2020 was the first time that IPC came together and in 2020 we were feeling the pressures of a crisis. And since then we've lost some of our most prolific international presenters in the United States. You're right, we are part of the crisis. We've lost under the radar, we lost BAM New Wave Festival. And as a result, have fewer and fewer international artists on our shores. I was very jealous to hear that you have 50 countries represented in the international festival. I wonder if we have 50 countries represented in our presenting community in the U.S. right now. So with that said, and we're here at a place where the investment was in the flowering of the human spirit post-World War II, I'd love to hear from our U.S. Counsel General on what you're seeing in the Diplomatic Corps, how, what good news is there out there or practices that we might be able to collaborate with others on and where do we find ways to overcome these barriers and not be in isolationist country? Sure, thanks very much. Hello everyone, as you mentioned, I'm Jack Hilmar. I'm the U.S. Counsel General here in Edinburgh. I feel like an interlooper into your artistic community here. But I'm very jealous of this, one of my secret secrets that I keep within me as I go around being a diplomat for the past 20 years that I was an acting major in college at first. So I learned how to project my voice a long time ago. I don't need this microphone, but no, thanks very much for that, but I'm afraid I don't have great news for you because as you say, the topic of this is during turbulent times. And obviously we are living through turbulent times. Many of you know about our own country in America and living in the United Kingdom. There's this similar, I guess you could say, splitting the divergence within our societies. And it's reflected in so many different ways and I think it's reflected in this as well. I've been discussing with many people that every country is different and how they perceive the different challenges and specifically what the government is in charge of. And in the United States, I think it'd be fair to say that we don't consider the government to be the one that it's in charge of culture. While other countries do a lot more in investing in those, and you mentioned Ireland, and Ireland is one of the great examples, especially here since I've been in Edinburgh, that the Irish government is very much involved in making sure that Irish artists are represented very well. We have a small consular corps here in Edinburgh. There's about 18 of us professional consulates. And I think it'd be fair to say that some are more involved. The Irish consulate's very much involved every year. The French consulate's involved. I know this year the Korean, South Koreans are very much involved. But other countries, and as we all know, the United States isn't as much involved. We have done some small grants to the Edinburgh International Festival. We've done grants to others, but we don't have an overarching, I guess general philosophy. It's one that comes more at the local level. So for us, and to get into brass tacks here, cultural funding within a US embassy is handled at the ambassadorial level. So it's basically within an embassy. And it can really go, as you mentioned, the whims, not only the whims of an individual, but the whims of a policy. So we all know the current administration. The current administration is willing to fund a lot of things and has certain perspectives that a past administration or a future administration most likely would not. Those of you who are more of an expert on the national endowment for the arts than I am, but obviously they follow very similar models. But I think just being here in Edinburgh, and one of my jobs is to advertise and to promote all of this, we'll be talking about the value of this international exchange. I'm very proud, I tell everybody how the Edinburgh International Festival was founded by a guy that then went to America, Rudolph Bing. So we're very proud of that. And I also noticed that in the same year or about the same time was when a very farsighted senator in America created the Fulbright program for international educational exchange. And that was based on the same concept. And I was just reading some quotes before he came here, some very farsighted thoughts out of an American politician saying we cannot be an isolationist, we have to explore the world, we have to be willing to listen to the people we absolutely disagree with. Sometimes we've done that better than others, and I hope through part of these conversations we will continue to do that even better. So thanks very much for the invitation. Thank you. Hello everyone, thanks for having me. My name's Fenella Dornie, I'm here representing the Javad Alipoor company. We're based in Manchester, we're a theater company who do quite a lot of political work but also have work that's very rooted in a non-Eurocentric viewpoint and bringing in lots of international collaborations in each of our projects. I think jumping off from what Emma was saying earlier about that challenge around sustainability, that's something that we're looking at really deeply as a company that while trying to diversify its income, international touring and that international relationships are really, really important for us. So thinking really deeply about how we can not just tour just for a week, but actually make those tours last longer so that we're reducing our environmental impact, but also able to maximize those relationships while we're there. So we think really hard about the wraparound activity that we have with shows when we're presenting, how we can do lots of workshops. We're going to UMS in November, where we'll be doing lots of workshops, we'll be doing lots of talks afterwards. So we're working really closely together with UMS in Michigan about how we can really maximize that time when we're there and be able to add value to what they need from us as much as what we want to commit to them. So yeah, that's something that we're thinking about again in terms of sustainability, we're also working with a sustainability consultant to really try and embed those values in our company, but we're also thinking about how we can share our work beyond touring in ways that may be more innovative in ways that may go beyond just digital sharing as well, because as we talked about before, we don't know what the footprint of that is right now. So thinking about how can we reach our audiences and reach our international partners in new ways that maybe won't be so physical, but might be more in digital space without just showing films or something of shows. So yeah. Sorry, Ali. The subject of my topic is fighting over land grabbing. Hello, I'm Linda Crooks, the Traverse Theatre and I'm proud that we've also got Gervad as part of a brilliant programme, I'd say Mrs. Smith, myself. What I wanted to reflect was just going back to when the pandemic hit. The Traverse had a show, Mouthpiece, which was on at the Auckland Festival. I got a call, I just had an operation, I was lying in a darkened room and I got a frightened call from the artist saying, get me out of Auckland. Little did we know at that point, it was the safest place on the planet. I was reflecting on this the other day there and the Auckland Festival obviously were in crisis because they were having to close down very, very quickly, but they covered their commitment to us financially. The moral of this tale is actually about kindness, leaning in to listen, seriously listen and be kind to one another. Sometimes the Traverse can feel like South Korea, we're surrounded by lots of superpowers and the important thing is that this is a tiny company, there's only 25 of us who run the company year round and we've got a world-beating brand. We need to work together and we need to collaborate in a meaningful way if we're going to have any chance of getting out of what is an ongoing crisis. It's not going to get easier. And again, changing the language in this country, Mike and I are working on a project, and I see him with other producing theatres, trying to find different ways to do things and the biggest problem we're fighting is the resistance to change within the community. And that's bloody ironic as a creative industry that was so uncreative when it comes to evolving. So that's my speech over. I'm now like you speak, Ellie. Dear, how do you follow Linda? My name's Ali Robertson. I'm representing Akashadetra Company. Akashadetra is a British South Asian dancer and choreographer who presented works in the International Festival last year and also in Imaginate recently. I was going to echo Vanilla's point about international being important and link it with your point about an increased reliance upon earned income. The same is true in the UK. And I think it's good why we can only react to the decrease in funding by doing less and using our funding just to sustain our core, which is a deathly trap to fall into, or by doing more. So for us, international is very important. I hear very strongly what you say about trying to extend trips. A problem to which I don't have the answer, but which has kicked in since COVID is that everyone's programming horizons are all over the place. We recently got programmed three weeks from the confirmation to the playing in Abu Dhabi. And in the same week, I talked to somebody who said we're full until 2027. Now, this is always a factor and of course, presenters have their own context and they have to make their own decisions about programming horizons. But since COVID, it's never been as... there's never been as much of a gamut and I find it increasingly difficult to line up those tours in a meaningful way. That is particularly the case because sadly, air travel doesn't cost that much compared to everything else. What Tom said, I hear, there would have been a financial massive cost to you to take the train and the boat and the 10-hour trip. So we find ourselves in the terrible Hobson's Choice position of very often going, it's actually going to be really cheap to go out and do one week and then go out and do another week, six months later. I don't have a solution, but I think that with the networks around the world can recover better so that presenters can work in harmony to present pieces for sustainability and selfishly for earned income reasons. Thank you. I am Michelle Witte. I'm the Executive and Artistic Director of the MINI Center for the Performing Arts City of Washington in Seattle. And one of our big challenges has been, or in my thinking, has been how do we continue to renew our artistic programming from many diverse perspectives over time and ensure our relevancy. And at the same time continue to empower and support artists. And so any one individual who's doing artistic programming is going to be programming from that perspective. And so we have launched an artistic partner program and our first partner this last year was Bill T. Jones. And next year will be Mark Bermuthi Joseph who's the Director of Social Impact at the Kennedy Center. And one of the great outcomes around international touring, which was not something that we could have anticipated and of course this work is you just launch into the unknown whenever you start to partner with a new artist, is that we developed an institutional partnership through that partnership. We were able to bring Robin Orlan who's a South African choreographer who introduced for the first time we brought a work to the U.S. and brought an actor to the U.S. Albert Kosé who was able to then win a Bessie Award. His first Bessie Award. And so it was something that by taking a chance to be able to activate programming that institutions would not necessarily choose or note to choose on their own we were able to activate a partnership which was really really useful and will be an ongoing partnership for the performing arts and I know of course that's happening here at the Edinburgh Festival as well and it's really exciting work and artists are in crisis and this is an important way that we can not only support artists but also raise the visibility for work that people don't know about by connecting them to names like Nicola Benedetti and others who do have that visibility. So that was a challenge and I'm really excited about this new direction that we've been taking. Hi everyone. Jennifer Harrison Newman from Yale Schwarzman Center great to be here. I want to just lift up a couple things that I've heard with thankfully to Cultural Island we are presenting to artists from Ireland at the beginning of our season we're entering our second season only in live performances though I've been involved with the organization now for five years we were slow to open due to the pandemic so it's exciting to finally be doing live performances but to say that we're starting quite small so thank you I'm so glad we have your artists with us I think that one way I've been working collectively, regionally with other organizations to try and support artists, local artists mostly presenting and working alongside sort of my regional partners to sort of mitigate I guess travel and to mitigate those kinds of things internationally working with lead artists to curate for us as well over long periods of time so bringing up artists that might not have been known before but from the artist perspective I think it's another model we're working with as well so I think I'm sort of just underlining a lot of things I've heard already from the rooms particularly as ways of working and I think international collaboration commissioning co-commissioning will certainly be something we're interested in and how to sort of build sustainable models I'm very much interested in helping artists sustain and what does it mean to have equitable agreements and equitable contracts and as we're a new organization something that's on my mind a lot is how to build from the ground up equitable processes that are embedded in our way of working and Roy's going to respond to that thank you two minutes just connecting with those couple of comments from a festivals perspective those cultural agencies that are the strongest so it is Ireland it's probably Canada and the Quebecies it's probably the French we'll start to have a very out of proportion perhaps representation in programs because they are still well resourced thankfully and they are committed thankfully but there is from a festivals position it feels that there is an increasing pressure to look to artists from those territories which are very strong in this regard at the expense of other areas of the world who perhaps don't come with that support so that's just something we are witnessing and then in terms of sustainability Emma gave a great example but we're also developing residencies by having two or three of our orchestras being resident for three or four performances in each festival edition and in fact in this year we have three resident theatre companies so Jekka has brought us Jeff Sobell's wonderful food which is in the studio just behind us we have NTS and their production of Throne with Linda at the Traverse and thank you Linda did I thank you Linda thank you and also and we must come back to punch drunk at the end of this afternoon but we have punch drunk enrichments a fantastic Lost Lending Library up at the Churchill Theatre which plays to a younger audience which is also here for the duration of the festival so I think we're embracing those longer runs but then that does also mean there's perhaps less opportunity for other importations so we're always just being mindful of one choice impacting another choice as we go thank you Ronnie hi everyone, Ronnie Pinoy I'm director of artistic programming for Arts Emerson in what is known in the US as Boston Massachusetts it's so funny I was about to go down a similar path Roy to your previous comment but more broadly what I'll say is that all of the changes that are happening I'll speak more to the American context because it's my own because the landscape is shifting so much what I'm finding in my work at Arts Emerson with my colleague David is the sense of who you're accountable to has really become more apparent so not only are we thinking about being accountable to audiences in Boston and to Emerson College and to the artists that we work with but also thinking about for the landscape in the US if we don't present a certain role in international artists and international work is a huge part of our focus where is that artist and where is that story going to be told and how is that affecting American isolationism if there's not so many places for those artists to go so we may have a certain set of priorities but I'm finding so much more now a sense of responsibility to even if we're not able to move forward on something having a different kind of relationship to colleagues but you really should be taking a look at this and I'll also just add that as a step in the direction of taking some action in a certain direction is that we've made a commitment in terms of our international work to present projects that need at least one and ideally two additional partners in order for us to move forward and part of that is about carbon footprint but a lot of that too is about really ensuring the kind of partnership of bringing something to life and trying on our end to take some of the steps that independent producers and artists have been doing on their own for a long time Thank you. I'm going to hand this over to Mike Alden and I'm going to ask him to talk about his challenge since we've discussed this previously. Hi I'm Michael Alden. I'm an independent theater and film producer from LA. I've spent many decades in New York and I'm back in Southern California living in the desert which I love. Pre-COVID I started to notice the decline in the United States just the American voice as far as new plays and new play opportunities to get those pieces out in front of the public. It became more and more expensive, more and more challenging more and more dependent on star marquee value than on content and so I started working on a program that I call Streamline Theater Works and started talking to authors about the idea of digitally capturing your play, optioning it as I would to take it to Broadway creating a stage experience but using the digital capture as the calling card. One of the prerequisites that I wanted to focus on and so far been successful is to have that program work with universities that have master fine arts degrees so that I could start working with kids in film, theater, television dramaturgy, directing acting and getting them to work together because in the states the school experiences that I've had is all of those departments are buying for the same donor dollar so they're really not working together and if we can create a consortium of students who were raised with cell phones who were making movies since they were five years old to creatively bring to life a new play we can also attract that marquee value name because we're asking them to commit two, three, four weeks of their time, not two, three years and so I've done one musical thus far it was a 24 person musical it's Christmas it's called Estella it started 24 Broadway stars and the $16 million Broadway budget was $750,000 and the play got picked up by MTI and it's available internationally and I'm looking to Linda's point as far as coming up with things that are new on the challenging side Equity refused to work with me they said that my attempt was to cannibalize their membership I ended up going to the screen Actors Guild Ultra Low and the thing that was most disappointing for me and my communication with Equity is that our program is called the PI program and so our 24 actors will get a check every time the play is done no matter who does it and that will happen in perpetuity the authors gave us the rights forever oh, oh, oh well, you know that's a minor, I mean it's a minor experience for me but I have been this is my third festival I love being here pre-COVID I have seen three plays that were written by two artists and have come to them in my court of like Americana commercial way saying this has got to go someplace else and there seems to be a hesitancy to move the project forward in the world of commercialism and I'm not sure if I'm not communicating it correctly but I sort of have three authors say yeah, that's going to be great and we're like in our fourth year of saying yeah, it's going to be great but it's not moving forward because I'm just at the effect of it I don't know where the concern comes from from the artist's point of view Hi, I'm Pamela Walker I work for Imaginate who run the Edinburgh International Children's Festival as well as a variety of stuff across Scotland and internationally throughout the year my point isn't falling on from your point sorry, it was a point just this is a thing that we've been talking about within Imaginate for a very long time but more so in the last year one of our main ambitions is to enrich children's lives and essentially all of the work that we do we hope will enrich their lives and currently we have noticed not necessarily since Covid but Covid was a huge part of it but since the cost of living crisis in Scotland and the UK and also because of the recognition of our government UK and Scotland at times not necessarily always in Scotland about the value of arts and cultures in school and for children and with children and it's one of the things that we have continuously been looking at over the last couple of months about how, because we have a massive crisis in Scotland about teachers and schools being allowed to prioritise culture and I'm sure that's not just a problem in Scotland and one of the issues that we're foreseeing in the future which is already happening is the artists that will be in our stage the people who will work in our theatres the people who will be part of our productions the voice of the people who will make work and the representation on stage will not be the general public they will be quite wealthy middle class if not upper class families from that background because they're not getting that support for arts and cultures in school I'm coming with the challenge I mean we are continuously looking at how we challenge that within the government challenge that within the arts and culture in Scotland but I think that there is a massive probably international problem in this and I actually think it would be great to have continual conversations about value because not just about financial value but the value of arts and cultures for our children because obviously we want to continue to have a variety of voices on our stages and actually I think that will not continue if the value within school does not come back so that was one thing also I just wanted to talk about something that happens in Scotland quite often and actually we presented a work this year that was actually from Spain but it's about adaption of work so we have a very brilliant company in Scotland called Barolambali who adapted a work called I think the original work was Tiger which was for adults they then changed I'm trying to remember that's terrible I'm trying to remember the version that they did for children Tiger I am Tiger no anyway they did a version for ASN children additional special needs children called Playful Tiger and that now tours as a model where it's three versions so it's a version for adults a version for children from a general sort of schooling and ASN children and this model seems to be starting to replicate across the world and I think it's a really really good and clever model we did it recently at our festival with Animal Religion which is a company from Catalan we did one other show half of the week and then the second half of the week was a version an ASN version of that show that was specifically for children with additional needs and it really worked and we had them the whole ten days and it kind of worked in our carbon area of what we're looking at but it also worked in our bringing work to different children so yeah hello my name is Liam Rees I'm an independent artist specializing in international work I wanted to pick up off Michael's point there because the work that I've been doing since the pandemic has been largely digitally influenced as someone on the cusp of being Gen Z slash Melinda I don't know which one it counts as I don't particularly care but phones and digital media are part of our lives it's just part of everyday life but I've noticed it's not in the theatre we make it's almost like we've gone no that doesn't exist because we don't really know how to deal with the fact that that necessitates new stories and new ways of telling stories and the model you're talking about there it's really interesting and a model that I was using was working with artists in India we would meet on zoom once twice a week and we were able to work over six months because we weren't bound by having to be in a rehearsal room and having to create in a specific time period so actually digital work and hybrid work can open up new stories and it means that I think there's a tendency to think that theatre is a one specific thing when actually what this allowed us to do was we had two shows happening simultaneously in two different countries at the same time and people were saying this is unlike anything we've done before this isn't theatre but it is because it's people connecting it didn't mean that they had to be in the same room and I think that one of the things that I would encourage you all to think about is all these challenges you have of saying we need to make work that is climate conscious we need to make work that engages with young people we need to make work that insert whichever priority you have let the artists know what those parameters are and they will be creative they will come up with solutions that you have not thought about because that is their entire job to be creative and I've seen it coming out I've seen it in Javad's work it's incredible I've seen it in some of the work that is programmed by the Travers but the digital world is part of our lives it's going to be part of the future it's not part of the future it's part of the present so let's embrace it Hi my name is Chris and I am representing two people today on the one hand I'm representing not me I'm representing Simeb Bhamrah of our physical which is an NPO here in the United Kingdom and for those of you who don't know Simeb Bhamrah is quite he's quite extraordinary he creates he's looking to prioritize one of a very few number of theater companies in the United Kingdom whose mission is to promote the Asian diaspora and alongside the BFI runs as the creative producer for the UK Asia Film Festival which is the largest film festival of its kind promoting Asian arts on top of that Simeb is a multi hyphen creative and I'm not sure if I should be saying this but he's just been confirmed to have a western transfer of his musical Bombay superstar which features a lot of people from the Indian diaspora his stuff is very important so that's on the one hand who I'm representing but I'm also representing me and I'm speaking from a different perspective from a lot of people here so there's a question of ecology at play here and I thought what I wanted to add today was a small view into what I am seeing from my own perspective as well as what I'm seeing from other people as an artist so Simeb is my producer for a piece where we're doing a show at the Underbelly Calgate I was in the original Western cast of Frozen and I left it last September to go put on this piece the trends that you're all speaking about now about the move away from subsidized funding as a viable model to enable our artistry is very much felt by myself and up until a few months ago we were enabled by a charitable donation by an extremely high net worth individual and unfortunately needed to pull out of funding us about four months ago so our choices were very simple right we could either quit continue or pause we chose to continue but that meant that we couldn't pay we couldn't pay anybody properly and I wanted to pick up on the point made by my colleague here I'm so sorry I forgot your name Pamela which was very well made which is this idea that the fringe is such a large thing now it will continue it will continue to grow the thing that happens though if there aren't other funding things available to us is that the diversity of the artists available will stop I know and I've spoken with all of the other artists that I'm speaking with now they are they're echoing the same thing which is that if at any other point because of these rising costs they would not be able to create art in this way I've been enabled by a whole bunch of people especially my team who haven't been paid properly I myself haven't been paid properly we have small funding things like this this Edinburgh keep it fringe fund but what it what it does require is that artists now need to innovate as my esteemed colleague was speaking about before and what we've needed to do and we've put enormous amount of effort into it is we've started taking bites out of the pies normally reserved by funding specialist producers so now we are learning we are needing to learn we're needing to invest in how do we approach how do we approach and and curate the relationships of funding specialist producers from starting from zero without funding without without training without understanding anything without any formal understanding of the systems what so ever how do we how do we cobble together an understanding of the industry that is large enough now from that I've needed to learn a few things the first of which is that Samir's company gained NPO status in the last cycle which is kind of extraordinary in the United Kingdom because a vast majority of many many NPO organizations lost their status NPO status means that you get generally a very very brief outline funding for three years in that in that context the UK government chose not to increase their funding pool in line with inflation which is tantamount to a 10 to 11 percent reduction in overall funding across the United Kingdom on top of that we have more and more funding being removed from London based pools which is where the majority of UK based artists are apologies for regional experts here which means that there are more hungry mouths for less money in targeted centers for art which have been sustained for decades upon decades so what is left what's left is a lot of people myself included looking at simply quitting like tardigrades like other animals like you know drought stricken frogs will go underground and over time as Pamela mentioned what will replace us is middle class people people who have privilege people have the money to fund themselves people who have the capacity to reach into their pockets and pay 40,000 pounds to run an edge fringe run and then you will lose out on the wonderful experiences and the curated art the dedication of decades and decades upon artistry the investment of time and humanity in heart which creates good art so the question really isn't will the edge fringe or any other fringe ecology continue the question is what shape do you want it to be in as it continues to grow I'm David House I'm the Vice President of the Office of the Arts at Emerson College and Executive Director of Arts Emerson my colleague Vrani and a couple of first of all Chris thank you for that passionate and very compelling case around the inequities that exist in the system it was named earlier when we talk about the haves and have nots the companies for whom we're grateful with the great resources are actually driving in many ways the shape of our future and you're speaking very passionately about the inequities in the funding systems and who gets funding which is an ongoing issue no matter where we are but the point I want to raise for me for myself is around our commitment to centering both artists and audiences as creators and I think from my understanding is there was a study that came out Clover Lynette about a year and a half ago two years ago they talked about the fact that audiences were 76% of audiences were looking for organizations presenters who were more socially focused in their work and they were also hearing a very divergent voice in the present moment around audiences saying that we gone too far in that effort so how we're able to both serve the artists and serve the audience at the same time knowing that we've got these divergent sort of perspectives around what's needed and so I feel like we're hearing many different things and listening to very little of it as we go about our practice and so that's a bit of a challenge for me as I think about the work that we're collectively doing how we're serving all the many stakeholders that actually have voice in the work that we're doing Thanks, I'm Mike Griffiths, I'm the Executive Director at the Royal ISEAN Theatre, the other key producing Theatre in Edinburgh and I suppose there's a couple of things, we've been on quite a long journey going from a repertory theatre that produced seven or eight productions of our own basically for a subscriber audience, moving now to a range of projects that we're basically collaborating with everything, every show that we do is a collaboration except our Christmas show and that includes international work that we're doing as well and one of the things that's come out of the last couple of years and has been a lifesaver prior to the pandemic was a piece of legislation that went through the UK Government called the Theatre Tax Relief and the Theatre Tax Relief has basically been the unspoken funder of a lot of projects that have happened in Britain in the last ten years and effectively at the moment it means that about 40% of your creation costs are refunded to you and that makes an immense difference to us which led to us this year since the pandemic doing the largest amount of new work we've been able to do and as a result taking the largest amount of income back from the tax system that we were able to this particular level which is around 50% of 80% of those costs is only going to continue for the next couple of years but it does mean that unlike Ireland which has a long term idea of what it wants to do with its creative sector we have a very short window where there'll be opportunities for us to make work with partners and get it out to people very, very quickly because that starts to change in April 25. Thank you, Ryan. That's very informative. Jack? I just want to make a comment on something I thought was very interesting what Liam said, just the reference to technology in the arts I guess is the token non-artist in the room. I sit in a lot of meetings, government meetings, business meetings and other meetings and everyone talking about AI and I find it interesting. I wonder how that's going to impact your industry? I'm not saying that there will necessarily be chat, GPT, give me an opera but that's where it's going with a lot of other things and I don't know what that's going to mean for all of you. I hate to be the scary one in here but change is going to continue and it's going to continue to impact you in so many ways. Yes. And Jack, I think you make a really important point because in different cultural organizations people are sitting down talking about how not to be afraid of it and then where do we go and clearly it needs to be a part of this discussion and other discussions because it isn't going away and Liam I really appreciated your comment about you have to have three generations at a table when you're having a discussion because that's how you get forward thinking but how do you use it? How do you share it? I also think there's a great comment made over here about being able, Chris being able to help people to learn how to produce you know it's not just artists making work but how does work travel and who makes that happen as well that that's equally as important. Laura? Hi, Laura Colby. I'm the founder and president of L.C. Management which is based in Brooklyn, New York and nearly half of my roster I represent a global roster with about 20 22 artists nearly half of whom are internationally located five countries three continents so I live and die on the international exchange means the world to me we specialize quite specifically in contemporary theater dance and circus and a lot of outdoor spectacle the challenge as someone who is both touring companies out of North America and over the big oceans as well as bringing companies over the big oceans into North America I was introduced to this magic in August and Edinburgh thanks to Mr. Michala who said just very pointedly you must be there so I showed up I showed up and it's you know needless to say the world has been introduced to me and my life changed as an arts worker quite dramatically just from coming here and being on the ground thank you Michael I'm in a moment where I finally am bringing a UK artist into North America I win only took me five years so and this is classic when I first started coming here it was in the heyday of the British Council when I know many of you experienced this especially the North American presenters in the room you would go see a show you would say yes I want they would make and you would tell them what season and they would give you a subsidy it was like magic so I never got to benefit from that because I was still very much a baby in the room and not so when I finally got there oh where did the British Council go all gone practically I mean it doesn't exist in the same with the same robust muscle that it used to have so the UK company I'm bringing over which is an award winning company and blah blah blah doesn't is coming over with not an ounce of UK money backing it for its debut in North America that's painful so that's big reality and then for the US artists well forget it because there's nothing there's nothing but people like me and Mara and Michael who are you know maybe screaming as loud as we can to say look look look good work is being made and because we're getting no love from nobody and the US artists we don't have an export policy we have very little support so it's impossible for US artists to compete on this global stage but we're doing what we can somebody pointed to the equitable contracting I think it was you Jennifer thank you and I just wanted to say in this room of international colleagues that a whole lot of work was done during the pandemic in the US around equitable contracting there was an artist led group called creating new futures APAP put together building ethical and equitable partnerships and dance USA put together an equitable contracting resource so these are all advocating for first payments things like out-of-pocket expenses guaranteed in the case of force majeure there's language change this is a daily challenge for me I'm fighting with a university fighting is a big word but I'm I am conversing with the university about the lack of a first payment as usual this is huge and you know Colleen you come from an institution the size of a ship and you know what it's like you want to make a little itty bitty change and it's going to take a room full lawyers and the president of the university to get a five thousand dollar first payment I mean stop it stop it so I just I want to point to these three documents because they actually all live on my website now and which is LC man.org the woman's name and it's under about this equitable contracting just in case all y'all nerds out there want to do some great reading thank you I just want to add a couple of notes that before we go to Mary Lou Jekka and then Mara is that one of the challenges we all have is to learn how we do differently precisely what you're talking about in being paid for services versus advanced payment is one of them. We worked with Inua Ellum and Kate McGrath at Fuel Theatre because we loved the barbershop chronicles and we are not agents or touring managers and we put together a national tour for them including their visas including everything else and so partly what we all have to do particularly presenters I am looking at is learn how to do other trades and make that a part of our regular mantra and things we're doing so thank you again Laura Mary Lou and then Jekka actually Colleen thank you for that because I was going to pick up on all of the capacities that have been articulated in this room and how we individually when we go home we think about how to apply those capacities to our own sphere of influence and how much different the world would be if we could continue to have these kinds of dialogues and these kinds of opportunities to think and reach across borders to collaborate in kindness thank you Linda and to not just think about what we are as presenters but to think of ourselves as people who facilitate each other because there's a lot of disparity also right here in this room those administrators who are here that are self funded and independent and have to worry about their resources for their artists themselves versus those of us who are institutionally supported and sharing that is something that we don't do as well as we should I have to say I'm very excited about any producing partnerships in the UK for the next three years hoping you'll think outside okay and also within our sector and this is something that you brought up Jack as we're facing new challenges not just the complete sustainability of what we know not just the underfunded global south which is being lifted up by the fringe in voices from the south in a small showcase this time but also those people who are being replaced with AI as a result of the SAG and writer's strikes in the US right now all people who all work across all of our sectors so I don't want to sound preachy but this is coming from a place that sees nothing but possibility among all of the comments that were made look at what we did and let's add we see you white American theater to your list we've done a lot, we can do more so thank you Hi everyone I'm Jacka Berry I am an independent producer I'm very lucky to be here with Jeff Sobell's food at the International Festival please come and see it I also have another company called Up Until Now which focuses on work with deaf blind and disability communities and developing new work both live performance work and digital work and as an independent producer I've been very lucky to have toured a lot internationally and domestically and one of the things that I have found coming out of the pandemic is that there is this desire for more transparency I have never had so many conversations with presenters where they have shared budgets with me and showed me what their labor costs are which can be wildly divergent and it does feel like there is this moment of saying let's figure it out together I think for me one of the things that that extends to is is seeing a willingness of organizations to work together within a community two different theaters that five years ago would never have had a conversation about co-presenting a work or now being willing to have that conversation and I wish that there was there was a more formal way I feel like a lot of the times it's like okay I had this conversation with this theater and I had a conversation with this theater and they're both interested in the same work can we come together and talk about it whether that's marketing presenting costs equipment there's so many ways to have those collaborative presentations and I think then the other thing that I am seeing and I think is really important is having a longer lead time that there is you know the work that I do with up until now when we go into a community it is so important that we're going in and being set up for success and that means that there is probably a year's worth of engagement that needs to happen on the ground with organizations that are working with the deaf community the blind community and that requires staff resource that we can't do it ourselves but whether it's with food and partnering with farmers markets you know with organizations that work on food and security and to me that is about it is about both doing the work to engage with local communities it is also about growing the audience base and if you can if we can figure out a way to do that longer term work then you know Tamara's point at the beginning like a way to grow the earned income because you are then creating an incentive for as a presenter organization to continue to program work that is going to engage with those communities and so it really does feel like there is this cycle that's happening and just I live in New York and the thing that I get scared about is when I see so many New York theaters that have traditionally developed and programmed really great innovative weird work and now they're looking for the piece that's going to transfer to Broadway and I feel like that is setting us up in a way that is moving us away from how are we continuing to engage with populations that are going to grow our audience base in a much broader way than what is the piece that's going to get the commercial out? I'm connecting a few dots and adding a couple of thoughts of my own I've been thinking a lot based on various comments about audience David thank you for that Liam I was thinking about your examples and the one thing that I didn't hear in that was audience and that so the whole thing I just want to name and then I'm actually going to move on from this point is that I'm in it for the liveness and I'm in it not to negate the AI but the thing that makes what the people in this room make different is actually the relationship between performance and audience however we define what that is and I just want to make sure that as we move this conversation forward we are thinking holistically about that relationship relationship for me is almost a manifesto in and of itself organizations don't produce work buildings don't produce work it's people that produce work it's our relationships with each other our relationships with artists and so as we move from thinking to doing the thing I want to say to everyone in this room is that we actually have the ability as individuals because somebody can go meet with a president and change a policy or whatever to actually start to forge the path forward that we want to sit here and list the issues that are wrong and wait for someone to present the solution to us but in fact it is our job to come up with the solutions thinking Jack I'm looking at you like well why can't we think about cultural diplomacy in a different way how can we harness there got to be some individuals somewhere in the state department network that we can maybe pull together to actually have a real conversation and effect change and not just accept the status quo as how we move forward so I just want to put that into the room for thought and I want to before Ryan before you go I just also want to add I think it's really important that there are no grids and boxes put on art art is art and it doesn't matter where it's made or where it's shown and I think one of the issues that we in the US have fought with is there's a segregation there's work that's commercial that's work that's not art is art and there are things we can learn from each other and sometimes the art goes to that house or sometimes the art goes to that house but we're part of the same village and we have to not circle the wagons and shoot at each other but really think about how we can grow from each other yes I mean that's a perfect segue for the point that I want to make so I'm the creative associate at Northern Stage which is the largest producing theatre in the northeast of England and I suppose just wanted to kind of share I was thinking about Mary Lou's point about your sphere of influence and I think that as myself and my colleagues work to build international partnerships to make work and to bring work to a building that was built at a time of huge healthy government subsidy that allowed beautiful international work from across Europe to come to Newcastle and meet an audience we also need to think really carefully about the impact that we have on the place where we work so prior to this role my creative practice research kind of sat thinking about place and how kind of cultural work and cultural centre is related to placemaking we have an opportunity here to think about how all of the actions of this kind of business have implications in our community so I'll share a very small example which is that our rehearsal spaces are in a community in the east of Newcastle council estate called Biker where we've made work there for a long time we've got a really deep meaningful relationship with a very small community of people who are kind of at the core of our organisation and coming closer to programming decisions and institutional decisions that place is very poorly served by public transport infrastructure and very few people own a private vehicle so there's very little access to the city centre where our asset is supposed to serve those individuals and every time an actor or the artistic director or myself takes a taxi from our facility to those rehearsal spaces we weaken the case for an improved public transport infrastructure to serve those individuals so I think we have to really think deeply about the actions that we take where we're spending our government subsidy where we're spending the income that we earn to serve this community to serve the place where we are and actually to build the place where we are because that has a direct implication of the cultural lives of those individuals that we're purported to serve thanks my name is Michael Moshala I'm an independent producer and I want to thank you all very much for inviting me here today I I have more of a question than I have something to say I think one of the things that becomes obvious as we listen to all of the points that are being made is that we're all you know take it outside of the world of the arts we're in a bit of an an industry's ecosystem and what is the role of each of us in that international community as part of the supply chain if you would you know what happens when the programming horizon is changing so dramatically what happens if we're in the middle of a tour and somebody drops out these things happen all over the place and I just I just want to put out there that I think a lot of us I've been very fortunate to work with a lot of people in this room I think we do collaborate I think we just have to sometimes look a little further how integrated is this ecosystem I just want to leave that thought thank you thank you my name is Liz Kellertrip I'm here on behalf of Spoleto Festival USA which is in Charleston South Carolina where I've been the lead producer for about nine months I just survived my first festival barely I'm in the throes of frantically programming 24, 25, 26 and beyond as I'm sure many of you are I'm so delighted to put a lot of faces to names that I've heard in this job in previous roles and I can't tell you how much so much of this resonates with me I'm seeing so far in this post which I'm bringing a variety of experiences to but it's the first time I've held a role like this and what I'm seeing is almost a sense of competitiveness about creating new work and that's something that we're struggling with internally is wanting to be at the forefront of creation and producing while also honoring and giving second, third, fourth lives to really powerful work that's already out there and one opportunity I see for Charleston specifically and the south more broadly is to offer different ways in which is something I feel really passionately about as a concept just making sure that there are either multidisciplinary ways of entering into a concept or a programmatic idea or some kind of discussion or some kind of some kind of reflection that offers that offers different kinds of pathways in sort of bristle at certain topics but also need to hear them but I need to be welcomed in somehow or I need to be offered a different path in so all of that has resonated with me so I don't want to repeat anything that's been said but maybe I'll just offer one other thing that I'm noticing in my work so far which is that Spleto specifically has undergone a huge transition in its staffing I'm one of five brand new directors and the general director is still quite new Charleston itself looks way different than perhaps the last time any of you might have been there except for you Jennifer maybe but it's like half New Yorkers and it's going to be under water in five years literally and the prices are through the roof for absolutely everything so it's a bizarre place to create new work and one thing that I'm thinking a lot about and navigating to some degree is a sense of bristling against stories that might have once resonated locally Charleston has a really, really scary, angry, deep important history in American history and some really incredible stories including the Pulitzer Prize winning Omar which I had absolutely nothing to do with but I have talked about those stories and I am feeling a fatigue about things that are stories involving race and gender and issues that we as artists and art makers feel incredibly strongly about sharing stories of and I just want to name that and I would welcome comments and further conversation with anybody about how you're feeling that in your own communities but perhaps more importantly or rather perhaps then all the more important to find different ways into a story, not just so that something is only pertinent or is not just pertinent locally but rather that there are ways of reflecting on a specific issue that is far more broad reaching than it might seem on the surface so I welcome your thoughts. I was at the premiere of Omar and what an incredible gift to the artistic community and that piece itself was about spirituality and it was about relationships across cultures as well as it was certainly about slavery and the difficult difficult history of Charleston itself and our country. I did want to just say that I also at that festival connected with our next artistic partner after this next year which is Rianna Giddens, who will be Rianna Giddens and I do think that I understand the fatigue, I guess I hear the fatigue of dealing with some of these issues around race and equity and gender and at the same time I also feel like it is ever more important to be presenting this work and in a way that Rianna Giddens can do it that is also a representation of folk music and it's a representation of the orchestra and the beauty of visual design and so many different ways so I just wanted to, and great, great festival, it's an incredible festival if you haven't been to Spoleto. Michael, and then we're going on to Kevin. Okay thank you Mara, thank you very much for your comment, I was kind of remiss when I was called on I wasn't but yes, about the audience and I have been asked because my original career was in film to work on digitally capturing works and I did not get involved with those companies because they were void of audience and if there was not the interaction you're not going to have the same energy from the performance so the end result of my digital capture company is two, four, six, eight performances in front of a live audience the goal is to get that work to more audiences without having to spend 68 days on Broadway or $14 million of other people's money but to make sure that that voice is heard as quickly and as economically as possible that's it. All right, we did a lot and we're about to do about just as much in the next 11 minutes so stick with me it's going to be a lot of fun so first of all thank you when Colleen said at the top she loved to hear from all of us I think we got through about most of us so thank you so much for your candor for jumping in and sharing so bravely I think we've shared a lot of learning and challenges which is I think really rare actually to keep the balance that you all just did and to give us a snapshot of that balance I'm going to pass it now to David House to give us just like some brief reflections of what you've heard in the conversation David House two hours of sleep so just to say so my recollection but anyway I have to organize things in my head so first of all really rich, engaging, challenging complicated conversations we're having here today lots of thoughts clearly we haven't solved all the things yet so there's more in the do tank that we have to do so hopefully this is the beginning of more conversations of combat in my head I've organized this and I have type A but there are four eyes maybe you'll remember them innovation, inclusivity integration and imagination we've covered sits in one of those four buckets and I'm adding some C's so collaboration I'm adding kindness as a C because it and and climate and so just to say on the inclusivity we started this conversation around Emma talking about I think it was Emma who was saying a little bit more about how do we maintain this sense of inclusivity when we're hearing different things from what is needed your yes, bringing up the fact that audiences are saying that they want one thing but are fatigued in the same conversation so how do we maintain that balance this notion of inclusivity was also brought up when we talk about equitable practices who are the companies who are the organizations, who are the countries who have the resources and how is that shaping or stifling voices that promote inclusivity and diversity we're also hearing the notion of inequitable practice when it comes to who gets the funding artists versus institutions institutions be they largely small who actually survives and what that's doing for us we talk a lot about innovation we talked about the fact of digital this experimenting very early we were testing something didn't work we cut it out where does that live it is not at the future it is the now as Liam reminds us and how we think about digital programming as something that we integrate but also being very clear that our unique position is around that relationship that Mara speaks about with audience and people integration heard a lot about collaboration this notion of the in order for us to survive I think it was Michael I think we have like seven Michaels in this room right one of the Michaels said something about nothing wrong nothing wrong with that we love Michaels the notion that in order for us to continue into the future we're going to have to be smarter around the way that we collaborate this notion of integration and understanding how integrated are we there's collaboration but it happens in pockets and we have to do better at making sure more voices are in the conversation when we're talking about collaboration and then this notion of imagination so much of what we're trying to do there is a resistance there's a resistance to the in the society there's a resistance in our audience there was there's resistance in our own field right and so we talked about Laurie no Laura no Linda see two hours Linda spoke about the resistance that we're experiencing Laura yes here over here also talked about we actually have some tools and we're still resistant to actually embracing those so how do we break out of that resistance and then you know again both Mayor Lu and Mar mentioned the notion of we have the answers we can't wait for folks to come to us we actually have to we are the creative industry we can actually present those forward then I'm going to go to my seas the notion of climate and how we actually are attentive to the climate and the world that we live in knowing the practice that we do in fact it feels like I think you mentioned it's like a drop in the ocean right but we have to continue to do this and a lot of ideas around travel that were brought up and how we might think about that differently and then I'm going to end with kindness because it just sounds like a great place to live we are not always the kindest of people we're not always the kindest of feel there's a lot of competition there's a very much a scarcity mindset and how do we move beyond scarcity to really abundance and I think this kind of conversations kind of collaborative conversation across the water is exactly what we need we need more relationships we need those three generations at the table so we're actually solving these problems collectively so I think that's my summary and I thank you all for giving me this opportunity David that was absolutely brilliant and it was amazing two hours of sleep we want to see you when you've had eight so that's just incredible we want to take this opportunity to thank Roy and to thank Emma and to thank the Edinburgh International Festival for co-hosting this very important talk with us that deserves a round of applause and then we want to thank all of you because in this room are very busy people you are doing yeoman's work you are mindful of your communities you are mindful of artists you are mindful of the greater global good that we can do with our work so we want to thank you for being here and sharing your time and energy with each of us and particularly we want to thank Hal for always keeping us together and keeping us going so on behalf of the IPC delegation thank you alright Roy had a great idea to be part of our closing here we're going to do like a minute we're not going to pass microphones we're just going to say titles of shows that we've seen in the festival or that we know that are playing in the festival that we are recommending to each other and then we're going to have this wonderful time in the lobby to say what was that show where is it playing but just a quick I'm going to talk about like a minute popcorn, speak over each other and then repeat yourself again to be heard, pitches food, I don't know where it is it might not be on your radar but the exhibition The Tower by Jesse Jones at the 12th at Rice Gallery around the corner is a really remarkable visual art and performance that you should just drop into at any time you have a break in this neighborhood some of the Goat Theatre at Zoo second that Bees and Doll very good it's a motherfucking pleasure I've heard about that a great deal I'm so looking forward to it it's a motherfucking pleasure last year as well bloody hell oh bloody hell after the act I saw it last night it's very good so I'll say it again just everything good program it's a really good program I'm in the Society for New Cuisine at underbelly cowgate underbelly cowgate we have a small invitation from Punch Drunk in Richmond we've added an extra slot to their schedule tomorrow at 11.40 if there are people that would like to see it usually you're not allowed in with a child but you can you can go tomorrow the context is you just have to be aware that you're an adult without a child and imagine the experience with more children in the room but if you would like a ticket you can probably sing in the wind we should say that Punch Drunk show is a collaboration because they originated with Imagine 8 thank you it was a couple of years ago it was pretty long time one of our collaborations part of the festival can I do can I do a wee shout out as well because there's just so much stuff out there and we can all recommend things but the fringe app this year yes we have an app just shake the phone and it gives you a random selection I just encourage everybody just to take a punch on something completely random because you just did it you did it definitely just I thought I had a new overwatch anybody over here alright as we close take a moment to look around the room and make eye contact with somebody that you did not know when you walked in take that moment see their eyes you may never see them again take a moment and make eye contact with somebody in the room who said something today that you are either really excited by or have a follow up question for take that moment find them, find those eyes that's the first person you're talking to at the bar as we just burst there thank you all so much for this time if you're coming to Trojan Women tonight we'll see you there don't forget to take your clear bag with you take your clear bag thank you so much