 The next piece I'm going to share with you is called Mother Me. It's a 60-minute piece about the complex relationships, sociology, and psychology surrounding motherhood. This piece has received support from the Drum Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board. It's touring in 2020 in Lanesboro, in Tulsa, New York. And I am looking for a co-presenter in Minneapolis and other touring presenters around the country. The next piece I'm going to share with you is called Songs Between Life and Death. This is an 80-minute performative song cycle about the conscious spiritual experience unattached from a physical body. This piece was commissioned by Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn and the Drum Foundation. It premiered in April 2019. And I will be performing it in Rochester, Minnesota in November 2020. And I'm looking for more presenters for this as well. The next piece I'd like to share with you is my NPN Creation and Development Fund project. It's called TDAI. I mentioned it yesterday. It is investigating my maternal lineage and cultural identity, Thai ancestry, through my mother's experience as an immigrant raising biracial children in Midwest America. I'm looking for funds for travel research to Thailand and development funds for that piece. And for all of the pieces, I'm looking for presenters across the country. And I'd also love to have a mentor. Thank you. Thank you. Again, that was Mary Prescott. I also want to say we're being live-streamed again. So hello to all the HowlRound audience who will see it live and also in the future. Hello, future. So next up is Shereen Azav, coming to us from Detroit. Good morning, everyone. Yes, my name is Shereen Azav. I'm the co-director of Detroit-based Ensemble, a host of people. My other co-director, Jay Cooker, is also here at NPN today. We are an intentionally mixed group of artists from different backgrounds creating work to manifest the world that we want to live in. Because we are an ensemble, I want to show a video that brings them into the room with me. Hey, scientists, you know that dolphins were incredibly incredibly smart to maybe speak human languages. One of the things about our company is that we really strive to make really interesting, layered, textured work across disciplines that is also very approachable by a wide swath of folks. We do theater, and other people would say that we do devised theater. We tend to say we make original experimental theater. Not having any power looks like a hug. It looks like being comfortable enough in your own skin back to being someone else's. Woo! When I was pursuing a career as an independent director and actor, I was always waiting for somebody to tell me what to do or what I could do. That's why creating our own work was so important. A quarter cup of are you Ethiopian? I don't know. Three bits a person. One tablespoon of my fair-skinned great-grandmother. One of my grandmothers was kidnapped from the coast of Africa. They tried to steal her beauty, but she looked just like me. One thing we're really proud of is the ensemble we've built in Detroit. It's been very special as we've toured National Light to share these experiences with them and show the National Theater community the kind of artist Detroit has here. One thing that unites all of our work is what we call our hosting practice. We are going to go on a performance adventure tonight. We're gonna start down here. We offer food and drink and our signature punch bowl, and we invite our audience with the work as we would guests into our home. We wanna create an experience that's more familial than a typical art event. Detroit gives us this flexibility to interact and really be one-on-one with our audience. We're not leading a movement with our theater, but we are supporting movement, and that's really important to us, that we are supporting and helping everybody to imagine a different world or different possibilities by helping the greater imagination grow. So the piece that we have just finished is called Cleopatra Boy. It is a 2019 NIFA NTP awardee. At its core, Cleopatra Boy is a show about power manipulation under the patriarchy. It looks at how Cleopatra's story was first manipulated by the Romans because victors write the histories, and then over and over again by her biographers over the years. The next short clip I'm gonna show you is from that piece. You'll see the very tail end of our live toy theater film that we do where we show some of Cleopatra's depictions over the years and then also moves into the ensemble's reflections of their own systems of power we find ourselves in and against. Over 1900 years later, Mankiewicz would write for Cleopatra after the bite from the asp. How strangely awake I feel as if living had just been a long dream. Someone else's dream now finished at last. Women would have had at least half the political leadership positions in the world. Certainly women would have had control over their own bodies this whole time. If women had decided how we should structure our economy, I believe that we would have been taken care of. We would have proper access and resources to take care of ourselves and our families and our bodies and our minds. Non-dominating power looks like a hug. It looks like being comfortable enough in your own skin not to hate someone else's. People of color might feel less othered in white spaces. Everyone might be less inclined to other others. Queerness is a place for anyone as long as you want to be there. The group over the personal, the community as the priority. It looks like freedom, like true freedom. It's open borders. It feels like when everyone hits the same move on the dance floor at last call and everyone has a safe way home. We created this piece to the lens of restorative justice and practice, which is a growing practice within our own ensemble. And we also offer a workshop in that practice that goes along with that piece. Our work looks at the past in order to interrogate what is happening in the present moment to help our community work toward a more just, equitable, and celebratory future. If you would like to know anything more about our work and our company, please come see me. I have Materios or Jake. We'd love to talk to you more about it. Thank you so much. Thank you, Shereen. So, just a quick note that under the app, in the part that's called conference art and content, and then under art slam, not to be confused with art bursts or art talks, all of these bios are in there so you could find everybody's contact information and bio there. Also, I'm noticing that we have amazing transcription and translation happening over here. If we could be mindful of the speed in which we talk, I know it's a rush because it's five minutes, but just be mindful that someone's taking good care to transcribe your words for other folks. And next up, we have Timur from Los Angeles, California. There you go. This is my name, as you can see. Yes, it means made out of iron, believe it or not, and hopefully it's gonna start. Okay, is it good? Oh, waiting. Okay, while we're waiting, thank you so much. Well, quick wait, my name is Timur, and I'm an opera singer from Kazakhstan, originally now based in sunny LA, yes. I started out as an opera singer, playing classical roles with companies around the world. You can see me right there as an old man. And eventually transitioned into the crazy world of contemporary opera. And so far I've premiered 20 operas by Living Composers and recently started to branch out, whoa, with my solo projects. Few years ago, I formed a band called Timur in the Dime Museum, which was described by NPR as punk, screaming opera, ow! Mixing cabaret, glam rock, and new music. Beth Morrison Projects brought us to Prototype Festival and then with the commission from the amazing Rat Cat Theater in LA, whoo! We created an environmental rock opera right there called Collapse, not with a happy ending. With interactive projections, a tour to Miami Light Project, bam, next way, Festival and Opera, Doug and Rotterdam. I'm really, really delighted to share three projects with you which are ready to be booked now. Nueva Concción, Songs of Protest and Resistance is a music-driven project and development for my band supported by NTN and co-commissioners Miami Light Project and BMP. Suggested to me by my Peruvian-American wife, it is based on the influential Latin American song movement which criticized oppression among many other things. As I researched, I saw numerous similarities between Nueva Concción and Soviet revolutionary songs which my grandmother taught me, ironically, right before the fall of the USSR. Well, we focused on the song of the legendary Mercedes Sosa, commissioning eight women composers to make arrangements. The songs only performed in the original Spanish, English, and Russian languages. Pierrot is a deliriously planned theatrical song cycle by Palestinian-American composer Muhammad Farouz. The story of the demented Pierrot is said in the 20th century like a kaleidoscope of philosophical gestures, remarks in iconic references with 10 songs and seven monologues. The orchestration is only five classical instruments. Flexible staging, as you can see, and here's a little clip, involves a little bit of undressing that we did at Joe's pub. Here you go. My next upcoming cabaret project with a text by Margaret Cho, the comedian, a mysterious songbird is captured and put on display as exotic entertainment. But the songbird rebells and twists the familiar and new songs into its own world of dark fantasy, and here's a little taste of that. Thank you very much. And if you mention NPN, you'll get 5% discount. Hola. That was Timur. And now, next up, we have Paul S. Flores coming to us from San Francisco, California. Yeah, Paul. Paul Flores. Calling Paul Flores. No, we're gonna skip you. Yeah, skipping? Skipping Paul. Yeah, he'll go to the end of the line. End of the line, Paul. End of the line. He's going to the end of the line. Okay, let's see. Next person. Is that correct? Do I have the go ahead from NPN? Yes, perfect. So, Lenora Lee from San Francisco, California. If you could come up. Welcome, Lenora. Good morning, everyone. Morning, my name is Lenora Lee, artistic director of Lenora Lee Dance in San Francisco. I invite you to bring your attention to the screen. For the last 12 years, I've been pushing the envelope of intimate and large-scale, multimedia dance performance that connects various styles of movement, dance, film, text, research, and music to culture, history, and human rights issues related to immigration, incarceration, and global conflict. At times crafted for the proscenium, or underwater, or in the air. And at times, the pieces are site responsive, immersive, and interactive, which can also be modified for the proscenium stage and for smaller casts. Our work has grown to encompass the creation, presentation, and screening of films, museum and gallery installations, civic engagement, and educational programming. In regards to the video you're seeing right now, in June of last year, my sister was diagnosed with stage four metastatic breast cancer. From May to October of this year, I interviewed 32 people living with cancer, their loved ones, and healthcare professionals in an incredibly enriching process that changed my perspective on life and mortality, creating in the skin of her hands. It premiered November 1st through 3rd to Standing Ovation, featured contemporary modern and aerial dance, video projection, interview voiceover, and live vocals, traveling through three rooms in dance mission theater. I was awarded a United States Artist Fellowship this year, which allowed me to, thanks. Which allowed me to create this piece now due to the urgency of this health crisis. On average, every two minutes, a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer. Also this year, our immersive multimedia production within these walls from 2017 received two awards from the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards Committee. Special achievement for outstanding production and outstanding achievement in performance by an individual, He'en Huynh in the red shirt. For his incredibly moving performance in this piece. In May of this year, we re-staged within these walls and created a sequel, Dreams of Flight, at the US Immigration Station Angel Island State Park for a three week run. It was intense and we brought this back because we felt it was incredibly important because these pieces were dedicated to the over 170,000 people who were unjustly detained, interrogated and processed there during the Chinese Exclusion Era. Immersive performance has brought me to the most intimate sense of connection with audiences, breaking conventional boundaries of theatrical performance, taking out the divide between us and them in the resounding voice of we. The pieces become live, real-time heightened sensory experiences that provide agency for the traveling audiences as audiences are constantly being faced with deciding who's narrative they would like to see unfold, who they are in relation to the performers, are they able to interact or alter what is going on in front of them and can they change the narrative? Some audience reflections include, I couldn't help but think of my grandmother, I also thought about ICE jails, people who fear deportation and refugees overseas, moving and beautifully rendered, so timely given the global dialogue around immigration. All of our pieces are adaptable to the proscenium stage, intimate spaces and smaller casts for touring. Three different upcoming projects in the works include, and the community will rise in immersive multimedia performance and exhibition, premiering in an affordable housing complex in San Francisco, September 2020, focusing on gentrification and displacement, funded by Creative Work Fund, California Arts Council Creative California Communities and Kenneth Rainin Foundation Open Spaces grants. Another piece, Convergent Waves, premiering spring 2021 in Boston at Pow Art Center, includes research and interviews with women activists and is currently supported by an NEA Artworks grant. In spring of 2022 on Alcatraz Island in the former military prison, we will premiere in the movement a site-responsive immersive multimedia performance piece and video installation, focusing on the mass detention of immigrants and refugees as a form of incarceration. We're looking for co-commissioners, presenters, partners and funders for these new pieces, any new commissions for your venues and opportunities to tour existing works. We invite you to join us in imagining the possibilities. Thank you. Not again with Lenora Lee. Next up we have Bug Davidson from Austin, Texas. I'm playing the video for me and thanks to MPM for having me here. It's my first time at the conference and I'm really excited and much smarter than I was when I got here on Tuesday. So I wanted to share with you the last show I made. It's called Trinitron Mix Tape. It's been described as sort of a live movie. There are 13 cameras switched live as two actor dancers move through the work. So the first one was at Fusebox Festival hometown for me and I used a large video wall of analog monitors to show the camera feeds. And then I was supported by MPM to go to Living Arts in Tulsa and adapted the show into projection. So I wrote the content using the familiar story of the Bonnie and Clyde gang in order to talk about my own story as a trans person growing up with a lot of violence and addiction around me. The show also engages the idea, the cinematic idea of the Western and the myth of the West as this malleable place and therefore a place able to produce malleable identities and appropriated identities and all the ideas perpetuated in Hollywood films that surround those myths. So I'm extremely interested in the duality of looking that happens when live bodies are sent as a signal as a moving image signal in the same space and I'm in the process of developing new work based on that kind of looking. I wanted to read a quick statement from Alexis Scott, the lead actress in this piece. She says, playing Blanche in M- Trinitron mixed tape is not a linear experience by any means. I embody the ghost of Blanche, a memory that slips between time and cognizance mixed with artist Bug Davidson's own memories. I am Blanche but slanted. I am the memory of violence as well as the beloved survivor. I am the incarnation of injustice, the sticky after effects of addiction. I am meat and memory and both. Finding my way in as an actor is a trip. The monologues are written both to people as well as to the ether. Time jumps the way brains do. No one ever responds. Unlike a lot of plays no one ever gets anywhere by talking and listening in mixed tape except perhaps the audience. There is no climax although there does seem to be catharsis which means that as Blanche my job namely is to make truthful the living of liminal space. I am both alive and dead. I am trapped and free. I am in charge and completely at others mercy. The ground to stand on is other people's crime, a slippery memory and the pain inflicted from loving others through their choices and the things they can't help but choose. When Erica dances several things happen for me. Blanche sees Buck in their first night together dancing drunkenly at a bar in a way she finds sloppy and sexy. I feel Blanche remembering the origin of it all. Meanwhile Alexis the actor sees a woman with a shaved head dressed in male coated clothes writhing through haunted movement stumbling through a sloppy two step. And it is also all the queers and dykes and trans and gender non conforming folks who I've watched find their footing in new boots and old clothes. It is my subversive desire dancing in front of me trying to explain itself seducing me without grace or linearity. When I show up as her, I'm showing up for her. I'm allowing myself to be found and then forgotten. I'm inviting the audience to see me but not know how to look at me. I'm reminding all of us in the midst of the confusion of trying to know each other when we love the people who break us. We are as real as our wounds. Thank you so much. Thank you, that was Buck Davidson. We're gonna now go to Paul Flores who wasn't here before and then afterwards we'll hear from Tim and Jeffrey. So next up is Paul Flores from San Francisco, California. Check, one, two. Visiting your family in another country is like a homecoming and an out-of-body experience at the same time. Aunt has a little house just outside Santiago de Cuba. I feel lucky to be here in El Campo. The next day we all go visit La Caridad del Cobre. I've never been to Cobre before and this is something else. La Caridad del Cobre is more than just a church La Caridad del Cobre is the holiest place in the country. La Caridad del Cobre is the patron saint of Cuba. Her shrine lies near the copper mine in the middle of the Sierra Maestra Mountains. La Caridad del Cobre is a mulata virgin. La Caridad del Cobre is our lady of charity, a mixed race saint, La Cachita, she who walks on water and saves three slaves from shipwreck in a storm. She gives us life, love, and wealth. She is Oshun, African goddess of the river, defender of all women, Cuban mother of the synchronized world she is African, indigenous, Spanish. La más bella del mundo, y a Lorde, y a Melee, y a Melee. Oh, Ache, Ache, mi Saramawe, y a Melee. The tears are pouring out of me. I feel my grandmother with me. This is what it feels like to be called. This is what it feels like to be claimed. Gracias madre por la bendición. So, We Have Ide is a brand new multidisciplinary bilingual musical theater piece written by me and composed by Yosvani Terry, the music, there's Yosvani. There's our artistic collaborators, the project is directed by Rosalba Rolón from Pregones Theater in New York City. It features our choreographer Ramon Ramos-Alayo and DJ Ladies. We Have Ide is a poet, a musician, a dancer, a DJ, all of them are Cuban and discusses the, revolves around two really main stories. One of DJ Ladies' trip across the ocean and becoming a DJ in the United States and my story of coming from the United States and reconnecting with Cuba, so it's like a criss-crossing story. Add that to, you know, a kick-ass jazz band that is just ripping through amazing jazz numbers and Afro-Cuban folklore. We have Kristin Kato, who is the singer of the, who sings in the piece and DJ Ladies who is representing more like a hip-hop vibe and everybody is telling their own true story. The idea with We Have Ide is really to talk about immigration from an Afro-Caribbean perspective, really allowing people to, one, learn about Cuba and also realize that Black people are immigrants too and that Afro-Cuban culture has influenced so many amazing things in the United States. So we, you can check out my website, paulesflores.art. And you can see the, more about the, about the show, let me just put the website up. And on the, on the website you can see the, there's no audio, huh? On the website you'll be able to see, sorry, the promo video that most people already saw with the making of from NPN that we did, the concept to, to production. Thank you all very much. Hope to talk to you soon. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. Paul, now we have Tim Smith Stewart and Jeffrey Acevedo from Seattle, Washington. You here? Hey, buddies. I'm Tim Smith Stewart. Take this. This is Jeffrey Acevedo. We are from Seattle, which is important to say is on the occupied and unceded territory of the Duwamish tribe and the Coast Salish peoples. So Jeffrey and I have been friends and collaborators for almost 20 years. Some of our earliest collaboration includes a high school production of Grease, Danny Zuko, making such a goofy face, as well as our high school ska band. Yeah, we were pretty cool. A little more recently, we, we premiered an evening length piece that on the boards in Seattle titled Awaiting Oblivion that subsequently toured to the TBA Festival in Portland. Currently we're developing a work titled Salvage Rituals and this piece is got the NPN Creation Development Fund Award, a co-commissioned by on the boards in Seattle and risk award in Portland. So this work actually began in 2014. We were invited to create an installation on an ecological preserve in northern Washington and we're kind of drawing from Radical Ferry's ritual practice. We went there with this question of what would it mean to create a ritual around the question of how to mourn someone lost but very much alive, lost to unsupported neurodivergence or mental health challenges and addiction. Honestly we were, we had just lost a dear friend and collaborator of ours to unsupported neurodivergence and addiction and we were just in a really challenging place with like how do you grieve that kind of complicated loss like they're right there but they're also gone in a way and there's some hope that they might be not gone at some point they could be back in your life but there's only so much hope you can put into that and you want to support them and you're angry at the systems that didn't support them but sometimes when lines are crossed boundaries need to be created. So we created this ritual in the river to try to unpack that complex kind of grieving and then we documented that ritual and put the images onto a glass piece onto this window that we hung on the bank of the river. So we then kind of continued this practice, we came back to it a couple years ago, continuing this question of how can we make site specific ritual that might sustain ourselves, be a space of healing and grieving and sustain each other and our communities and now we're in the process of taking these images which we shot with a drone camera at that same ecological preserve and now we're doing a photo resist process to sandblast those images onto glass pieces. So this challenge of trying to sustain interpersonal connection is inextricably linked to the inherent inequity surrounding access to basic resources. I have a background in electrical engineering so I have a specific interest in energy as a resource and have been inspired by current and historical examples of communities salvaging technologies in order to create autonomous electrical grids and energy generation. So for this work I am developing a human powered electrical grid that can prioritize the body in free movement using piezoelectric technology which is a material that when you apply a mechanical stress to it, it induces an electrical current. So you can see here a prototype of a piezoelectric disk which I'll be able to embed into a dance floor and that design allows kind of a vertical force to be spread horizontally. So when the performers bodies impact the floor performing the choreography that we're doing that will create electrical currents and we'll be able to store that in a battery and we'll ultimately use the energy to power lights which will eliminate both the performers as well as those sandblasted glass pieces. So this is a little bit of a video from a residency at Seattle University. You can kind of see the taped out hexagon shape that's going to be the shape of this platform that Jeff is developing and you can see kind of some of the glass pieces that are being lit by the LEDs. I think something you know that's important to us about this work is that this idea came from an impulse around like how do we construct and how do we create a possibility of constructing our own systems recognizing that corporatist state systems that were never designed to be equitably distributed will continue to fail more people and then how can we prioritize like the free body in movement in creating our own systems. So we have a work in progress showing in Seattle in February 1st. If you want to come to Seattle, if you want to talk to us a little bit more about this work and hear Jeff explain the science again, which I generally need a couple more explanations, please come find us. Thank you so much. This has been a wonderful time at MPN. Jeff, I need your energy machine now. Can I have it? Yes, please, thank you. So that again was Tim Smith-Steward and Jeff Azevedo from Seattle, Washington. Next up we have the Indigenous Roadshow from Portland, Oregon. Hello, Bulbancha. What a great start to the conference the other day. My name's Ed Bourgeois. I'm here with Mora Garcia and we're here to talk about the Indigenous Roadshow. It's a program being developed by Western Arts Alliance in partnership with the NPN Creation Fund. Oh, I'm supposed to be. It's a devised, multidisciplinary, contemporary and traditional Indigenous expression piece. Thank you. Hi, my name's Ed and I'm here with Mora Garcia and we have less than five minutes to talk about the Indigenous Roadshow. It's a devised, multidisciplinary piece featuring contemporary and traditional Indigenous expressions from all over, not just Portland, Oregon. We recently completed our first creation fund residency or creation residency at Bunnell Arts, Bunnell Street Arts Center is Asia here. Asia's here. We had a great residency up in Alaska and we have another one coming up in July of 2020 in Portland and we're hoping for more residency partners. Right now our co-commissioners and partners in the Indigenous Roadshow are Bunnell Street Arts Center, Pai'i Foundation in Honolulu and Maui Arts and Cultural Center in Hawaii, Pangea World Theater, Indigenous or the International Sonoran Desert Alliance in Arizona and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Let's meet the artist. Thank you. And so this is a picture of Shelley Morning Song. She's Northern Cheyenne. She sings like an angel. She's a wonderful human being. She's a recording artist and she currently lives in Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico. She recently received the 2019 Native American Music Awards, Artist of the Year Award, Best Blues Recording Artist. She is like a mother earth figure and emits warmth with everything that she does. And her partner, Fabian Fontanelle who is Zuni and Omaha. He is a singer. He is a drummer. He's a traditionalist. He's a comedian, a storyteller and a award-winning traditional dancer formerly with the American Indian Dance Theater. And he brings the element of comedy and just keeps us grounded. And next we will have coming up, oh that's a photo of them together. So they are husband and wife. They have their own kind of personal love story that goes underneath the entire ensemble. So it's wonderful to work with them and have that spirit there as well. Next we have coming up, Arias Hoyle. He is a hip-hop artist. He's originally from Juneau, Alaska. And he wraps in his language and about traditions. And we have a video clip from, that's not the video clip, but okay it's in a different order. This is me. Sorry. So pause that for a second please. Yeah. So I'm Mora Garcia. I'm a dancer and choreographer. I'm Cherokee and Madame Mesquite originally from the land of milk and honey, also known as North Carolina. And I create and perform contemporary indigenous performance. And this is Arias now. Okay. Thank you. Okay. All right. So now we'll have Arias's video. Okay. All right. So we'll move, you want to move on to Peter? Yes. Okay. Okay. All right. And this is an outdoor piece that has to do with the planting of corn and all of the traditions around corn. Okay. So. So anyway, just contact us. If you're interested in seeing more, I've got it on my laptop and it's great. Thank you. Thanks again, Mora, from the Indigenous Road Show. If you're just joining us, the room is a lot more full than when we first introduced this. So this is 16 artists for five minutes each. We're at the half mark now, so we have eight more to go. And all their bios are in the app under ArtSlam. Next up is Ushamari Sorzano, originally from Trinidad, and you're based where now? In Trinidad? In Los Angeles. Welcome. Oh, I don't like bright lights. Hi, guys. My name is Ushamari Sorzano. I'm also not trained in this, so here we go. I nailed it. Okay. So I am mothering a new contemporary dance work titled Threat. It centers around rebellion. It is meant to unpack the human condition and unrest and paradox at the heart of it. That we are as terrified of stagnation as change. And so in order to create rebellion, you must create a power structure. And so I endeavored to build a world with a ruler, a rebel, and the rules. And I thought that this would be the best way of representing the Eurocentric hierarchy. I'm extremely familiar with being ruled because I come from a colonized country, but it's now a republic. I'm also extremely familiar with being ruled because I'm a classically trained dancer, so years of Eurocentric ballet has baked into my soul. And it's in this new world where I feel the spirit of rebellion is extremely important that I felt myself being ruled yet again. And it came out of social media paralysis, quite honestly, because I would see that people would post things that was controversial or, you know, that they deemed important. And I would see the discord and the throwdowns that happened between family and friends. And I was like, not me, not today. And the reality was when I interrogated that feeling, I recognized that I was more scared that the conflict might compromise my livelihood, and I didn't want to take that chance. So here we have the ruler, the ruled and the rebel. It occurred to me, you know, when you are, when you live in this hierarchy, you know, when first you were raised and reared by your mother, you know, first you were ruled by your mother and then by your educators, and then you grow up and you go out into the world and you were ruled by society, how often do you check yourself? How many times do we use art as a mirror, not only to fight for social inequities and injustices, but also to fight for the personal inequities that we create within ourselves? And I got three weeks, I got timed to unpack this work, I got 24 hours, seven days a week access, and I wouldn't use it all, but you got to sleep. And I didn't want to put the dancers through that, because I'm not a ruler. And so we'd go home and we'd unpack it, and we'd unpack it, and we'd unpack it, and we recognized that in order to unpack rebellion you had to look at every lens. And one of the most important lenses to me is that, you know, songs of rebellion accompany, songs of protest accompany rebellion. And so I baked it into the score, and I also involved musical collaborators to create soundscapes that would identify the ruler, the rebel, and the ruled, so we could connect to them. I would bring you into this world. My hope is that with time, I'm looking for residencies if I wasn't clear, with time that I will be able to involve a drama turge, that I will be able to involve the input and academic awareness of a social psychologist, and have the time to stretch his legs. Because it was created at the National Young Art Center, and their space, the drill box is more like a series of hallways, like museum hallways, I had to figure out how to herd them through the space, and though I gave them the freedom to choose whether they would be the ruler, the rebel, or the ruled, 90 percent of the audience, because I modeled my ruler, and I played her, after Meryl Streep and the double were his product. So they basically listened to me, and did not take the freedom to choose. I laid down rules. And what was really terrifying was to hear them say, I thought I was the ruler, I thought I was the rebel, but in that moment I became ruled, because the story and world that you created was so intimidating. This speaks to the heart of threat. It is not simply a dance work that unpacks rebellion, it's not a work that gives dancers the opportunity to interpret rebellion. It is a work where human beings get to step inside of this world and unpack how they deal with living in a hierarchy, with living inside of that social structure. And when you walk away with it, after I have time in residencies, when you walk away from it, I'm hoping that you walk away feeling a change because you actually experience it yourself. I'm going to now move on to a short video clip from an audience viewer that shows you how threat impacted her, because I don't want it to be about how it impacted me, I want it to be about how it impacted you. Should have gone through those, but here we go. And if you can acknowledge that it is one mind, and you can be frustrated with the ruler for ruling, and you can be frustrated with the rules for being ruled, and frustrated with the rebel for fighting against a system that makes you more comfortable, you don't want to see the change, you don't want to see the discomfort, it makes you, anything that triggers a true human emotion, great. But at the end of it, I would hope that you come to realize that these are all human beings, and there should be a sense of compassion, and they could all assist together. And in this particular climate, I would rather be talking about inclusion and compassion than rebellion. There is rebellion, and then there's the all the way retreating that doesn't apologize, and neither needs to be right or to explain its reasons for the rule, how come to find comfort in one of our directions? We are all ruled by defaulted father-ship and motherhood. Next up, we have Jordan Barnes from right here in New Orleans. Good morning, y'all. How y'all feeling? Good. Okay, I'm a little nervous, I don't need the energy. So I'm starting my time up in five minutes, so I think, yeah. So my name is Jordan, and my photography company is called Demir's Photography. Born and raised in New Orleans, always been surrounded by art. Yeah, I don't know if anyone knows about it, but it stands for Young Aspirations Young Artist. There we go. Went to Xavier, have my degree in art. And yeah, so saying all of that, technically, I was pretty fair out. You know, I was pretty good, but there was nothing, no content behind my work. So one of my mentors, my poking art, she asked me a question, what is it that I'm trying to say? So that's the hardest thing to think about, like, as an artist. Like, what are you trying to say and keep it simple and concise? Yeah. So let's see. All right, I got the slide down. So this is me. Some years back at, right, this was during the Trayvon Martin incident, the verdict came out that, yeah, basically no justice was served, in my opinion. And what bothered me was that a lot of black people couldn't relate to that. They didn't know what was going on. Like, how could injustice still happen? Like, what is this? Like, how can something like this happen in no justice being served? And still today, there's still no justice served. At that time, I was working at Joseph S. Clark. I was teaching some students, and I was like, so like, what does it mean to be black? Like, how does it feel to be black? And they're like, what do you mean? I'm just like a person by myself. So in my mind, I'm like, okay, that's the first step. Like, you don't know that you're black or like, what is blackness when you grow up around black people? So for me, my personal story is that I'm black and gay, and I knew I was gay before I was black. So I didn't realize I was black until I went to Seattle, Washington, and I'm like, oh, that's how that feels. All right. And nothing bad happened, but it's just a feeling that your skin, your skin is the first thing that they see. So I took that concept of feeling black, and I did a whole series of just painting black people black, and that whole experience of them like feeling like what that means. That's just the first start for you to educate yourself to know, you know, what you need to do as far as a black person. So moving forward, I did a whole series called Two Strikes, where I was talking about me being black and gay. And my whole, how did I get to this point, past the trauma and being able to like speak to people about my life? And part of that series, I did, so part of this series, I had, I did a portrait series of black women. And the reason why I did black women is because they poured into me like no other group of people could have poured into me. And I wanted to show honest to them, you know, black women go through a lot as far as like not being honored for anything that they are. On the flip side, everything that they are is used in pop culture now, like the hair type, the body type, the way that we talk, you know, everything about black women, I feel like inspires society now. So I did a whole series where I took pictures of black women in my life. These are not like models that you're going to find. I don't know, I don't know, big, I don't know, monocle, but these are like women in my life. So this is one of my really close friends. This is my sister. This is another mentor of mine. And that's my mom. So basically what I had them do was like, so I showed this series and then people were like asking me like, why, why them, why them? And I'm telling them my personal story. And at that point in time, I didn't feel comfortable telling their story through my words. So what I had all of the models do was write little short stories. So now, like when their portraits are being shown, it's stories from them talking to other people to inspire other people, specifically girls, brown girls, black girls. So moving from that, I wanted, that goes by fast. So basically I did the same thing with gay black men because I felt like that was something that I missed, that I wanted like other black gay men to feel is like that story that I didn't want to tell my narrative. I wanted them to tell their story. So right now I'm currently working on interviews with other black gay men. And I'm also working on a series of black men, period. So this is just black men and I just wanted them to feel beautiful as well. Because I have, this is like one of, this is like my nephew who also didn't feel like he was beautiful. So I feel like it's my job to make sure I illuminate black people and make sure they feel good. So thank you guys. Thank you. That was again Jordan Barnes. And next up we have Terrence M. Johnson from the TMJ Dance Project in Dallas, Texas. Peace and love everyone. My name is Terrence Johnson. I'm the founder and executive artistic director of the Terrence M. Johnson Dance Project. And I'm here today to speak to a work that was funded by the NPN Creation Fund. And if I could get it, can you all press it from back there and just play the video? Awesome. So, and then there's a little sound to it too as well. Awesome. So this piece is called Locker Tree. It is supported by the NPN Creation Fund. It's a co-commissioned by the South Dallas Cultural Center and the Honor Bantam African American Museum in Alexandria, Louisiana. What this piece does is it parallels the life of humans to that of nature. One of the things that I believe that we have lost connection with is our reflection with earth and our connection to the earth. So what this piece does, it parallels the life of humans to that of a tree. The word goes in fourth section. The first section that you are seeing right now is called sunlight because all trees need sunlight and that, like humans, we need sunlight. We need all of those things to grow. The second section is a beautiful, beautiful solo that we call moonlight. And it features how the moon balances everything in the earth. It keeps us in orbit, but it also balances all the waves and the tides of water. And the human body, of course, as we know, is over 80% water. So what it does is it parallels how we as humans are supported by the moon. It then goes into the third section, which is called Darkest Hour. And it speaks to how we grow in our darkest moments. A lot of people don't know, but trees actually grow at night. They actually find their greatest strength at night. And so just like humans, when we go through those hardest times, we find our strength in those times. And then at the very end of the ballet, it goes into greatest rising. And it says that life is just not so bad when we really look at all of our reflections and see that everything is designed for us to grow and to improve. What this piece does that's so unique is that it creates workshops where we actually take our workshop attendees out into nature and be able to engage with movement, be able to hug trees, be able to connect with the earth, and do what many people call grounding. But being able to ground and connect back with the earth, we're able to see that we are truly like trees and our lives should definitely reflect that. The movement that you're seeing right here is actually from the moonlight section. The artist is doing what we consider a caustic balance in the Lester Horton technique. And as I said, this section really speaks to how the moon provides that balance. It provides that those support of the ties and the ways in life that are also represented in our bodies. So I'll let it play to the end because it's actually time to five minutes. This is the darkest rising section. The artist that you see performing now, he actually comes out and he performs through a weave of a whole bunch of dancers that he doesn't know the pattern that they're going through. And so what his objective is is to be able to move effortlessly through these artists to show that even in the darkest moments, as long as we stay focused, we're able to rise, we're able to grow. And so throughout this whole section, you'll see him start in out in front of the line. But as the piece develops and as this section develops, the dancers are all over the place and he has to be able to keep that same movement, be able to keep that same clarity in his movement as he did when they were in once in front of him. The actual work is 30 minutes in length and it is still growing. Another thing with the TMJ Dance Project is that we have an actual interest in making sure that people of color get into the theater. What we notice a lot and what I notice a lot is that there are many children, there are many people that look like me that have never gone into a theater. So our goal is to also to create a lot of proscenium work so that we can attract more people of color into the theater so that we can get them more engaged in this hot form of art. To find out more information about the TMJ Dance Project, you can find us online at www.tmjdanceproject.org. You can also reach out to me directly. Terrence at TMJ Dance Project, we definitely host many workshops. We have performances. We also have residencies that we are also available for as well. Thank you all so much. I give thanks. Thank you, Terrence. And now we're going to hear from Michelle Fuji from Portland, Oregon. Welcome, Michelle. Good morning. I hope it's a good morning for all. My name is Michelle Fuji. I am a taiko artist and co-director of Unit Solzl, a taiko ensemble and dance ensemble based in Portland, Oregon. And Solzl can be translated into three ways. It can mean from Japanese. Solzl from Japanese can mean imagination. Solzl can mean creation. And Solzl can mean noisy. And so we hope that we are creating imaginative works for the art form of taiko that are heard within our communities. And for us, building all of that is super important, the way that we devise our work. And I'm going to do my first click. There we go. The kind of work that we create is telling stories of identity, centered around home, displacement, and belonging. Listening is really important to us. And so we do a lot of community engagement. And we believe the drum is a way in which we can be powerful, we can be loud, we can also be really vulnerable. And through that, we believe we build that unity to hear stories, but also to recognize space in place. For us, as we walk and we perform, we think and listen to where we are and where we're working. The essence of Unit Solzl is to tell stories, weaving taiko Japanese folk dance and storytelling into contemporary and expressive blends, sound shaped by form and movement. The current work that we are developing is called Constant State of Otherness. And it's an NPN Creation and Development Fund award. Thank you so much. With five commissioners, just calling it out because they've been all amazing. Dance plays, Asian Arts Initiative, Mirno Loy, as well as two organ presenters, Risk Reward and, or I should say organ presenters, Risk Reward in Portland and Caldera Arts. And Constant State of Otherness was honestly a post-2016 re-triggering. As rhetoric was starting to happen around this divisiveness, compartmentalization, distancing, all of these things were starting to be felt within me, starting to regurgitate within me as I started to recognize all of this othering that I had lived through and realized that I had normalized that identity within myself. And as I was hearing all of this toxicity, I was realizing that I needed to explore that within the work, not only for myself, but also for the communities around me. This particular example is the first iteration of some of the exploration, building a paper labyrinth in Sister's Organ as we're walking around seeing the trauma of trees that had been burned down in a fire that had almost burned down this building. And as that had happened, we took pictures of these uprooted trees and thinking about the trauma of their lives. And as we walk through this labyrinth that we created of their roots, what is all the traumas and how do we respect that, not only with the nature within ourselves, finding objects and inviting audience to listen to their community. And we did that for ourselves. And as they watch us, how do they witness us and build empathetic practice as we go through our own life as we journey through that path? We've been going through community engagement with many of our co-commissioners, listening to stories. We've been botting their words, writing it down, putting it within our bodies, dancing upon it, moving on it, playing with it, and recognizing that all these words and stories come from history, come from lineage, come from experiences that have been there for a long time. So as we dance upon this, how is that embodying into our own selves? In this next sort of iteration, I'm just gonna have that play as I talk. This is one of our works that we're just discovering control and power. And we ask lots of questions, how have I been othered? How have I othered myself? How have I othered others? Recognizes those daily grocery store conversations for me? It's that quintessential question, where are you from? No, really, where are you from? And I'm profiling that person to decide how I'm gonna answer. So within all of this, we are going into this idea of how can this drum go back to its history, be loud and proud, really express that way of hearing voice, but also of representing today. Thank you. Thank you. Again, that was Michelle Fuji from Portland, and now we have James Alastair Sprang from Philly. Come on up. What's up, everybody? Could I ask your permission to tell my story? Let's do a little call and response. Cool. When I say crick, could you say crack, please? Crick. Crick. Crick. Ooh, okay, cool. Thank you. Sweet. I'm a storyteller, and I'm a multi-disciplinary artist, and I believe that poetics, gesture, and documentation, no matter what discipline you're working with, are the foundational building blocks for storytelling. And so, sorry, you're gonna be hearing some deep breaths and some quivering of the voice because I'm a little nervous. It's a pleasure to be here, and I've learned a lot, so thank you very much. My work, like my personality, is kinda has this introvert, extrovert split, right? So I make images, I perform poetic gestures, one could say, in my studio by myself, and I document them, and I make images, and I make objects that don't need my presence to communicate meaning. And then the other part of my practice is figuring out how I can transfer the same ideas with my body. So I'm just gonna talk you through this one project that I'm finalizing now, and then tell you what I'm looking for, tell you what I need. All right, so this project is called Turning Towards a Radical Listening, and is based on thinking about concrete as a material analogy. It's this industrial material. It's this industrial material that paves our throwaways. It functions as the foundation for our institutions and our cultural centers, right? It's this material that can take on any form, any texture, any color. It is made up of aggregate, deasporic pieces of earth that come together and are fixed by a matrix. And so I began pouring concrete in my studio and putting dumb amounts of pigment into it, super abundant amounts of pigment. So much so that when the concrete cured, it was structurally unsound, and it would fragment. And so I would take these fragments and I would build mounds in my personal space, right? And as many of us know, you go to most cultures, most societies, and you go back far enough. And there's a practice of building, of stacking stones to mark sites, a burial, mourning, right, mythology. That's what I was doing. Morning in my studio. And so the question was, how could I think about concrete? How could I think about concrete poetry? How could I think about music, concrets, and generate a sonic experience that could live alongside these photographs? And so I collaborated with a good friend, his name's Bobby McElver, and Bobby has built one of three wayfield synthesis arrays in the country. And this is a sound system that allows us to make sonic holograms. So in the same way that I'm taking concrete fragments and generating landscapes, now I'm able to take these sonic fragments and generate soundscapes. And so that led to turning towards a radical listening, the performance aspect, which is a 70 minute listening experience in which there are just under 200 speakers in the room, right? And we can place sound very precisely. I can place a voice in the front row so that the third row cannot hear it. And I can have that voice travel from the front row to the back row. I can sculpt space with disembodied voices. And the whole room is mic'd. So you're having this experience where you're sitting in a room and you're listening to voices of people that you may or may not identify with. And you're hearing those voices travel past you, surround you, and you're watching as this biased algorithm fails to represent your sonic experience. It's somewhat akin to imagine whoever's typing, I can't see you, but imagine they were typing the lyrics to 50 cents many men right now while I was talking. You feel me? So that's the experience. You're sitting in a room, you're looking at this monumental projection, right? It's Google's algorithm, which is two tiered. The first tier is frequency recognition. The second tier is phrase recognition, right? And as you're watching this concrete poetry document itself and materialize in real time, you're watching as I break it apart. And then I read it back to you. And people ask, how can you tour a piece with 200 speakers? This is what it looks like. So I'm looking to work with institutions that are interested in gray spaces, right? Using the viewing constructs of the gallery space and the viewing construct of the Black Box Theater to tell new and important stories. Thank you so much. Thank you, James. Again, that was James Alistair Sprang from Philadelphia. And next up we have, we're gonna hear from Basil from Pierre South Dakota. Come on up. How am I doing? I'm good, I'm doing well. I'm very happy to be able to share my experience with you. My name is Talyn, I go by Basil. I am from originally Eagle Butte and Crow Creek, South Dakota on a road called Bad Nation. Malakota, Nadama, Lakota, and Dakota. And my heart and my spirit are very full. I'm very happy to the point where I'm like crying almost every second here. And I thank you all for that. And I hope that I can pour all of that fullness out of me for you right now. Through the assistance and vital support of First Peoples Fund, James Picotis and TS The Solution, I was able to do a residency where we worked on in five days a 24-track album entitled Traveling the Multiverse with Iktomi. Iktomi is our trickster spirit. He teaches us what not to do, but he does so in a really funny, twisted, crazy way. And so traveling the multiverse with Iktomi is traveling the universes of different people as Iktomi travels throughout, going through, giving them their medicine. This is a song from that album. And to the sound person, thank you so much. You might want to turn my mic down a lot at first because I kind of yell through this. There should be audio that we turn that way up. I don't see mommy, oh nice zombie. Not at the living dead, just breathe calmly. Talk back to this bustle with the knife we saw me. But only if the fist don't solve the problem. You know I caused them, pray to God. Send me a bit just to rip one off. Cause ain't nothing working, how could I be? Just need blood. Matured around thugs, I must be one. Grow up with the best so I can't detest 51 bad nations till the death. Down the brand right now after the session. Slip a mid hit, no taking a breath. 20 on a plane of Philly planning my return. Before I seen the show, I had known of Heisenberg. Before the show was visiting like how it is today. Honestly, this life has kind of always been this way. Praying for the demons to relinquish every soul. Fill me down with a bowl. Sorry this will place a message disrespect to hell. We ain't got the time to clean the home before you show. Cause auntie had just died this night. That's just what I was told. While we're on this phone, she can let me show you round. This my younger cousin through, he's always sleeping now. We're happy we were still alive, we would be in town. Messing with each other all the time, just teasing around. I see my older brother and he's always grieving now. Sometimes he cries for me, we need each other now. Some leads to the dance so the death will hold him down. Now walk this way, there's just a couple rooms up in this house. Sorry for the bags, I'm used to moving now. Sorry for the dance that I had left upon the couch. I've been served for crazy in the Disney, but summer. I've been dreaming, heavy streaming, I ain't even plumber. Still get down and dirty just to maintain all my numbers. Cause poverty taught me to be a budget for a wonder. Had me feeling super human back when I was younger. Had my friends believing that I ain't know the hunger. That's why these ones that scheme on me, can dangle chains in front of me. I ain't carry shit on me already who I wanna be. To take a whole lot, never really get one over me, especially the old to me, especially the soul to me. Back in the Philly, I was drowning in pollution. Had me feeling like I wasn't getting any younger. So in times when I was high, I couldn't get my strunka. I was typing up a plan to be back on my land. I walked on my post-traumatic memories that jam. But once was open door between me and my fam. I could step up in the club and spend at least a grand. But still feel like I'm just another pebble in the sand. The thunder chased me home. I know I needed that. My fam's new reality, I'm truly bleeding that. Embarked on this road, there's never going back. The longer my head gets, shows how far I am from that. First step, last step to me that was the same. Either one could be considered happiness or pain. Might come up a superstar or stray away from fame. Community means more to me than growing any name. I just want a memory of me to never fade. Learn tricks of the trade from successes and mistakes. Always be a real one, don't settle for the fake. No matter how you try, you can't run away from fate. I cried a lot for zade. I cried a lot for wake. Saying this doesn't really feel like a mistake. The sacrifice is inaccessible, taking the toll. Counting many coups I never ever stole. But I don't think that I could ever let go of my soul. I tried so many times, I know creative knows. So I'm just here just trying to live and do it for my home. Do it for my home, for the rest I will grow. Thank you. Thank you, Bazel. Bazel, I'm with you on the opening heart and on the almost crying from joy. I'm feeling very lucky to be here. So that's a testament to NPN and that's a testament of the power of bringing us together in person. Thank you. We have one more, one more. It's gonna be, oh no, two more. We have two more. Next up is Lauren Turner, also from New Orleans. Lauren's not here, couldn't make it. Okay, so we do have one more. And I was psychic there. The one more is Juma Tatu Poe, also from Philly. Come on up. This is an individual in community and community in an individual. This is a game and rhythm is key. This game is both folk practice and the court practice. This is Black Queer Alien Intimacy Teamwork in Grace. This is Black Queer Alien Royalty, Magic and Megalomania. This is a family show with nudity and sexual themes. This is a deep lower back curve and a stomp through the universe. This is an interrogation and sometimes refusal of art institutions. This is an interrogation of the space for Black Queer Aliens on the sidewalks in our neighborhoods. This is an interrogation of our, of belonging. This is a formation, is a collaboration between myself and J-set artist, Juma and Dante Beachen. So, this is a formation, is the final work and the series of works called, excuse me, Let Him Move You, and that I've been working on for about a decade with Dante. The latest project in that series is this formation. I'm feeling urges to follow spirit directions into other territories of research now. The terrestrial projects, which will probably be another decade of work is a conversation through performance between Black and Indigenous artists from the US and Brazil. Dealing with the notion of human as earth, not on the earth, not with the earth. I guess it's gonna be dealing with maybe beach, maybe desert, maybe farm, and the idea of the invention of court dances and the human problems with court and royalty and empire. I've been using colored contact lenses in performance over the last decade. It feels like Black queer folks need to be able to just transform into whatever the fuck. Now, Jimetatou is transforming into me. Hello, my name is Mariah Leathers and I'm the managing producer for Jimetatou Po and all of his creations. And I'm gonna read a few words to you. Sorry, I'm reading. The works in the Let Him Move You series are deeply collaborative, composed of a collection of main ensemble artists, collaborators, local artists who join us for a period and presenters who also help situate us in places where we are guests and help contextualize us in the place and the place within us. Working within and through community and place is everything about this work. Formation has received NPN Creation Fund and National Dance Project support. This is the part you really need to listen to. We're looking for presenting partners in the Southern region. J-Set originates from the South and we really need to bring this work back home. And did we get the 30 seconds? That was our timer, so thank you very much. If you want to know more about Let Him Move You or Terrestrial, please come speak with either of us. So that was the art slam. We are now gonna switch over to an art burst. So you should stay put. I think we're just gonna change the stage over. I'm gonna go to the bathroom personally, but you know, feel free to like, but we don't officially have a break because there's no time. And remember, if you were here the first day, the person that asked you all your astrological signs, Dayfina, it's her birthday today. So if you see her, you know, just say happy birthday Sagittarius. Okay, stay here. Check, check, check. Yeah, one, two. Mike, check. One, two. Check, check. Mike, check. One, two. Check, check. Welcome, welcome back. We're gonna get started. I'm gonna robot till you take your seats. I can't do the robot. My name is Salome Asega. I am a new media artist who plays with technology and sound. I am a new NPN board member. It's my first time at the NPN conference. And I'm so excited to be here. I'm learning so, so much. So welcome back. We're gonna start with, we're gonna, we're starting with Art Burst. There are four performances. So we'll just jump right into the first one. Alexa Dawson. Alexa Dawson presents a sultry spirited performance with original music and a warm honey mixed with prairie dirt voice. Her newest album, Music as Medicine, releases in November, 2019. December 6th, new date. The founding member of Kansas folk homegrown favorite, Weed of Skirts, formerly the Skirts. Alexa is a born entertainer and skilled songwriter. Two albums self produced by the Skirts, Many Moons and Mother, present a collection of songs that are influenced by her Padawomani and Oklahoma heritage. Nature, family, love and loss, all with a hopeful and heartfelt tone. Alexa performs solo with the blue folk trio and with Weed of Skirts at private events and public events, gatherings, pubs and campfires. Welcome Alexa. Let me go out, slow me. Bojo, bobancha. I'm Ondesh Nekas. Bo de Wadami, Anishinaabe Kweyendal, Shishi Bandal, Oklahoma and Dolchbia, Manakansas and Shkode and Dera. My name is Alexa Dawson, but my community calls me Amo. And I come from the Citizen Padawomani Nation in what we call Oklahoma. And I live on Kha'an Osage on ancestral territory in the beautiful Flint Hills of Kansas on the tallgrass prairie. So my album Music is Medicine was released on December 6th with Lost Cowgirl Records. And it was a project that was conceived when a couple of streams of my life sort of came to a convergence. I was ready for a solo career. My hobby bands have always been fun for the last 20 years, but I really wanted to support myself with my craft. And so I needed to do that buoyantly and moving forward and that meant going out of my own, which was a very scary thing to do. Another thing that I wanted to do was to reconnect with my ancestral elements. So my Padawomani Nation exists in Oklahoma after three forced removals. And our ancestral territory is in the Great Lakes. And I wanted to reconnect with that maple and that sweetgrass and that birch bark and those things, those elements, those relatives that my ancestors had to leave behind. So I was awarded a grant with First Peoples Fund to complete the project. And I'm here with my cohorts and it's been commented that we are rolled in deep. And yes, we are. So anyway, I really expected the research to go into that Padawomani lineage. But things as they do take a turn when you're really seeking to connect with spirit and to see what art needs to come out into the world. And so there's a photograph that I wanna share with you here. This is my mother's, mother's, mother's, mother's, mother. We had babies early, so that's why we have pictures of her. But so my daughters are her seventh generation. And in the Anishinaabe prophecy, the seventh generation is that generation that will go and collect the things that were left along the path. And so I am situating myself deliberately in a position to be a good descendant and a good ancestor. My gosh. So this song reminds me of her because I feel like I channeled her for this. Everyone knows this feeling in relationships. You might recognize yourself in it there. Nothing's about one thing. It's also a little bit about in this patriarchy, even trying to be a feminist is difficult. So like you can keep your maiden name but isn't that your dad's name? And when does a woman have her own name in this society? So it's called his name. And I think that in writing and performing this song, I am able to heal something within her because I can't travel back in time, but I can heal what of her is left in me. Okay. His name. It's a quiet love out of the way, it's way. Miigwech. Iguyan. Thank you. I'm looking for venues and I just want to say that my name starts with an E. Not an A. E-L-E-X-A-Dawson.com. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Alexa. Give it up for Alexa one more time. So next up we have Jelisa Roberts. Jelisa is an artivist, choreographer, and educator using dance as a language and a means to process the world. Spark Conversation and Build Community. Welcome, Jelisa. I'm gonna set a timer for myself because I can go on and on with this. But like she said, like they said, I really like using Dance with Spark Conversation and I particularly really like working in communities, especially if people don't consider themselves dancers to really like subvert and activate that at its core, dance is just moving through space and time with energy. And when I thought about the conference, I got really excited because I love being here with y'all. I love the peer forums. I love everything, but we spend so much time sitting. And so I offered to offer some movement to us after days of sitting and after a night of hopefully a really good rum punch party. And in a morning where everybody's feeling just a little like, right? Does that work for y'all? Okay, so what I've been doing with my students, with other dancers in all communities that I go to, and it's really relevant for this conference. We've been talking a lot about how we name things. And one of the first words that you really get good at is writing your name. So I'm gonna first ask you to spend just 20 seconds with your finger or with a pencil writing your name. It can be your first name, your last name, all of your names, just one of your names. Just spend 20 seconds. Think about the different ways that you write it. It might be incursive, it might be bigger, it might be smaller. Just take 10 seconds to get that back in your memory and your finger. Good? Okay, so now I'm gonna ask you to think about that part of your body that might just be a little tight, right? Or your favorite part of the body. And just yell some body parts out so we can hear them. Booty, back, neck, my right hip, shoulder blades, hands, elbows. I have students tell me kidney or spine, right? And we're gonna take and we're gonna extend what we just did with our fingers, with our pens. So I offer you the opportunity to take space. To stand up, you can sit down. I would encourage you not to use your finger because we've just done that. But maybe think about that tight body part that you might wanna activate. Think about if your paper is gonna be on the floor. Is it gonna be in front of you? Is it gonna be on the ceiling? Is it gonna be all around? We ready? And we're gonna take about 30 seconds. Think about the same things. Go, you might make it really small. You might decide to make it really big. If you're using a two-limbed body part, you might decide to change and get a little bit ambidextrous. Take about 15. How do you dot your eyes if you have them? How do you cross your teeth? A little shake. How's that feel? Good. Okay, so my hope is that you got a little bit of tightness out of those tight body parts. Let's think about your favorite body part. For me, I really like my hips, right? You might, it might be a part that you don't get to move a lot. Like ribcage. You might wanna explore some dizziness with your head, but we're gonna do this one more time. If you made things really big, think about how small. If you did print, think about cursive. Think about exploring it just a little bit more. Are we ready? Okay, let's go. Are your letters stacking on top of each other? They might need to travel. Remember, your paper can be anywhere. It's a count and spell my name at the same time. Two. One more time, give it a deep breath in. Give it a little shake out. Somebody give me a body part. Knees. I heard knees first, and I'm gonna challenge myself cause they've been a little sore. So I have four names. My first name, Julissa, came from my grandmother. She fell in love with a different world and named me after her favorite guy, Knee's character. I don't know where Danielle came from. There's a confusing story about maybe a cousin or a god sister. We don't know. Nicola is my mom's second middle name until she gave it to me, sent Mark over to eat, and then my dad passed on that good Robert's last name and carried it on. So I, especially after this conference, have been really interested in names, how we name things, why we name things, and really taking that movement and exploring how it's connected to our ideas of identity. I encourage you to take this same movement, even if you don't consider yourself an answer, because it's a really good way to get things moving and also pay homage to how you call yourself or how you might call space or how you might wanna subvert language if you're really upset in ways that you don't have to say the things that might box you in. So that's my offering to take that with you so that it ripples. And then we can all think about it. Is this one working? Yep. All right, can you hear me? Yeah. So Lisa, so next up we have Rebecca Moase and Ron Reagan. Hills is a seven woman harmonic meditation on the transcendental possibilities of song during the middle passage. Experienced within an interactive and acoustically rich sculptural environment that invokes those infamations, this interdisciplinary ritual performance explores singing as a survival tool and asks, what does freedom sound like in a space of confinement? Vessels conjures two worlds, the carceral world of the slave ship and a physical and psychic floating prison and the world of the spirit, a place of freedom. Vessels is a work of speculative history. As such, we do not seek to restage the middle passage. Rather, we attempt to invoke and transmute its cultural, psychic and spiritual wounds as an act of remembrance and imagination and to contribute towards intergenerational healing. Welcome, Rebecca and Ron. Oh, Baba Jevine. Oh, doña ma sue jese. Oh, no more in dida doña ma. Oh, ma jevine. Oh doña ma sue jese. Oh, no more in dida doña ma. Oh, na mia. Oh, Baba Jevine. Good morning everyone. My name is Rebekah Mwasa. I am the instigator of Vepel Performance and co-shaper along with Ron Reagan. These beautiful low notes you heard there in the back. Thank you so much. So I feel like y'all have heard all the things that I was going to say because it was not reading. So let's see if this works. So as was introduced before by Salome, Vessels is a harmonic meditation on the middle passage that investigates the question what does freedom sound like in a space of confinement. The intention for the piece was to be a part of instigating the healing of the people, places, stories and the imagination that we hold for descendants of those who were trafficked during the middle passage during the transatlantic slave trade. We've been working on the piece for five years. It was co-commissioned by the Junebug Productions. I think Stephanie's over there. And the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia through the Creation Fund of the National Performance Network. We premiered the work in March of this year in Philadelphia. It will be here in New Orleans in the spring of next year and then we're touring. So come talk to us about touring. I just want to read you a little about what we believe. We believe that our ancestors' freedom tools live in our bodies and can be activated. Healing is continuous and intentional practice rooted in the relationship of the individual to the collective and to the divine. A wound must be named and encountered to be healed. The past holds lessons and dreams for the present that allows us to grow into a liberated future. Now is the place to practice freedom. So the way that we've done this over the last five years is to center black women very, very specifically, very, very devoutly and with deep commitment in the process. So I want y'all to know that. And yeah, we love to share the work. We're looking to tour around the country and what are available. Please feel free to check out our contact and booking page. We just built this beautiful electronic press kit. We've got a lot more information about the piece, myself, Ron and other members of the ensemble that are here have cards. So if you want to take the information with you, there's also cards out on the table. And just to also lift up, we were supported by the National Performance Network National Theater Project Creation and Touring Grant. So we also have funds available to support us touring. Thank you so much. Is it on now? Yes. Okay. In time for the last art first. Welcome Leilani Chan, Founding Artistic Director of Teata Productions, a nomadic theater of color based in Los Angeles. Chan is currently the 2019-20 Santa Monica Artist Fellowship, a fellow and co-chair of the National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival to be held in Hawaii in August 2020. Teata's Masters of the Currents premiered in 2017 at the Honolulu Theater of Youth and toured to Maui Arts and Cultural Center, University of Hawaii, Hilo, Brava Theater Center, and Pangea World Theater Awards, including NIFA's National Theater Project Map Fund, NEA, NET, and is Chan's fourth NPN Creation Fund. Welcome Leilani. Thank you. Amying is actually an artist talk, not an artist burst. So this is my first four-way into Ted style presentation. So let's see how we do. It is about to be 2020 and the waters are rising. Here in a place that is still recovering and bracing for the next flood or hurricane, I know I don't need to tell y'all. Let me hear the places where the waters are rising. Call them out. Florida, Atlanta, Boston, New York, Miami, Bahamas, Thailand, Laos. It's about to be 2020 and the water is rising. Make no mistake about it. Climate change is here. While we can talk about global warming, melting glaciers, plastic straws, reduced reuse, recycle, what does climate change really look like in places yet to be hit by disaster? It looks like migration, mass migration. The people on the forefront of climate change, these are the people on the forefront. These are the first wave of climate refugees. This community has been arriving in increasing numbers from the small islands and atolls of the Pacific region called Micronesia. In case you need to know where, there are many reasons Micronesians have been coming to the U.S. in increasing numbers. One is because of a post- World War II treaty called the COFA agreement in which the U.S. promised to provide free access to education and healthcare in exchange. The U.S. would have the privilege of military and economic exclusivity in the region and be able to test nuclear bombs on their islands. As a result of this over 30-year-old treaty, between the U.S. and the Micronesian Federated States of Micronesia, Micronesians have been plunged into poverty and an increase in serious health issues while having limited access to healthcare and economic opportunities in their own countries. Meanwhile, the waters are rising and warming. Another thing you need to know about the Micronesian community is that they have been navigating the Pacific Ocean for centuries long before Captain Cook ever found his way to Hawaii or Polynesia. This is Papamal from Satowal who is credited for reviving the indigenous practice of navigating the ocean using only the stars and currents and he helped the native Hawaiians reclaim that practice as well. I was born and raised in Hawaii. Like many artists do, I've left Hawaii after high school for opportunities because if you're not working in the tourism industry, your opportunities in Hawaii are very limited. Many of you know my partner in life in art, Ova Sao Pang. Thank you. For over a decade, we had been touring a play called Refugee Nation, which was funded by our Commissioned by an NPN Creation Fund, and this play was about the stories of Laotian refugees in the U.S. That's me, seven months pregnant at Intermedia Arts. That was nine years ago. And we had found out that the Micronesian community in Hawaii was experiencing many of the same issues that the Southeast Asian refugee community was experiencing. So since both of us grew up in Hawaii, we decided as artists, maybe this is a way we could kokuwa give back and help in our homeland as artists. I put way too many slides so I'm going to try to quickly go through them. So this is Inocenta Sound Kiku. Inocenta is our community navigator, and she invited us to teach a theater workshop with her youth at Pacific Voices. And we did our usual workshop creating images and tabloids inspired by their own experiences. Almost every image included dead bodies and guns. This is Hawaii, right? So I asked them, wait, are you doing something from your real life or from a movie? And they said, no, this is real. This just happened outside. Pacific Voices is located here at Kohio Park Terrace, also known to many of us as KPT, which is the largest housing project in Hawaii. And there's two buildings like this that you can see from the freeway. Inocenta's Pacific Voice youth was housed in this building, and for her she created this space where youth could learn their practice, learn their tradition and their language because here they were losing their language and losing their culture and being faced with a lot of prejudice from the community, from racial profiling to teachers assuming they don't want to be educated. So when we started these workshops, we had no idea if we would be able to have Micronesian actors in the show, but we just approached the workshops by finding ways to make sure the participants felt comfortable and felt they belonged. So this meant we had to give up on some of our traditional, trained professional attitude, right? So if we're asking this community to share their stories with us and that our play was going to be based on their stories, they were the experts, not us. Over the next three years, we taught workshops with various community groups. This is a group of at-risk youth who are either on parole or close to going to juvie, and they taught us that the community, even on the radio, is called Kakaroches. This is an elder, Tamana Poli, who is a master navigator himself. He gave us the title to our show, which is Masters of the Currents. From a quote he said at the UN, which was, we were once master navigators. Now we are slaves to the US dollar. We continued many more workshops with our experts over the years, and we culminated with two different sharings with over 30 people involved in those sharings. And we worked with different groups, and we had the Pacific Voices dancers as also part of the guest performers, actually part of the performers. They knew all the lines to the show by the time we were done. And ultimately, we were able to get four out of five of our cast members were Micronesian actors, who had their, some of them had their first experiences in our workshops. And of course, we convinced InoSense to go on tour with us as our elder in the cast. We can't do it without her. There's no way. So the show has toured to Honolulu, Maui, Hilo. We finally got to the continent, thanks to Brava Center for the Arts, and went to San Francisco, and lastly this year in Minneapolis to Pangea World Theater. And I want to fast forward to this experience. There were great, amazing community experiences wherever we went. But I want to fast forward to Minnesota because that happened recently, and it was huge. As Hawaii and Saipan and Guam have gotten the brunt of the Exodus from Micronesia, there are communities growing all over the country, because like most immigrant communities, they're looking for the places where they can work and rebuild. And one of these places is Milan, Minnesota, not Ilan, but Milan, Minnesota. And it's three hours away from Minneapolis. And so we're, how are we going to get these people to see this show? And this is for them, and we need to find them. So we all piled into our rented minivan and Adeline Carreras, her car, thank you, her hot red SUV, and drove out the three hour drive, and we didn't know if anyone would show up. We needed the help making the connection. These are two professors who are Micronesian at the University of Minnesota in the Indigenous Studies Department. They helped us to connect with what he calls the Mylanesians, because he's been working with them to build their own canoe for the Mississippi River. And so we did the drive, didn't know if anyone would show up, and we pulled up, and there are all these people wearing chicky skirts, like the one I'm wearing. And the middle of Middle America, in the middle of the flatlands of Minnesota, here are these women in their traditional chicky skirts, proudly wearing them. And we're coming up to their community center, which is a gym. And so we thought maybe 20 people would show up, and they just kept pouring in. So we did this arena style theater workshop with everyone, and then we did a 10 minute excerpt, and it was just like mega, mega, mega excerpt workshop. And it was just a transformative experience for all of us, for my cast members, for myself. I sewed t-shirts out of the back of the rented minivan. I felt so hip-hop. I was so cool. And then we drove back. And finally, when they got to see the show, this is how they thanked us. Give the shaky video. It was totally spontaneous. And I'm going to fast forward through these beautiful shots of our amazing show, with great writing and acting, and gorgeous video by John Osato. Yeah, gorgeous, gorgeous. And you know, the director's pretty awesome, myself, that is. And you know, I feel like no video could give you the real experience of the live show, because it is awesome. But I do want to just tell you one more story about our professor Diaz, who had brought a canoe from Guam, which is a traditional Micronesian canoe, to Minneapolis, and was working with the indigenous nations of the Twin Cities region to share navigation practices of river, ocean, using the stars and currents. And he said, oh, you guys, come on my canoe. And it was tech week. And I was like, oh, hell yeah, we'll stop tech week for you. So we went and we all got into a traditional, traditional Micronesian canoe in the Mississippi River. We brought Panjio World Theater with us. I'm not sure Deepunker was too pleased, but you know, he did it. Proud of you. And it was just a tremendous experience. Some of my cast members had never been in a traditional canoe. I had never been in a traditional canoe. And of course, Ina Senza was like, at home, telling us what to do. We were all in sweats, and she was in her beautiful cheeky skirt, just paddling away while we were like, ah, this is hot. So it was a tremendous experience. And I'm happy to talk to you more about it. Thank you to everyone who made it possible. Mahalo. Last time up that ramp. Thank you Marlène and Salome for emceeing us this morning. And thank you to all the artists who shared with us today. I have some thoughts I want to share, but I'm going to get some of the announcement-y stuff out of the way. I'm sure everybody's really excited to continue hearing me giving announcements. But I don't want to end with announcements. That feels weird. So we're going to roll with this. We have a dance party tonight. It's at the Ache Powerhouse. For those of you who've been to the conference before, you know that we used to do a late night party, which our local hosts always planned and organized. And then we also did a closing night party, and we thought let's just merge these together. Also it's New Orleans. Every party is going to be a late night party and a dance party and a glitter party and all the things. So our local hosts, Ache, the Contemporary Arts Center and Junebug have collaborated together to organize this party for us tonight at Ache. And we're super excited about that. Wear your dancing shoes, whatever that means to you. There will be a dance-off, and we're going to have a great time over there. We have tours this afternoon. Really extraordinary tours, again, that our local folks have organized for us here. We've been sitting in this space for a long time. We've been here in this hotel. Hopefully you've also gotten out into the city, but we are here in this place, Bulbancha, New Orleans. And the opportunity to be in this community is really important. And so for folks who are participating in those tours this afternoon, I hope you have a really wonderful time. As I mentioned the other day, they are sold out, but we've been able to get everybody on to the tours in the last couple of days. So just show up and we'll figure out how to get you places. Let's see, last thing. We have a Final Practica. I still like saying that word. Final Practica today during lunchtime, and it is being organized by Taylor Bergen from Legion Arts. It's a really incredibly important topic, which is succession and managing massive organizational change. So folks who want to share lunch with Taylor and have that conversation, that's going to happen today. Okay, I think that's good for all that stuff. So I have a few remarks I just want to share, and then I'm going to ask somebody else to come up and actually have the last word of this conference. I open the conference by saying that I hope, rather than me presenting a state of the NPN speech, that the conference would speak for itself. And as many people know, we've gone through a lot of changes in the last three years. I think if there's one thing to really pinpoint for us, it has been the move from implicit to explicit around racial and cultural justice. And as I've experienced the last few days here with all of you, I feel that change. I feel that shift. I hope that you have too. It's not an endpoint. It's not an arrival. It's an ongoing continuing practice, and it is an incredible honor to be in this work with all of you. So the conference itself can speak for where we are and where we've come from and the journey that we've been on. But I want to say a little bit about where we're going. The strategic plan that we released last year was lofty and aspirational, but also lacking in some concrete things like benchmarks and goals. So that's what we're doing now, operationalizing this vision, this mission, and thinking about what it really means in practice to be explicitly committed to racial and cultural justice, what it really means in practice to build artist power, what it really means in practice to undo systems and to upend systems change in arts and philanthropy, which includes figuring out which ones we tweak from the inside and which ones just need to blow the fuck up. And we do this work with all of you and hope we continue to do this with all of you. This work requires us to be more nimble and more nimble than NPN has always been. And that's not always graceful. It's not always comfortable, but we're excited to do it. And this conference in particular being here in New Orleans hosting you all here in our city feels really good to the future of this work. We started the conference invoking joy and thank you Davefina for inviting us to start in that way. Marlen mentioned joy this morning as well. Lots of folks have mentioned joy today. And of course we also have rage. The opening session Monique talked about anger and being furious at what has been erased and what we haven't known. And so I think we hold those two things together, the rage and the joy and walk this path together with those two things. And while we do a lot of other work throughout the year, this annual conference always feels like a kind of milestone and to invoke where we're going any year from now and hopefully we will see you all back. Next year, December 8th to the 11th specifically in Chicago. And I know December in Chicago. Chicago happens to be my hometown, so I know December in Chicago. And we actually thought about the weather and we thought about moving it a little bit earlier, but there's this thing that's happening. November 3rd, 2020. It's a thing. Maybe you've heard of it. And I think all of our energies, all of our collective energies are going to be focused on that thing. And none of us know what November 3rd is going to hold, but I know that in the weeks that follow, I want to be with all of you. So we hope you'll come back next December in Chicago. And as we think about this next year and the uncertainty and the complexity and the anger and the joy, we look always to our artists and to our elders to help light that way. And I would like to invite an extraordinary woman to join me up here and share some final thoughts. Stephanie McKee. So as some of you know, on February 14th of 2019, John Milton O'Neill Jr. entered the ancestral realm. He left behind a wife, a daughter, a son, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, many in-laws, a host of nieces, nephews, relatives, friends. He also left us his legacy of art, of organizing a pedagogy, of writing a blueprint for Junebug Productions, the organization that he founded in 1980 and where he served as the artistic director until his retirement in 2011. I thought it was really, I was flipping through emails, and I have a lot of emails from John. I have a lot, he liked to write. He liked to write in long emails, very thoughtful emails. And I found an email that I often refer to when I feel like this work is really hard. And I think all of us know how difficult this work is, but it was a reminder to me that this is a place that we've all been, it's a place that we know, as Sonny Patterson would say, we know this place, right? And to remind us that we know this place and we know how to navigate this because we're still here. We're still here. And so if you'll allow me, I'd like to share this letter that John wrote in 2012. Actually, he wrote this letter. He sent it to me first to say, hey, this is like one of those times people might not know, but Junebug has had many near-death experiences. And this was one of those moments of, you know, we may have to close the doors to Junebug. And so we decided, hey, let's get out in front of this, let's let people know where we are with this, and let's just own where we are. This isn't anything new. And we had one brave funder who stepped up and said, you know what, I'm not afraid of what this is, but this was our letter. This is the letter that he wrote. Now the movement faces new challenges. We're in the midst of a major, yet old, so familiar changes that seem familiar, but that we still can't seem to understand. I feel like one of the clownish tramps circling a barren spot in the road waiting for Godot. We boast of our woefully inadequate accomplishments. We marvel in ignorant curiosity at things found on the trail so well traveled by our forebearers, who left what seemed like signs unknown, except that the rhythms that they found in their bones resonates in ours. The dances that they found in their bodies make us wish to dance as they did with only drums as teachers. The songs that they found in their throats and fingers make us wish to play and to sing the music and the stories which they gifted the world to make the world a more friendly place to be if only for a moment. Much that remains unknown is because the artists who will craft the curios into language we can understand still wait for their models and their mentors to arrive. Junebug holds a place in the long, perhaps even infinite march in search of these stories that can help us find how to survive the pitfalls, which threaten all who want to try to march on singing the South African fighting song. We are the ones we've been waiting for. John always signed his emails, yours in the struggle. But what a lot of people don't know that that became a shorthand for something that was longer. The full statement is yours in the struggle to make this world a better place for all of us. Where are you in that struggle? Where will we be in that struggle collectively? John and so many other people who have crossed on to the ancestral realm have left us a blueprint and an ancestral responsibility to continue to march on. And though this might be hard, I want to remind us that we are still here. We are still here. After many economies have tanked, we are still here. The artwork that we make matters. It is a reflection of our past, our present, and we, more than anybody else in the world, are able to craft the future that we want and that we see. We are inspiration. We are spirit. We are moving. Are you with me? Are you with me? Are you with me? I remain yours in the struggle. So as we sing and dance our way out of this room, y'all can stay on your feet. It's totally fine. In fact, I encourage it. I just want to close out with some thank yous and feel free to shout your own thank yous from your places, in particular to the folks at Junebug Contemporary Arts Center in Ashe for being an extraordinary host of this conference. To the board and the staff of NPN and Orchid Robinson in particular for managing this conference. It's an incredible team to work with. You got all the hats, so you're just going to stay here for another second. To all of the artists, my goodness, we have experienced such incredible hearts and minds and courage and illumination and inspiration and all of these things this week. And our hope is to do it in a way that is not extractive but that actually builds us all deeper and stronger together. And so thank you to all of the artists who've been such an incredible part of this conference. And all that's left is the dancing. Have a great night.