 So we're resuming with session two, which is a panel on the local, national, and global continuum. Daniel Banks will frame that, I think, more articulately than I did. We asked Daniel to moderate this. He's an extraordinary director, coordinator, or educated writer. His own work in hip-hop theater has been in Ghana and around the world and is also, in terms of embodying the continuum and the dynamic between working locally and immediately in communities with his own company, DNAWorks, and working across the world, Daniel atomizes this as well as anyone I know. So please welcome Dr. Daniel Banks. Thank you, Derek. Just to give the panelists a moment to breathe and settle in, I want to respect the dialogue of nature of what we're doing and just see if I can get maybe five volunteers to quickly blurt something that you're thinking about. It doesn't have to be a well-articulated sentence and it does need to be brief, but let's, you know, great creativity comes with confinement and restriction and structure. So could I have just five hands quickly and then what? And then you can blurt. One, two, three. Okay, three blurs. Great. So a blurt. Could you stand up and introduce yourself, please? I'm Barbara Mulkey. I'm in the Spanish department and I teach theater and direct theater and do other theater-related things. I've been thinking about the issue of top acts and I've been thinking about it for a long time. I've worked with Ghana Hispanic Theater and I have often, very often, directed the epilogues, the top acts section. I've been doing it for years, decades. However, although they are often very, very successful and my students like them and the audience likes them, there are times when one sees a performance that is so powerful and so moving and so emotionally devastating that when the lights go on, all you want to do is go away and be with yourself and your thoughts. And sometimes having to talk about it and intellectualize about it and analyze it and become the professor ruins the experience. So I think that top acts have their place or free performance discussions could have their place. But I also think that some of that depends on the nature of the show. Some of it depends on the nature of the audience. And I think that before we just mandate whether it should be this way or it should be that way at this theater or that theater, that every situation should be considered individual. Thank you. Roberta, just a quick sort of couple of words, couple of phrases, a blurt. Not a dissertation, a blurt. I'll blurt really fast. I'll just do it by point. My first point is the questions raised I thought were excellent for all of us who work in international work anywhere in the country, not just in D.C. The question of proxy writers versus international artists speaking for themselves. The question of languages and translation and finding new theatrical languages to present those languages in translation. The question of contextualizing any community and culture that the audience itself is not familiar with. The question of measuring impact and being able to describe that impact and articulate that impact. The QIAC question of creating a public conversation and a quick anecdote. Catherine Fugh talking about how in Cambodia after her play the audience stayed for four hours and began to tell stories they'd never told before because they had the forum and the moment to share the stories. And the last thing just to say that while D.C. was moving and great to hear everybody talking about how they're struggling here and resonated so much with struggles, I'm from LA, another international city. But one thing we don't have, when we have an audience, we have a casting director sitting in the audience. But when you have an audience, you have a stake at heart with members of the audience. Thank you. Shahid Nadeem from Adoka Theatre, Pakistan. First, I fully endorse the comments about the dangers of dog bags. You can spoil not only the mood of the members of the audience but also sometimes it can be very unfair for the artist. One pre-opinionated, articulate person can steal the post-show. The other thing is there have been in the previous session people have talked about sensitizing the audience and making them more aware or interested in international theatre. I think there's also a need to sensitize the sensitizers, like the theatre practitioners because last year at the TCT conference in LA, I had the chance to participate in a panel which talked about theatre in the conflict zone. So I thought it would be of great interest to American theatre people. There are about 1000 of them. That some of them, maybe a score of them will come and want to know how theatre is being done in such difficult situations like Iraq, Pakistan, and some other countries. But the appendix was quite pathetic. So I think there is also a need to motivate the motivators. Thank you. Just to have one contrary view on the talk that I think from a diplomacy perspective I actually found as an ambassador that through using forms of creative expression I did more with movies than theatre but I did occasionally theatre as well you could have extraordinary conversations after them that you could never have under any other circumstances because people are in that magical emotional moment that only lasts for a couple of hours after a performance. I guess I would say if you want to go be by yourself, go be by yourself, no one's stopping you. But I'm more with you, Roberta, for the space that that opens up to have the kind of engaged conversations that are often very difficult to have and of course one person can run away with it that's why you have to have a half decent moderator. But if you do and you can capture that magical moment you can do really extraordinary things if you can't do any other time and one of the things that will come out in our panel there, Susan, is that when she took her controversial production, the top secrets to, not that controversial, but you'll hear about it, to China the Chinese government wanted to stop the talk-back session they let her have the play but they recognized that the danger was in talking about it and what might come out of that so, gee, if they want to stop it, I simply hope we won't. As I suspect over the course of the next two and a half days there will be a lot of complimentary and slightly tugging opinions happening and this is a great space for all of that to coexist. They don't have to be resolved and I think it's great just to let different opinions be in the air and I think we probably, many of us as practitioners, on some days we feel one way about one issue and on another day we feel another way one show we do it one way and another show we do it another way so there's even a dialogism within ourselves as practitioners and thinkers and scholars I actually need to move to this panel so if you'll let me I'm going to segue into this panel and then I'm sure there will be lots of time over the two and a half days for us to continue to tease some of these things out so, with your permission, we've been hearing one of the things that I think is really important that already started to get unpicked in that first panel is the difference between international programming, international exchange, travel, presence, bodies, languages all of these things are starting to come up and they're not necessarily all the same thing and this is a great, I think the creators of this program have done a really great job of putting this panel next because it talks about some of these very tensions for people who are living in one place and then possibly working in that place and or working in other places and the tensions that that might produce in terms of priorities in terms of funding, in terms of sweat equity and amount of time spent in places so I actually want to begin with something that Michael Rode who many of you may know from Northwestern University and Sojourn Theatre sent to Derek, I believe it was this morning, this just in everybody in what ways, if any, is it relevant that Georgetown University sits amidst a city and a nation's capital where although great work occurs the arts and civic discourse do not often function in deeply comprehensively successful partnership with each other where diplomacy at the local level is on many levels of failure in what ways, if any, are the university's resources needed desperately at home as it is also looking around the globe to address tactics and partnerships that is not mastered in its own backyard. The question does not imply the local and global or mutually exclusive, it asks for an examination of how priorities are arrived at and it asks for an interrogation of the lore of the brand to the sometimes detrimental the everyday. So that's not, Georgetown is not the topic of this panel but I think that the tension that Michael articulates is very much the topic of this panel so since we haven't had a chance to all get on the same page yet because we all just arrived I'm also going to let the convening as well as the panelists know how this is going to work. We have David Diamond in the front row who has a little five minute and one minute sheet that you expressed. Some of you expressed an interest in having a timekeeper I felt this was perhaps the checklist kindest way to do it. You've been asked to... Does that mean five minutes to go? Five minutes left. Five minutes left and one minute left. You've been asked by the conference to speak for ten minutes or less about the work that you do and your thoughts about this either continuum or tension or both between the local, the national and the international. I'm just looking to see if there's anything else I want to say here and how do you address and or balance needs in all three spaces. So the bios are in the program and on the website I'll do it directly and go down the list so you know who each person is and then we'll just allow it to flow in this order I've asked the panelists to self select the order in which they would speak. First we have Jonathan Hollander who is the artistic director of Battery Dance Company Pam Corza who is co-director of Animating Democracy a project of Americans for the Arts Next we have Christina Evans a noted Australian playwright and assistant professor of theater and performance studies at Georgetown Next we have Christina Shepelman director of artistic operations Washington National Opera and then we have Jennifer Nelson director of special programming at the Forge Theater an adjunct professor of theater and performance studies here at Georgetown and at the end last but not least we have our commentator Diane Ragsdale who after each panelist has spoken will give a kind of a summation or some thoughts and then we will open it up to the community and Diane is the former program officer for performing arts at the Andrew W. Knowledge Foundation So with that said Jonathan Well thank you for inviting me I feel like I'm an ambassador from the world of dance in this realm of rich theater also from Lower Manhattan and New York City and some of the comments that were made about Washington DC and the issue of these different populations and societies are certainly something that was formative in Battery Dance Company's history 36 years ago when we sort of put our stake in the ground in the Wall Street area and felt that we were in territory that was alien to some extent and that put up a lot of walls that would prevent us from penetrating our own community and really from that beginning to the point where we are now where we've been in 54 countries and where we work in New York City Public Schools and produce New York City's longest running dance festival I think we've been informed by where we started in our community and our relationship with our local community and that the enrichment that we've experienced in terms of learning how to work with young people in New York City Public Schools for example how to communicate with an audience from Wall Street banks and insurance companies and how to work in a university that gave us a home for the first five years PACE University that was basically an accounting school at that time how to bring dance and make it relevant and communicative in those environments that has certainly given us a pathway as we go to Cambodia as we go to China Lesotho or Brazil but I want to step back from the institutional position I'm a choreographer and I started this company because I needed a vehicle for my own expression and development as an artist and I was 24 years old and I had been in I danced with Twilight Darb as a scholarship student with Mars Cunningham and I kind of found a drive inside myself that was saying you need to make your own dances and you need to find a way to do that so there was an organic beginning that set all of the rest of it in motion I should also say that I grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland I went to Bethesda Chevy Chase High School so when we were talking about the international influences here in Washington my classmates were as likely to be the countries as they were locals and so that interaction and also then becoming an American Field Service exchange student living in India when I was 16 so that I was introduced to Indian classical dance forms at the same time that I was learning about ballet and modern dance all of these things obviously fit into who I am in my DNA as an artist fortunately I've been able to find people like-minded artists collaborators board members who've helped me joined with me in forwarding this mission of taking a small modern dance company from that was concerned about bringing art into its community in this very dry work-a-day world and bringing art into the workplace and then taking that out around the world so certainly I am part of a team right now and I've sort of graduated from dancer to choreographer to artistic director to whatever I am now a spokesperson and unfortunately I feel that the dance world is way behind the theater world in terms of this international engagement and I'm hoping that by example people will follow in our footsteps or find their own way towards this very rich engagement which has not only given us opportunity to work when a lot of companies are sort of on a shelf but also has fed the artistic inspiration of my work and of the work of my teaching artists who are now becoming choreographers in their own right and I'm very proud to say that they got a fabulous review from Alistair McCauley who likes nothing in New York a couple of months ago so speaking about that we've coined a term that's probably used by a lot of people teaching artists and the teaching artists in my company have sort of learned the rules of the road in New York City public schools if you can engage a high school student in some of the schools that we work with then you can do it anywhere and they do and the means by which we engage students is that we don't talk at them the way I'm talking to you right now but we go into a classroom or a studio or a gym or whatever space we can find and we lay down the rules and the rules are that we're not going to show you anything you already know something and we're going to help you unlock the door so that you can figure out how to do that teams are built choreography is generated and at the end of five days the students have created their own piece of choreography and this process has been translated around the world but we learned how to do it in New York City public schools and I don't think we could have done it anywhere else had we not done that stepping back from that process which is called Dancing to Connect and it's now been in 30 countries and we'll go to South Africa Tanzania and Greece in the next few months the Downtown Dance Festival has been a wonderful opportunity for us we are the producers and presenters we basically have no sponsorship I mean this has run on a nickel but we have been able to bring dance companies from Slovakia Poland Malaysia and various in India every single year because of my involvement with India and because we reciprocate when we go to places we're looking for talent and we have an opportunity to offer we have a Singaporean company a Malay dance and music group that's coming this summer we met them when we were in Singapore last fall and so I find that this is a tremendous calling card for us that we're able to it's not all about thrusting ourselves overseas it's about creating a dialogue a lot of the productions that we have done have involved artists that we've encountered overseas I created Rabindranath Tagore was mentioned earlier and I first heard a Tagore song in Calcutta in 1994 and then met Bengali musicians in New York of course New York is such an incredible place that you can find maestros from all over the world and we collaborated on a production that then went around the United States through Europe into 17 cities in the Indian subcontinent it was an artistic expression of mine but multiplied and made meaningful because of the interaction with Indian artists the year that we took it to India was 1997 the 50th anniversary of India's independence and in each city that we went to we had a different Indian classical soloist so that's just an example of the kind of enrichment that I have felt personally in my artistic growth exemplifies the kind of work that Battery Dance Company is doing Thank you, it's great to be here I wrote out my notes just so that I would stay within time and as a lapsed art historian I also brought images because I feel like I have a sort of security blanket of images so Toby my new friend is going to help with that in the back of the room so go for it Toby the first one I'd like to start by sharing two moments from Animating Democracy's first let's rewind to 2001 it's in Los Angeles and at that time Animating Democracy is funding Cornerstone Theatre Company to develop and implement its four year faith based theater cycle the plays in the cycle explore how faith unites and divides people in American society and the cycle includes 21 original community based plays created in collaboration with interfaith communities the importance and the urgency of this project becomes acutely apparent in the unexpected context of the September 11th attacks at the Islamic school where one of the plays was developed and performed officials deliberate whether to cancel the events because of the safety concerns for all involved but ultimately choose to continue as planned this turns out to be the most heavily attended play providing a much critically needed opportunity for community dialogue about the tensions that were being experienced in that local community as well as worldwide next slide Toby so now fast forward just to last week New York City I'm sitting among 400 corporate leaders attending a conference called courageous conversations many of these corporate folks have titles with words like corporate social responsibility global partnerships corporate citizenship sessions include topics such as making multi-sector collaborations work lessons from the White House Council for Community Solutions and courageous leadership on challenging issues and they talk about human trafficking, HIV, AIDS and other issues Americans for the Arts through its relationship with the committee encouraging corporate philanthropy to sponsor the conference arranged for the American Records Theatre Company to perform an excerpt of re-entry in which several characters speak their truths of re-entering civilian life following military duty in Iraq and Afghanistan the audience of corporate folks is riveted this performance along with three others that were infused into the conference begins a process of building awareness among corporate leaders about how the arts might align with and advance their interests and concerns to do well but also to do good next slide Toby so animating democracy is a program of Americans for the Arts which is a national service research and advocacy organization based here in Washington DC and animating democracy in particular works to inform, inspire and connect arts as a contributor to civic engagement and to community civic and social change as our support of Cornerstone Theater and many other sojourn and urban bush women and Liz Lerman dance exchange and so on in the early years as that support demonstrates we place high value on local arts based work we're interested in work that is intentional in how it applies the unique capacities of art to enhance knowledge, to improve discourse to build civic capacity to contribute to an improved policy or change negative conditions to possibly even make systems change the local is where the rubber hits the road as someone else earlier used the phrase I love that one and where hearts and minds are certainly changed of course many issues like immigration like the reentry of military personnel to their home have implications all along this local national global continuum as we consider making impact along this continuum we have to however acknowledge that such complex issues demand more than one off projects and programs and I might dare say almost all of you single performances but they demand scaled up and sustained efforts this in turn requires strategic alliances among agencies that can work with arts that can situate artists in right context and help those cultural agents at animating democracy and at Americans for the Arts we're increasingly intrigued by concepts of collective impact of whole government and even imagining beyond partnership toward embedding or integrating arts and culture into the work of other sectors next slide so I'd like to put on the table two cross sector opportunities that were discussed at Americans for the Arts and Sundance Institutes annual National Arts Policy Roundtable in 2009 few years ago the theme was strengthening the role of the arts in 21st century global community and the Roundtable's goal was to identify strategies toward realizing deeper and more positive global relationships with and through the arts next slide and the first question that I'm sort of framing is how might corporations in my mind from last week's experience how might corporations operating locally, nationally globally help advance cultural diplomacy at the Roundtable we had the Hitachi Foundation and their example might actually teach us a few lessons in the 1980s the US Japanese business environment was characterized by mistrust of Japanese companies it was rooted in Japan's rise as an economic power and history of world war Hitachi established foundations in the United States to help the company learn about the cultural context for business and to help build roots and establish relationships in the communities where their employees work and live the foundation became a catalyst for non-volunteer and philanthropic efforts by employees and executives and these efforts became part of the fabric of the local communities exchange programs were developed featuring Japanese and American cultural forms these programs allowed leaders in both countries to examine substantive issues share lessons and solve problems the foundation's cultural efforts were seen as a business imperative for Hitachi rounded in an ethos of corporate citizenship so today many businesses must understand in multiple cultures because that's where they're operating corporations tend to have long term presence in places around the world where they do business and where their employees are living and working as part of those communities this kind of platform may provide a much needed sustained kind of focus and corporations have resources and certainly as a result of last week's forum which I was able to sit into part of increasingly corporations have a commitment to a level of social responsibility that is worth noting and an opportunity I think exists there to integrate the arts so the question is can we imagine partnerships between arts agents and corporations that integrate performing arts and theater strategies to achieve cultural problems and goals what are the cautions what would it take to really do this well next slide participating in our round table also was retired Brigadier General Nolan Bivens he's from US Army he envisioned a role the arts can play in phase zero operations this isn't stuff I know nothing about these are operations that help prevent conflicts by promoting stability and building capacity in partner nations through interagency and non-governmental coordination as he described one such operation in Central and South Americas and the Caribbean that sent medical crews to serve communities and need and to train military personnel he imagined that General Bivens imagined what greater impact could be made if arts and cultural practitioners were also engaged in an essay that he wrote after the round table he outlined not one not two but eight specific strategies for arts integrated into such phase zero operations as well as those kinds of missions serving families and communities at home and abroad he underscored the need for a whole government approach to strategic interagency alliances to make such endeavors happen and happen with the greatest possible impact and he framed that desired impact of cultural diplomacy as nothing less than contributing to the prevention of conflicts in the interest of national security so in my last minute I would like to close with a question that animating democracy is asking about the social impact of the arts and this is a question that you know we're hearing already from other speakers and it's been part of the arts and civic engagement impact initiative that he had going on for a few years it seems like a simple question but inherently it's very complex and that question is what difference are we making and how do we know thinking about integrating arts and cultural work into phase zero operations or corporate social responsibility approaches or any other sectors activities will require making the case for the role of the arts in terms of how it can make a difference what value added it brings and what difference in the end are made in terms of national security economic development, health and education, human rights and other kind of diplomacy goals so I'll just echo what Andy and a few others have already said, how do we measure and communicate the value added by the arts and their contributions and so as we talk over these next few days I'm really curious to hear about both your own cross sector kinds of ideas or aspirations or needs possibly experiences that you've had and what you've encountered there but also more how you frame intentions and expectations for the role of the arts in this context of cultural diplomacy. Thank you Pam, Steve. Hello everyone so I would like to talk about a project that I'm involved in making at the moment one of my collaborators on that project is here but before I do that I'd like to just change gears a little and tell you a story I'm a playwright and I would like to just tell this story that came out of my head because I want to wind back the questions that I'm thinking about here from this large question of what the arts can do to for me as a practitioner a question that comes before it which is what is it to make art a process what is the object that can apparently do all these things because I think the language can very often move towards the instrumentality and the usefulness of the educational force of art and in fact for those of us who make it the question of what is it in the first place I think needs to also remain in this sort of tense double focus with this question and for myself as a practitioner that's always part of the struggle and the question hence I'm going to tell you the story this is a story from the first play that I made in Australia that really kind of did well and found it sort of a larger audience which you've never heard of because it was in Australia but it was a play called My Vicious Angel I really struggled to write it because I was learning to be a playwright at the same time as I was making this play I'd come from ensemble based theatre and circus and I was struggling to make this play out of language and out of my knowledge of bodily practice and it ended up being a story about a circus performer who falls from a very great height and breaks his spine and she's a mobilised in a spinal brace and is haunted by the ghost of her dead sister so it ends up being a poetic play about the relationship between memory and grooming and the past play that in this kind of circus theme performance style you know when I was writing it I was thinking about my previous life in the circus and about the story I wanted to tell and about the music and all of these things and then one day in Adelaide where the play premiered I met some local playwrights one of them was in a wheelchair and had his spine broken 15 years ago and was now very active as a playwright and as a disabled playwright and he said to me I'm really looking forward to coming to see your play because I hear that it's about and you never see that on stage and of course I was immediately completely uttered tarot because I tried to tell the truth of imagining this immobilised person in order to tell this completely other kind of story so I was terrified of this man coming to see my play thinking oh god it has to be worthy in all of these ways and I haven't thought about does it represent a disabled person in a good way etc etc I've just tried to write a true play imagine in a very specific way so he came and it was a stormy night almost no one else came to see the play this night because I was sort of I really didn't want to go myself because it was raining and cold I was sitting up the back in this wretched shivering state this very nice, very smart thoughtful man had arranged for somebody to hire a special taxi and probably spent $70 to help me to come there and see my wretched play that wasn't anything about this I was sitting there feeling sick for the whole play and afterwards there was no audience so there was nothing for it, I couldn't scuttle out and we were sitting at the bar together and I said thanks so much for coming out and he looked at me and he had tears in his eyes and he said how did you know I tell you this story because for me this is an absolutely defining story in my politics and politics and processes as a playwright and I take it into the way that I approach thinking about the connection between local and specific work into the international side of things and I think that specifies and if you start from the specific and if you start from attempting to find the truth rather than from a kind of outside in perspective of how do I tell a story that isn't mine and that I don't know then you have a better chance of connecting from where you come from and I learned that and that gave me a lot of courage to remember that what I have is imagination and I don't mean this in a sort of soppy, mushy way that we imagine things and we are all one and so forth I mean that there is a force and a clarity that comes with being able to follow that or being willing to follow that and that's my own thing that then may become instrumental and useful and have a wider conversation but if you don't start from that there is nothing to have a conversation from okay, how many minutes left? I've got five minutes so in the second part of this conversation having preface it with that I want to talk a little bit about the work that Joseph Meagle, the director and I and our third collaborator Jarvis of Chiazoom we are making a piece called and the second point I want to make about the continuum local to national to international is that all of these things in the world that we are in are happening in the same time and space in heavily mediated ways we often think that they aren't but you are dead, you are here started life as a very small commission to write a piece that had integral video in its structure and so my question was why does it have to have video? I don't want to make something that's just bells and whistles and so the starting impulse for this came from looking at the imaging technology that the military are using in rehabilitation for soldiers coming back from war and also in training soldiers for war and as someone who comes from outside of this country one of the things that's been very distressing and interesting to me is the way that the US tends to reflect back on itself all the time even when it appears to be looking out so many of the conversations are what can we do as Americans and so on and the idea that video game technology was being used to create images of Iraqis in order to help American soldiers train for war and then recover from the impact of that war was very interesting to me because the missing part of that puzzle seemed to be the material body of those people so represented so my question was really about what can appear in the frame of this representation and we started making this piece in dialogue with virtual Iraq which is a virtual reality program that creates animated landscapes of Iraq and it's used in military rehabilitation here in the US to help American soldiers with PTSD image and recover from their traumatic experience so we're building a piece that uses this technology and uses the animated landscapes of Iraq to tell a story about an American veteran going through this and the third character in our play is a girl who's blogging out of Fallujah at the same time and in the end you see that the two stories join up and the idea with this is to put the landscape of living through a war and the landscape of remembering back through a war in the same space that makes these two things come together so that it's very important to me in making this piece that the girl blogging from Fallujah this character in the play can only appear in the space of an American theater through the technology that was available which is the space of the blog and the same technology is also the technology of storytelling and memory for the traumatized soldier and I feel that in this the very simple thing that we're attempting to do is to put these two stories together in the same space that are not usually supposed to be in the same space via the technology that actually exists to do that one minute and to conclude I think that one of the reasons that we're trying to do that is because for me the abiding and burning question is what can it be in this space how is this experience framed and I think we have to be careful not to go too quickly to what is this about and what can we do to the question of what specifically is it and how can it appear in this space what are the rules of representation governing this work and how can we make those appear in space and then I think we have a starting point for those ongoing conversations Christina please Thank you for having me I felt when I was invited recently a little bit like the off one on the other hand I also feel that opera is really well kept secret as far as applied cultural diplomacy is concerned because music first of all doesn't require any language as far as communication is concerned that dots on a piece of paper you play them and usually they evoke emotion or a feeling and that goes beyond any language beyond any countries because the emotional appeal of music is pretty much cross cultural we also in doing opera we all perform in Italian, Russian, German English, Sanskrit even I mean in any possible language and the singers that participate the conductors the stage director, the assistant stage directors all have to understand what's going on and we flew in in those languages but we bring people together from all countries I mean the last production we did has 10 principal roles they came from 8 different countries 2 years ago I had a production of Merit of Figaro we had people from 14 different countries in this production and there is one goal which is to perform the music and the music in whatever language it is written the singers don't necessarily speak the language fluently but they have to confront themselves with the culture where this music comes from where the story comes from so in a way you have to learn about the culture, about the country, about the language that you probably hadn't heard about before our young artists now, our young artists program when they learn Italian opera when they learn Mozart they don't only have to learn something about Italian they have to learn something about Mozart about the history of when Mozart lived and all these impulses that opera give kind of automatically create a connection a cross-cultural connection I mean to me it never was the international dialogue to me was never such a big issue because the dialogue among people that do music is irrelevant as far as where you're coming from it doesn't really matter I'm lucky that I lived in four different I am German, I lived in four different countries I have worked with artists from all over the world and because we have one goal which is to perform a piece of music that through the notes gives us certain limitations and parameters which is a goal that is in a way flexible theater has in its pacing much more possibilities you could stand still for five minutes and wait until you do your next line music doesn't have that music you could or you can drag out a line in a different way with more pauses when you have music it is what it is you can pace a little faster a little slower it's a frame that everybody has to agree on and there's something incredibly touching about this because you don't care where you come from you sing the music and the music will speak to somebody's heart I know that's very simplistic maybe but having experienced so many productions with artist singers from all those countries there is something very touching there is a moment where everybody realizes oh with you I have to speak English you have to speak Italian, you have to speak German you know somehow you find two or three languages as common ground and the communication works and sometimes I even had people that spoke a language that was not shared by anybody but through the music in the score the goal was achieved and therefore I I love opera and I love music because of what it can do on an emotional basis no matter where you come from and that's very touching and very exciting to me because I don't have to create an intentional connection or a communication with a different language I have a universal language that is incredibly appealing and will preach you I mean why is opera or classical music the western classical music so appealing to the Japanese I'm not sure but obviously it pushes an emotional button that works for them they don't speak Italian especially 25 years ago when opera became much more popular in Japan also in South Korea and now also in China it wasn't through the language it was through the music and that is so powerful to me actually as far as connecting on an international level the connection starts with the singers on stage of course but it also goes to the audience actually because you can perform regoletto, traviata in any country even if you don't understand every word you probably will feel what is being expressed and that's where the understanding of the connection happens and I think that sometimes I think opera could be used a little bit more in that sense because it does bring people together not through the culture not through the specific language that we talk to each other and understand each other in but through the emotional level that goes beyond that yes opera is expensive I can't deny that but that's why it's also such an incredible art form because it brings together high art, music, crafts you need seamstresses, you need lighting designers you need orchestra, you need chorus you need the singers, you need electricians you need your carpenters you need assistant stage managers you need a set designer it doesn't matter where they come from or which language they speak because the goal is to design a visual that provides the frame to them to perform the music that is not language specific and that's why I personally believe very much in opera as something that can create connections cross-cultural connection international connections that can be very strong and very powerful and I've seen it firsthand thank you very much Teneffa, please please and thank you I'm so nervous why am I up there see how that's how art connects us I'm going to start by saying I think the reason that I went into the arts besides the fact that I had a very creative family is because I never felt like I belonged anywhere a lot of my childhood was spent being the only black kid in whatever the environment was my dad was in the military and we traveled a lot and in almost every single environment there would be two black kids in the school of me and my sister and so I never felt like I was a part of what I just didn't feel like a part of it and the thing that saved me was learning to read and imagine so when you said imagination I wanted to cheer because I think that's the thing ultimately that is the wellspring of art is that every human being imagines on some level or another whether it's imagining that you've got food imagining that you've got a better house that you have a better life there is something very elemental in the human capacity to dream of things that don't exist in the real world and then what we do with that dream what we do with that imagination becomes art whether we sing it dance it act it write it paint it whatever other things you can come up with now we've got new art forms either sometimes it's how else can you imagine that you can express it that you know that that you never run dry also it's a river that is endless endless I was very lucky I think in retrospect now that I'm in my 60s that I grew up in the 60s I kind of came of age in the 60s because it was a time in this country where there was such turbulence and particularly for African Americans for such unease of not knowing what was going to happen next you know where will I be where can I go who can I talk to etc and so you know instead of the comfort of feeling really belonging to something discomfort the uncomfort of feeling they didn't belong I think actually was was critical because again it meant it kind of spun me off back into the world of fantasy and of imagining things my first it was books and then it was movies and then my dad was an amateur actor and he always had scripts around the house I started reading plays when I was like in the fifth grade and reading plays I had absolutely no idea what they were about but I remember reading the ball soprano when I was like in the sixth grade and oh what the fuck but I read it all and I was absolutely intrigued by you know then then I read the one where they go down the stairs for some reason Madwoman of Shia and that hole going down the stairs and I was enthralled by that concept and so then it became kind of making up plays in my head of how I would like to see things or how I would imagine a situation going and there actually is a purpose for my telling this personal blather a purpose but that would be a long time before I understood that everybody does this in one way or another maybe not in the same dimension that I was doing it in doesn't matter but that everybody you know was imagining themselves to be something that they were not whether it was richer, poorer, thinner fatter whatever the other gender you know it's whatever and then I lucked into being in the Living Stage Theatre Company in the early 70s at Arena Stage and Living Stage was created and led by a visionary kind of madman Robert Alexander and it was based on the notion that everybody has this imagination and that the death of the individual is involved with the death of the imagination the squashing of the imagination and so he set out to create a form of theater that worked with children and young people that was to say imagine and that out of that will spring whatever it is what comes next we don't know yet we're not going to try to tell you what you should be what we want to help you do is imagine what is the world that you want to live in and then that's the world that they will go on and create and so for 20 years I was an actor and this is an improvisational company as well I should add so that we weren't using anybody's scripts we were making up our own stuff we were working with the poorest of the poor right here in Washington DC and this grew into working in prisons we worked in DC jail and also the maximum security men's prison that has now been moved out of the city that's another story and eventually into working with disabled people of a variety of disabilities with mental disabilities, physical disabilities at one point to work with deaf people work with kids who could hardly move taking them out of their wheelchairs is something that we discovered kids in wheelchairs who are very involved in physical disabilities are often just kind of they're put in that category that's who they are, they're in that wheelchair you find out take them out of the wheelchair and see what happens and these are kids who could dance and we had I go off into those stories at any rate eventually I left that and started working in the regular theater in which I have learned a tremendous amount and found a certain measure of success and yet the thing I feel that really drives me in what I have to say up here is about that the global is the individual to learn to understand to interact with people who are not like you whether they are not like you because of the color of their skin or the language that they speak or the food that they eat or how they get around town you know that the core that unites us can be met in the realm of imagination and so what I try to do now with my life is figure out ways to teach young people that to pass that message on they don't have to do what I did they don't have to do what any of us did but find that in yourself that is holy and hold and work from that place to find that in other people and thereby is a bridge and it could be done in an infinite number of ways you can do these wonderful stories whether it's opera, dance circus, trapeze poetry et cetera doesn't matter what matters is that point at which the life force between human beings means allows there to be a moment of comprehension an understanding that I can look at you and see that we have more in common in common so I feel like it's become my mission in a way my personal mission to help young artists in particular understand that the lifestyle choice that they make if they decide to go into the arts as a profession is has to be based in a commitment to social justice and equity for all people and so I teach here sometimes in other places and what I'm teaching always is theater for social change and particularly since it's my background improvisational theater for social change because that's where I grew up as an artist in the improv world I recently had the experience of being involved in a local project I want to mention that I was brought into as a writer because I do that too what was working with women in Washington DC who are homeless or have been recently homeless most of them have been substance abusers women who have been through lives that we don't want to know about and that we don't believe in a way you don't believe that happened right here in Washington DC right now going on and these are women who have found their way into a place where they can get some assistance and part of the assistance that this organization provides for them is improvisational theater classes and one of the things they were doing was a series where they were asking the women to do improvs in which they would talk about themselves they would tell stories about their lives but not therapy not reporting just that the stories would come out in the process of them and my job was to kind of record some of the stories and then they put together we put together a script of their words and their stories that they then performed at the Kennedy Center for one night that was probably the most important thing I've done in my life other than bear my daughter that when I think about it I start crying again because it was such a oops, okay transformative experience to hear and see these people telling their own stories in a theatrical form with other people listening and hearing them and understanding them in a way that they possibly could not ever have done before which then have there's a poem a Lays and Hughes poem I would close with the poem, the song the picture the poem, the song, the picture are water that belongs to the people that must be given back to the people in a cup of beauty that they can drink and thereby understand themselves so before handing it over to Diana I just want to say we have been given special dispensation since we came back a little bit late from tea to make up that time at the end so we do about 10-15 minutes left on the panel Diane, your thoughts first of all thank you all it's wonderful to hear all of your stories and perspectives maybe I'm going to come across as cynical I'm going to bring up money which wasn't mentioned by any of you but I'm aware that when I've worked not just in funding I was also working in arts organizations for years before that and for a while it's been a huge imbalance the other countries, Europe in particular had subsidies that they would put into these sorts of exchanges subsidies that they would put into these sorts of exchanges and the United States did not for the most part you saw such things as the kind of work that was coming over was the kind of work that had subsidy attached to it and the kind of work that wasn't coming over didn't to some degree Jonathan I loved when you talked about you're on the ground relationship with people that enables some of that stuff to come over and I think that is where some very powerful work is happening but we're not cognizant of it to a degree and we're not understanding how to foster that sort of thing likewise I think that a lot of artists in the United States have used Europe as a way to subsidize their careers in America because you can make more money going to Europe than you can here so one, I think money and where subsidies are or not, Europe is to some degree less able to subsidize this work now and I think in that space then the intentions and the motivations can get conflated is the back and forth happening because we're somehow now needing to capitalize the work that's made in America by taking it overseas to what degree or things exploited in a way that's not helpful and it seems to me that there's this vacuum of both money and an argument, policy argument on the sort of cultural exchange and cultural diplomacy side that's running up against a creative economy conversation that is all about exploiting content, intellectual property including culture and financial gain that can lead us to a palatability in the work that goes around the world that may not be helpful and so I listen to all of you and I hear something very powerful and interesting happening and I just worry about how we raise this up in a way and demonstrate that this is what needs to be understood and fostered and that it can't be replaced by a whole argument that's kind of coming at us from the other side I actually think that maybe so that we can hear from as many people as possible if I could try to guide this a little bit by suggesting that going with this theme that I introduced earlier about our space being able to hold a multiplicity of opinions and views could we take a page out of Liz Lerman's book and maybe just ask questions not even necessarily questions for the panelists but just pose questions that this collection of stories and testimonials raises to mind for you about the tensions or the confluences between the local the national and the global and if you really have a burning comment you have to say of course there will be no repercussions for that but I'm just offering that in order to keep it pithy for people if we could maybe frame our question I'd like to make one quick comment talking about the subsidies in Europe don't think being a European don't think that subsidies are always the ideal solution to I'm not saying this in response they're not always the ideal solution subsidies also often lead to an immense amount of waste of money because it's not spent the right way a theater or opera company or a museum has a budget and if you spend less than the budget the next year it gets cut so you basically spend what is given to you sometimes the subsidies are not the answer to all questions and the system having lived here in the US now for 17 years I have a great admiration for how cultural institutions are being funded here by the private patron I mean there's also a lot to be said for that and that the interest the various tastes and interests provide a variety of cultural institutions and output and so I mean I think the truth is somewhere in the middle but the subsidies having been away from it for many years I have a very critical attitude towards it so as in a rehearsal process any questions that we're not going to try to answer but we'll just let it sort of linger for a couple of days I'm starting to wonder I hear a lot of conversations where we reference our colleagues that work in other countries and it sort of struck me a moment ago as we're almost like collecting these trophies like oh I've worked with this country and this country and this country and I can name a whole bunch of colleagues in countries that I'll never visit but I know people there and I just wonder who my question is why do we focus on the country and not the individual and that relationship because in many cases as we all know we don't always represent what the country puts up we don't always, we are not we can't speak to ourselves for all of America we don't speak for ourselves so why do we always identify our colleagues that way as we are in that country I just wanted to put the contrary view about philanthropy we in England are now going through the path, going down the path of philanthropy and it's disastrous in many ways the problem is that it leads I think to heritage efforts because no one is willing to give you the right to fail and everyone's very happy for you to do traditional work and not challenging work and at the same time not work that reflects your community so that an awful lot of black and Asian work that was happening in England is suffering now because it's not accessing that philanthropic money and we have the same tax model as America unfortunately we have a tradition where rich people consider the state should deal with the arts and should deal with the health system and should deal with the welfare system so if there are I'm willing to give money but I do think that it is very dangerous to go too far down that road and I think the natural endowment for the arts in this country should have access to much more money and your arts would be healthier if it did my question is again relating to the master when one of the charges of every ambassador is to promote American commerce in the country and at that time aerospace products were our number one export and I spent a whole lot of time doing that and you say that I sold the joint strike fighter and got a big award Pentagon with a citation that said how can an art historian be so good at selling weapons that's the question out there but that's my question my question is why is it that that was a mandate that I was expected to carry out and did for the top product of aerospace products we all know now that creative products are always among the top three one two or three coming out of America and yes it's the commercial products that are generating the money we all know that fueling those commercial products are people from the non-profit sector and to my knowledge it's never presented as a mandate of any sort to diplomat to do something with that sector of American commerce Cindy and then up for him I appreciate it on this panel of opening up I think I heard correctly of the question about instrumentalizing art and the need for especially the artistic integrity of the creative space in the context of this conversation about arts being engaged for purposes of diplomacy or peace building and I think the question that I have about that emerging from our project acting together in the real estate that we'll be talking about later is how can we use opportunities like this one to help people who live in these different worlds who are thinking in very different mindsets about what constitutes excellence in this work to appreciate and honor each other's knowledge, each other's way of understanding the transformative power of the art to be a both aesthetic experience and amplified perhaps in strategic ways that these builders think about I love all this stuff in the air because I love those directors I have a question about the audiences for these performances that we've been talking about all day how, if we get the funding if how do we make sure we have this problem in this country I'm sure we have it abroad narrow sector goes to the theater so how do we reach more people with the theater that we're making abroad and here how do we make sure that when we bring a company from another country all that way how do we make sure that the people who should see that performance see that performance and I'm going to add a corollary to that is what do we mean when we say theater and is there only one yes please I have a question I guess that has to do with what is the connection between collaboration and voice and what I mean by that is implicit in walking across many of the very interesting things people have been saying are different working assumptions and theories about the relationship of cultural expression to communication so one of the working theories is the transcendence of cultural expression but here Mark some others have suggested that this is a problem for us because we assume it's some evidence of communicative but in fact it's not and so we have challenges when we have people in the room who don't really know what's going on or how to consume it or what it might mean and so there are competing notions at play I think in our conversation and it's interesting considering what we're talking about notions of the intersection of foreign affairs, cultural diplomacy cultural expression in the arts regarding just exactly what sort of collaborative possibilities they represent and what sort of context and attention to voice and meaning and I guess another way of putting this is how can we think about these engagements as open to multiple appropriations Thank you One last question and then we can all try to answer each other's questions Yes please Okay, I hope I can get this out properly, Michael from Montstreet Theatre One of the issues that I find in theatre is the question of realism if you're going to do a play like Death of a Salesman you can't have a Israeli Willie Lohman and an Arab wife without that suddenly becoming something about the racial casting of it it's something I really admire about the circus and what I'm learning about the opera and dance because you can actually have very interracial company and that's not the question but in theatre unless you're going to do a production like A Midsummer Night's Dream or something more fantasy you can't put different races on the stage without it suddenly being about that I'm just throwing out the question of realism in the theatre and if you use realism the only stories you can tell are realistic stories about realistic issues and how can we get Each of the panelists, thank you so much, Diane Thank you