 Good evening everybody. One of the co-creators of the Fransy Festival this evening is something that I'm so honored to be witness to. Over the past 25 years the Founding Theatre has raised some of the most provocative and timely questions through groundbreaking theatrical introductions, public dialogues, and deep community engagements. It has been, quote, responsible for some of the most artistically ambitious works seen in New York. Close quote. New York Times. That's right out there. Tonight we offer a sneak peek of its final production, a book titled A Moment on the Clock of the World, co-edited by the Foundries founder Melanie Joseph and David Berling. See what about the structure of another part of the world. Another Foundries Theatre foray into the independence of form and content. The book's layout divides each page into two horizontal sections. The top of the page contains pieces from the contributors that I invited to write for this collection. And underneath, borrowing from the image of a footnote, is my piece, which unfolds separately throughout the book. I didn't read the contributors' pieces, and the contributor's drawer didn't read mine, no one else. Structurally, David Bruin and I have ordered the pieces at the top of the pages, guided by qualities of tone, length, and form, as much as subject matter, as I've done with my own piece on the bottom. But this isn't the only treasure map. Oh goodness, it certainly isn't. In short, we invite you to engage any or all of this book's contributions in any order that holds or makes meaning for you as you journey through it in your own time and space. A moment on the clock of the world is not a history of the Foundries' shows or projects. Rather, it excavates 25 years of the evolving inquiry that led and shaped the company and its time and place, and that of our contributing writers, Kim and Stirkins, who were formulating their own questions both within and alongside us. What prompted me to make this book and the structure that holds it, is the invitation it might offer to those who are led and shaped by their own cartographers of wondering about how we live and work and the ways we create the world in which we live. I extend this invitation with faithful hospitality and with gratitude from the Presidents and the Spokers. find more text, come to the convention of cartography show. I wondered about the location given for this show. 112 and a half West 17th Street, just a few blocks from the apartment I've been living in since 1988 and still live in today. Not because of that peculiar a half, but more because I've walked along that stretch of street countless times and couldn't think of any space there that might properly host any kind of show, even one involving the mysterious Mike. The neighborhood had been changing rapidly, though. A theater presenting new American realistic drama thrived on my own block and farther west, where artists had long worked quietly in low rent studio spaces and when car was near shop for old warehouses, the high-end galleries were beginning to move in, bolting from rising prices and so forth. Meanwhile, the neighborhood SROs, where jobless men sat on feeling fire escape smoking cigarettes, one that could have been Mike, were emptying out and closing down, eventually to become condos and tourist hotels. Only six months had passed since January, when Rudy Giuliani had been sworn in as mayor. And it seemed like a case of gentrification was already accelerating along with a wafting meanness of spirit. Though it was summer, I didn't see as many old Puerto Ricans and straw fedoras playing dominoes at car tables set up on sidewalks like I used to. It was Pride Month, the second annual Dyke March. Body and Boisterous took over Fifth Avenue for a glorious day. But the crowds of shirtless men who once preamed through Chelsea every June had dwindled. By that point, New York had lost nearly 50,000 people to AIDS. And it hadn't been two months since one of my closest friends, among other things, a fine theater critic, had succumbed to its ravages. I walked among ghosts as I traversed New York streets. And I felt their aura, especially at night as I headed home from the theater. I walked among homeless people, young white women in skimpy outfits hanging out on the sidewalks in front of the 8th Avenue bars, and young black women in skimpy outfits hanging out on sidewalks in front of the 9th Avenue projects. Had I seen this man, Mike? I knew the matchbook was a piece of public relations. But part of me thought, oh, maybe I had. I should have. More and more, I've been feeling a disconnect between what I was experiencing in theaters several times a week, disparate as they are, and what was roiling inside of me and around me as I headed home. Not that some place weren't topical or concerned with issues or made by folks. Every bit is upset as I by the neoliberalism spewing from the Clinton White House, when we hoped against hope that his election might have begun to abrade the 12 years of Reaganism that had transformed the American ethos, all but extolling the idea of a common wheel. Every bit is appalled by Giuliani's racism, tinged law, and order campaign, which presided to exactly the malicious eight years to follow. Freedom, the mayor had recently said, and a corrective to the supposed mayhem of the city before his election, is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it. Seen that, with significant graph giving exceptions, theater itself was being gentrified. I don't mean its real estate or increasingly corporate structures, although it goes to, of course. But it's imagination and sense of apartness. It's what Sarah Schulman aptly called a gentrification of the mind, and defined as an internal replacement that alienated people from the concrete process of social and artistic change. None of this is to say that W. David Hancox, the conventions of cartography, handed me the answer I've been waiting for, or any answers. When I made my way to that strange address on 17th Street, a flat-board carriage house hidden behind an unremarkable squat, fail-brick building, and excess through an inconspicuous alley. The theater is a lousy place to look for answers anyway, and I hadn't been seeking any there. And I can honestly claim that Hancox piece produced an epiphany in the moment I saw it, moments rather, since I saw it twice, much as I appreciated the work on a number of levels, not least for its astonishing form. But I did feel an immediate kinship of its off-center inquiry into creativity, authenticity, the nature of theatrical illusion, and narrative construction, and what human beings owe to one another. Staged as a curator's informal lecture, which was followed by an exhibit where audience members, only 20 at each performance, could roam around and handle items on display, cartography presented like it's several revolts removes. We first learned about him through stories told by the curator who explained that he met Mike as a teenager and joined as a tenor at travel for a time. We saw videos of Mike or Marine interviews that the curator tells us he conducted when he tracked Mike down after years of not being in touch. We held an inspected Mike's artwork in genius sculptures made of buttons, horseshoe, crab shells, SNH queens, stamps, postcards, SO maps, often arranged in cigar boxes, of poor men's Joseph Cornell assemblages. We read, or heard the curator read, Mike's looping prose poems, scrawled on the backs of diner placemats and other artifacts of American road. Mike would leave these objects, the curator explained, in public places like cast station men's rooms and highway underpasses as gifts for whoever found them. The filling Mike's dying wish, the curator put together the exhibit by searching the country for these items guided by clues Mike had left, tags affixed to the artworks describe their course prominence. Through these various representations of and by Mike, this abstract hero emerged as equal parts brilliant folk artist and paranoid cook. For a lorn partner to a woman institutionalized with mental illness, a detached narcissist incapable of sustaining emotional ties with anyone, the question remained, had I seen this man? Of course, as the Hancock's fictive invention, Mike was not really seeable at all. Tangential, genuine objects in the museum, splintery, dusting, emitting a whiff of mold, contrasted with the ways Mike was a figment of the curator's memory, projection and framing narrative and ultimately of Hancock's fancy. I had turned over in my hands the decaying relics of an enormous, imaginative journey Hancock had dared us to take. The experience left me disoriented, pondering illusion and reality, how and where we look for and create meaning, to whose stories we lend freedoms, to whose artwork and to whom we grant attention, how we confer value and how we come to matter to each other. Those were the pertinent questions of the moment it seemed and they coursed through me on a tactile and emotional currents in that awkward lapse. I never cared much for models or replicating or creating for others to replicate however efficient they may be and however inefficient it may be to recreate the way I'm drawn to doing so or at least considering why it might be useful to do so. I'm fairly certain this red election is amplified by capitalism's current monopoly over meaning. Modeling like countless other ideas has long been subsumed into a ravenous appetite, the endless replication of the latest version until its value goes limp and it's disposed of in favor of the next even more efficient model which gets reproduced and on and on added to my life. All that intriguing depth of a saddle the composing father for ironic insight, could you wear the rubbish through the ever piling trash bags? I have a science teacher in high school who once said the lazy man is the smartest. He was metaphorizing the importance of conserving energy of efficiency to a successful biological process. The efficiency is time determined, the economy of time spent on a process in relation to the resulting product. But efficiency on a macro scale like how we make the world together calls for other measurements. And what are they? Process and product and the rest is coexistence in time or in some ways would gather this book for me. I must confess I'm confounded by the tyranny of time. In this case by its disposition in unraveling a story in red in page by page sequence a bottom inquiry that itself exists in all time at the same time. An inquiry that arose at the ball in the theater company. A what? In New York City, the United States, the world, this story from then till now is unreliable in sequence. You can't prove the math. Meanwhile the afterfalls and bike events for all of life on earth and the universe in which you're floating. Maybe that's what compels me to theater. It's multiple orchestral tracks simultaneously holding past, that was created, present, happening now, and future anticipation of the actors and audience in any given moment. Meaning or story can accumulate in limitless ways in the imagination of an audience even as if a 59, 60, one, two ticked by in their own relentless theater. Not to mention the secret exhilarating possibility that anything could go wrong at any nanosecond by personal favorite spectral reality. The Foundry Theater was itself an inquiry for 25 years on the continuum of ever. An inquiry in and of its time that wrestled with the complexities of making lives of meaning in and with the world. We ask questions of a world of this is how it's done. Wondering how else it might be. This we who wondered, who stewarded and evolved with this inquiry were people who made things. We were artists and social justice practitioners for whom making things means holding aloft something that isn't there, that was never there before until it might be. And holding what it might be collectively and collaboratively all the while inviting others into the long and painstaking reach for a future. I worked with, mentored and was mentored by other half alumps as Melanie Joseph called us. Who's intellectual and creative, personal and working lives well over traditional binaries and categories. We Foundry producers, Melanie included, can find aesthetic and political theory in the categorization of expenses in our accounting software. We can distill the most abstract aesthetic principles into a prioritized to-do list. We probably wouldn't agree on how to frame the former for what tasks might comprise the latter. We would, however, have a process by which to come to consensus. Though process might be too elevated a word for hours of talking around a table at the end of which our own thoughts would be sharpened and only potentially mitigated by others. When Melanie decided to bring this particular phase of the Foundry's life to a close, I knew that I wanted to gather this tribe. I was interested in how questions seeded at the Foundry. How questions seeded at the Foundry had developed in our subsequent work. How the Foundry's spirit has left trails through divergent sectors, disciplines and communities. How it has mutated and evolved along the way. I wanted to talk about how we were mentored by the Foundry and by each other. How Foundry questions of power sharing have shaped us as leaders within our, within other fields and areas of endeavor. I wanted to find a way of approaching the company's legacy that wasn't found by the edges of the institution but was contained instead in the people who have passed through the company. Moe Yusef, Shireen Azab, Kate Atwell and Robe Pepe Nides and so many others who have collectively been the Foundry. The following is a compilation of interviews, individual interviews with these individuals which attempts to capture one dimension of the Foundry's afterlife in diaspora. It was challenging. Every single project I worked on at the Foundry was incredibly challenging. We were learning to do the thing as we were doing the thing. Asking big questions, new questions every time. Successes were so sweet because of that and the low points were some of the hardest I've had in my career. The Foundry is not a thought experiment, it's an actual experiment. Like, try these things and see what happens. It's a platform to ask questions. The work we did on those community-based projects was about the role and function of art in social change. What's happening at the most local level in New York City? The Foundry never allowed itself to play in the pocket of specialized expertise. Its projects were designed to function as provocations to their mayors, producers included. Sometimes the challenge was formal and or practical. Like, how do we make a play about real estate? Staged in a different New York City apartment every night. What politics might accumulate as the play moves through the city? How is this accumulation present in the art? Sometimes the challenge was to absorb and innovate entire bodies of thought, like how to make art. Recognizing all that baggage that word contains grassroots community-based organizations and without replicating power dynamics of white supremacy or capitalism. It wasn't always back to square one. The projects built on each other as the Foundry's body of work grew. Teaching and learning in the Brechtian sense was a part of the joy of working at that company. Failure was the necessary other side of the coin, which didn't make it less painful. At the Foundry, we would all sit together and discuss things like the font of the website in great detail. Every decision was completely thought out and mattered. Everything contained meaning. I think that for a lot of people who work at the Foundry, that can be a frustration of theirs that Melanie wants everyone to be involved in every decision. The level of rigor Melanie brought to the analysis of them in vain has been unparalleled in my life. Pick your battles. The Foundry's was a war on all fronts. And I get it. The internalization and replication of oppressive systems is perpetuated in the automatized details of everyday life. If, like the Foundry, your politics lie in the upending assumptions, the search for new landscapes of thought, vigilance is necessary. Once, after an hours long all-staff discussion of the Foundry's filing system, Melanie announced that she only wanted to hear new and radical ideas. I don't think we ever did revamp the filing cabinet, but we did think a lot about the dynamics of space and how categorization creates its own value system. I tend you all this because I want to make being here all that matters. I want our vehicular flow, the road construction, all accidents and delays to be part of what constitutes here. A long time ago, before Jesus, someone said, you need to be responsible for your own passage, all this life, all this living. Congestion will be, is, no matter how much we try to facilitate, no matter how much signage directs us. Did you know that the ideal cruising speed is 30 miles per hour? Speed limits are just one example of a traffic calming measure that engineers have come up with. Even they realize our hearts race though we sit still. Telling the truth and telling it well, this is the ethical spectacle. The concept elaborated for us by Stephen Duncombe, a member of the Foundry's Artistic Organizer Council. As a theater company, what made our politics so compelling was the strong fucking art. We work on waste your time. The framework of the ethical spectacle challenges the artist to a similar task as that of the social justice organizer, to build a bridge between what is and what could be and to make embarking on the uncertain track over that bridge irresistible. As hard as we may work to build or sustain an off the profit institution, we must preserve in our awareness that this is not the thing itself, but merely a potentially useful tool for our central task of artistic production or movement building. And a bit further along is recognizing that the goal is not getting the next grant, but seizing control of the means of production or somehow managing to build our own. It should also be clear that this isn't a call for the ridge to be more cherished. If we do find ourselves well and truly advantaged in the current setup, whether by citizenship or class or race or gender, it is in large part because others have been exploited, dispossessed, repressed or devalued and continue to be so. The realities of contemporary wealth inequality between the richest and the poorest nations is one helpful reference for embracing that this is indeed the situation. According to the most recent data available, for every dollar in aid received by so-called developing countries in the form of aid, investment and income from abroad, over $2 flow out in the form of payments on debt, profits repatriated by foreign companies, capital flight and exploitative trade relationships. There's little virtue in the charitable relationship and we as makers should avoid finding ourselves getting caught in that trap. Instead, we can identify our own longings for change and join with others to make it so. Not long ago, nearing the end of her over 100 years of life, Grace Lee Boggs declared, now is the time to grow our souls. Reading the time on the clock of the world, she concluded, as many others have, that humanity's productive capacities were pushing the very ecology of the planet toward greater levels of instability and collapse. Justice, democracy and sustainability can be brought to bear, or not, on the means of production. And in this moment, there is a populist right to be found nearly anywhere one turns, sharpening and deploying its tools of oppression to ensure the latter. There's enough to go around, but not enough for the rich to stay rich and keep getting richer. In these times, when it seems that our emancipatory horizons are receding, the work of radical imagination is fundamental. It is our work to show that the seemingly impossible is wholly plausible to find a way from here to there and to make the journey irresistible. The idea of theater not being an imitation, but rather an adaptation of very individual perceptions of reality became more and more interesting to me. Adaptation in its biological meaning is a change of process by which an organism or species becomes better suited to its environment by which it evolves. When applied to artistic work, adaptation implies interpretation, alteration, modification, remodeling, reconstruction, and often integration and acculturation. Regardless of the precise operation, it is ultimately transformative rather than merely imitated. An adaptation of any perceived reality is also an interrogation of what defines that reality. It disrupts an accepted lens through imitation. Seeking out manifestations of this disruption became part of my theatrical quest. One concept that seemed to be shared by both Greek and Indian traditions, and indeed in many indigenous traditions and ritual, is what is called in Asian Greek, and Pheosocmos, the filling up of the self of the spirit of the deity. It is the root of the word enthusiast, which seems an appropriate companion to wonder. This is perhaps one way the angel can indeed be human, and vice versa, a way to enable a humanized angel to find alternative means of flight. At the core of most adaptive impulses in the theater, there lies a desire to reinvestigate what is presumed to be a known or conventional landscape. There is an impulse to create a cartography that shows different aspects of that geography, and to view it from different perspectives, to see the original narrative or situation in a different time, place, or culture, to view the world through another character's viewpoint, to investigate alternative dynamics for central relationships, including those of the audience to the work itself, to engage with the original language and images in a way that not only honors the original intent, but also questions possible contemporary meaning. With these ideas in mind, one could say that almost everything the fountain produced was an adaptation. There were certainly recognizable adaptations, spin-offs of work by Shakespeare, Decker and Middleton, Melville, Wilder, and Twain. In many ways, all of the ongoing work repeatedly posed several fascinating core questions. How can we adapt, rethink, and redraw the cartographies of our own worlds, redefining our view of what is included, and how we navigate through them? How and where can we find inspiration, wonder, and hope? How and when can we move past near individual adaptation within particular circumstances to a deeper interrogation and a more shared recognition of ourselves in the world? And those shared moments of, ah, oh, and hey, evolve into a deeper humanity, perhaps one that can ultimately affect our circumstances? In tandem with its theatrical productions, the fountain investigated geographies of specific communities in the world at large through a wide variety of initiatives and partnerships. The audience ambassadors program, for example, experimented with the conventions of how a theater company invites communities to its work and the work of others. Through its many evolutions, the program plotted new points of intersection between artists and audiences, found redialogues and climate change, political change, economic change, and the concept of hope charted new paths for artists, activists, and others to explore modes of making and ways of thinking. The legacy series explored how we might piece together a more complete picture of theatrical and political landscapes through personal narratives. The foundry adapted classic, yet problematic, social traditions, such as Thanksgiving, creating a three-range gathering of true community, sharing of food, perspectives, and art. The attempts to reexamine traditional hierarchies and modalities within the structural entity of the foundry itself were also reflected with this desire not only to adapt, but also to evolve. Among its most distinguishing features, the warp and left of the organization were art and social justice. While these began as dyadic compliments crossing in the organizational weave, they eventually blended to create an entirely new and unexpected hue. Who else but the foundry was producing an exquisite show like Telephone, then taking a gang of artists on an excursion to the World Social Forum, and then hosting a community dialogue about food? Who else but the foundry could have created the prominence of beauty, an intimate bittersweet journey through the South Bronx on a bus, narrated with the poetry of Claudia Rankin? A longer life should not be conflated with a more significant one. Many to this day would argue that the most influential theater company in America was the group theater, which lasted a mere decade. Its brief but brilliant life inspired countless others, including Margot Jones, to drink from the same sourced springs that fed it and to form their own companies. The foundry's warp radically and beautifully expands the possibility of inquiry in theater. The urgency is in the asking. The form follows the question. You may find yourself riding in an amplified bus, along with a woman who performs live and two men are voiced over. Together they pursue the sublime and rowdy sorrow of a neighborhood. Even if you can't see what they see, you may leave feeling like we can learn new ways to look. You may find you are never able to see a city, or a clay, or a talk again the same way. You may see the structures and forms that were invisible before that frame or envelop everything. When the foundry did Food, Water, Shelter in 2006, or this is how we do it in 2012, I think some people worried, wait, wait, this is a theater company? Aren't they supposed to be doing theater? The foundry let us see activism through a dramaturgical lens. This work, like all their work, became a way to ask together more coinantly. For me, it was never at odds. I have a job, I eat, I care about emancipation. Why wouldn't the artists I work with want to talk about that? Food, Water, Shelter was a series of dialogues with activists and organizers who address challenges we all face in our day to day survival. By positing these necessities as part of the concern of a community of artists, the foundry shifted us from an insufferable, creative class logic to the riskier rhetoric of citizenship. By integrating what we often think of as necessities into the workings of a theater company, the foundry dialogues asked a subtly provocative question of the city. What if culture itself is a basic necessity? What if art is part of the social contract? Food, Water, Shelter showed the material and ideas that surround everything we do and how they respond to our every move. This is how we do it, was funny and profound. It felt vital to me as it played out the way art feels. Activism as imaginative space. Art as activist dreaming. After I saw Grace Lee Boggs speak and after I read her work and got to meet her, I started thinking about what I want to do as inch wide, mild, deep art. Work that may only impact a few people but profoundly rather than trying to appeal to the notion of a broad audience. Somewhere around 2010, the foundry was approached by a handful of foundations who were thinking of shifting their guidelines to include support for art and social justice, art and community engagement, or ideas to this effect. Our Jim Academy, who comes from the social justice role, was then co-lead in the country with me and together we went to meet the director of one of these foundations. We've never applied to them before as the foundry's budget was too small, this large foundation. The director had a lot of questions as this was an entirely new area of exploration for them. RJ and I spoke in some way to the potentialities, procedural challenges and the depth of committed engagement required in this work. The end of the meeting, we were asked to put together a three-year plan to submit for support. Together, three-year plan to submit for support, we went to a meeting at one of these foundations. The program office we met, the program officer we met with, had a lot of questions as this was an entirely new area of exploration for the foundation. RJ and I spoke at some length to the potential. Yes, at the end of the meeting. Ah, but when we left the meeting, knowing we were about to get significant dough for three years, which we weren't expecting, we were oddly quiet as we walked down some midtown east side avenue. After several blocks, I finally said, RJ, why aren't we celebrating? He paused for a bit and replied, they should have asked for a 100-year plan. For the next few years, the foundation received significant money from four of these foundations while they were figuring out their new guidelines. Once they've done so, every one of them sunset their support for the foundation. Meanwhile, RJ's 100 years while he framed the foundation's mission, it became a liberatory visionary principle in which we proceeded, we referred to it often whenever expectations of outcome were played. Enter a cast of characters, eyes ablaze with a torch blow, attempting to perform the concerns of the universe, not simply the singular concerns of the corporate us, but the multiple concerns of the cooperative we. When the Foundry Theater convened a conversation on hope, a community round table of public thinkers engaged in a series of creative conversations and encounters exploring notions of hope they had been holding fallow for the future. The conversations are about hope as aspiration and its impact on the actions we do and do not take in our everyday lives. The scene bursts with the energy of a people. Humanity needed to be heard. The particularity of its work required cogitation. Its causes are multitude. This conversation is for women, for men, for gender non-conformists escaping sexual binaries, the environment. It regards economic justice, human rights, the politics of disease, neoliberalism, alternative cooperatives and the means by which people act and react to the radical way that they have been conditioned. Scholars, dancers and performers, sorry, scholars, dancers and performance artists gather with experimental theater producers, playwrights and poets and the greater community to compare notes and strategies. These true and perhaps unlikely guardians of citizenship would cast aside all consciousness of opportunistic self-interest, hold history accountable and attempt to drastically improve the common place. What time is it on the clock of the world? The late Grace Lee Boggs always poses question at the beginning of her talks. Is the question she and her lifelong partner Jimmy Boggs asked nearly half a century ago in their book, Evelyn Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century. And it is the question she raised at the opening plenary of the Foundry Theater's Historic Convenient in 2012. This is how we do it, a festival of dialogues about another world under construction. Activists and artists from around the world share alternative practices in economics, safety, media, politics and more to demonstrate that the world is always working in radically imaginative and different ways. There's a point in the opening plenary of This Is How We Do It, when Grace Lee Boggs invokes Albert Einstein's dictum. Quote, imagination is more important than education. Begin reimagining education. Begin reimagining work. Begin reimagining demonstrations. Re-imagine everything. Close quote. Imagination is far more important than a correct analysis. Artists sing, dance, paint, sculpt, film, write, shout, embody, perform the world we want before us, want before most of us can see it, let alone conceive it. Whereas art resists the constraints of time and space, the same cannot always be said of our political imagination. The compression of time created by what Volter Benjamin identified as our permanent state of emergency, alongside the limits of theory and ideology, has often arrested our political imagination. Art has the capacity to free the political imagination and to stage the dreams, stories, and criticisms of the oppressed as a means to advance a radical democracy. This is not easy task, since even the most visionary social movements do not censor art or artists in their work, except as adjunct prop or in localizing tactics. Meanwhile, commercial theater is deemed political when it reacts to the state of emergency, in these times embodied by trauma. The result is liberal catharsis that has the effect of inhibiting dialogue, dulling imagination, and reproducing our current world as the only possible future. This is how we do it. Like so many foundry theater projects, took a step back from the state of emergency in order to imagine a world in which power was horizontal and organized around sustaining life and joy. But what the foundry did exceeds the prefigurative. Rather, their work is generative in that art and dialogue are never intended to produce a blueprint or a map to the new world, but rather a kind of ethical compass to guide our struggles. And even then, the direction we take is never fixed. To reimagine everything as artists and activists are want to do is also to reimagine time. Hi, little one. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. It's me. Oh my God. Oh my God. It's me. I know. I know. What's you? I'm here. Oh my God. Where are you? I'm here, baby. Right here. It wasn't art or making things that brought me back later in 1994. It was hearing Cornell West at a conference. This crisis of vision, this crisis of motivation, has much to do with the crisis of meaning. I do believe it has something to do with an existential crisis. And my existential crisis, what I mean, is dealing with meaninglessness. And it's not just meaninglessness. It's hopelessness. It's not just hopelessness. It's lovelessness. For some folks, it's touchlessness, loss of tenderness, and kindness, and gentleness in people's lives. Their results of the creeping zeitgeist of cold-heartedness and mean-spiritedness, the gangsterization of American culture, which is the ultimate logic for market culture in which people feel, is that the only meaning to life is to gain access to power and pleasure and property by any method. That's existential crisis, deep existential crisis. I hunted him down at Princeton, where he was teacher. I brought my nervous breakdown to him to ask if art was enough. In those 15 minutes, with Westian references to everyone and everything, including Chekhov, his answer destroyed the question. I read him the mission statement, and he said, sign me up. And I did. He became a Foundry board member in Densha. The fidelity of longing in West and David Hancock's role, and in my inability to quit theater, was what started the conflict there. It triggered a deep and rigorous inquiry about how we make the world and who we are and who we see. And then it's part of a, in which we put artistic practice and conversation with critical perspectives. So, Marie Friedman, a great theater scholar. Words I've been reading. So in the book, it's a different book, called Ten Points, Gum Points, and Dreams, that was published in 1998. Kenyon Theater Artist and Activist and Guqi Watianguo wrote, quote, art is dreams of freedom and creativity. It behooves art to join all the other social forces in society, to extend the performance space for human creativity and self-organization, and so strengthen civil society. So it seems to me that a moment on the clock of the world, the foundry's latest production, and perhaps last work of art, in line with, and Guqi Watianguo's call, is a place where numerous foundry voices converge to discuss the myriad ways they have for the past 25 years of its existence. In fact, expanded theater practice and so strengthened civil society. The essays examine how to reconcile a strong invitation to imagine a different theater, a different world, an equitable society, a different political landscape, different spaces, with the creation of a theater company, its own productions, staffing, and economic needs. It is a commitment to literary critic George Steiner's powerful question, which Melanie cites as an inspiration early on in the book, where he asks, quote, is there something that would make the imagination responsible and answerable to the reality principles of being human all around us? The heart of a book is, of course, art's role in society, but also, and perhaps even more immediate, art's role in this country. It reads as a collective reflection on theater making, both aesthetics and production, dreaming and making, ideals and real life reality, an invitation for the reader to consider the product and processes as one. There is a sense throughout, a core gut feeling, call it what you will, of the power of theatrical imagination, the artistic imaginary, to birth a different reality. The book resonates with a line of Marxist political thought that seeks to unveil the conditions under which neoliberalism has and continues to prevail, in this case in the American non-profit theater. OPEC, OPEC, OPEC, fundraising strategies, OPEC, season planning, casting practices, hierarchical operating structures, and what seems like an ever ending focus on audience impact versus community building. As Robin D. G. Kelly affirms in his essay titled Forging Futures that David Brun just read an excerpt from, which is something in which the foundry grapples with directly throughout the book, quote, no matter what art is due to create a new comments, the modern theater is a commodity, subject to market relations and enclosure by the powerful, even in a so-called liberal democracy like they was. So, let's talk about means of production, really. How many theaters can one name in this country who make their decisions, their staffing processes, their curatorial processes, their artistic decisions, their budget salaries, really transparent? It prompts me to wonder why other art forms such as dance, visual arts, et cetera, engage with institutional critique, and why the 21st century American theater still seems so reluctant to do so. Melanie asks in the second half of the book, quote, why do we who make theater in this city continue to pretend it doesn't cost what it actually costs? Making it impossible for everyone who makes theater to afford their living lives. And how come even the unions don't insist on living wages for their members? And how come their members don't demand they do so? The book's contributors, Melanie and the company's collaborators understand that art lives in the world, not as an autonomous entity separate from its means of production and labor practices, but on the contrary, that aesthetic rigor is intricately connected to such concerns. Innovation and the development of new theater forms as the Foundry has created for the past 25 years the book shows us is embedded with asking such questions. Melanie writes, quote, that a theater is not only a legitimate venue for exploring civic engagement, but that such conversations belong in a theater, that art has a role to play in social movement in a way that is subtle and slow and unquantifiable. So I wanna close with just a few more ideas and questions that stood out for me after reading. Usefulness, must art be useful, or what is the responsibility of the artist as citizen? I thought of telling that Melanie had wanted to be, she talks about this in the book, that Melanie had wanted to be a doctor, even took a few pre-med courses early in her career. A doctor cures and the best ones practice preventive care and promote long-term well-being. And Melanie has spent her life, at least the past 25 years curating another word for healing or caring, putting together compelling voices of change to in fact promote collective long-term well-being. Theater-making as visionary organizing, or visionary organizing as theater-making. What are we teaching artists about what the artist's job is? What does an artist do? The interminable question. In Taylor Mac's piece, which is a dialogue between, in the book, which is a dialogue between Taylor Mac as Taylor talking with Taylor as Fran Ligowitz. You do. Judy writes, 25 years to build, say, a theater company or social justice organization, or a theater company, that is a social justice organization. The audience slash activists come again and again, then the lives are, but to do that, you do have to put in the years. Stemic change. What are the pathways to new models for horizontal and inclusive structures? The book strengthened my conviction that academic departments and institutions to hire learning and not just theater-making institutions, which is where I come from, must question and unveil our own complicity in concealing and furthering hierarchical infrastructures and exclusionary politics to reconsider what should and should not be part of theater curriculum and hiring practices. Finally, Taito, or the inspiration for the Taito, which is a moment on the clock of the world, Grace Lee Boggs, as you heard, the title comes from her declaration, now is the time on the clock of the world for us to grow our souls. So there is something larger at stake, something about our relationships to one another, to make meaning with one another, to using the tools of art to communicate, to come together somehow. So a few years ago, when Grace Lee Boggs was approaching 100 years old, she wrote, quote, I began to view my unease and restlessness, not as a weakness, but as a strength, a sign that I was ready to move to a higher state of being. So in accordance with your book and with her words, let's all stay restless. And it was through this reading that I was confirmed in that, because the kind of foundational drive that has pushed us to this moment with this company is profound. And the first question that I actually have is, I think it was Aaron Landsman said, the form follows the question and his piece. And it made me wonder how did the book become the answer for the final production and where did it come from? Well, first of all, thank you for so kind. And let me also say that it wasn't, I began it, but the amount of energy that went into it becoming a foundation was made by so many people. I know that because I was there. So it wasn't just Melanie, I just was there in the August. The book was because of the pressure. And it rose out of a lot of different things. One was trying to understand the future of the company. It was time for me to step aside and not that I was dying to, to be honest, but I just felt it was time. But what was the structure in which to pass it to was difficult because we were insistent on it being a shared leadership of artists. And it wasn't really possible in a timely way to put that together. We tried. So knowing that the leadership was going to revert to it again, RJ had left RJ and I were co-running the company for a while and he left. And a lot of the people that I worked with were off now running their own companies and following their own, no excuse, the expression. Maybe it's time to call this foundry theater that we have made for 25 years. This Energenics, it's time to pull it to call it a day. And what I thought was really important was I wanted some desperately to hear from people that worked there. What was it? What was it about this company? Was there anything to talk about, to feel about it? And everyone that I approached to write, I wanted to know what their inquiry was right now. Like what was drilling, what they were drilling down around their own lives right now. And how, and since they'd all worked at the foundry, how, if at all, they found that in relation to the company. So I wanted there to be some kind of document that took a bit of a snapshot, if you will, to what we have accumulated in the 25 years before. And the other really great thing is that because of K-NAP will, Morgan Janess, Vinayana Pani, me, those four in particular, including myself, we made an archive that all the shows, all that everything is on the website and it's gonna be there for 25 years, no matter what. It's paid for, done. And that was the best. Like not having to say, well, on this show, these fabulous actors, da, da, da. Because the fabulous actors, we have clips on the website so you could see them for yourself. You know, I don't have to. So we could talk about the other framing device. And that I felt was something I wanted to allow to exist from people to programs. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. And how did the two of you start working together? Do you wanna go, although you have to put your mic on your shirt, it's pretty little. Oh, sorry. It's a lot of anti-noise. Sorry. No, it's okay. I just wanna just look you down for people here in my role as curator. I like all that. Well, I'll say to Melanie in the spring of 2018 by Tom Seller, who was a former Prelude curator. And it was the absolute wrong time for anyone to ask me to do anything, especially of this magnitude. I was working as many people in this room and on the stage now, too many jobs and had committed to other projects. And I initially said, no, this isn't the right time. And then I reconsidered it and thought, this moment, talking about the moment on the clock, the world is also a moment on the clock of real life. And so the moment, the clock of my life, it was like, all right, I'm gonna make this work because an opportunity like this isn't going to come around that often. And it's never gonna come around. And so I decided, okay, what the hell. I'm already very precarious about my professional life. My loving partner, Jesse Rasmussen is here and is wondering something insane and that this book was completed. So that was, from my perspective, what the interaction was, how it was game. And I must say that we started with a very different relationship than we ended up with. And it didn't take long to realize I had a tether by the tail in this person. And so we became co-editors as opposed to edited by Melanie Joseph with David Brunner, assistant David Brunner, any other sense. This is a monster. I have a great idea. I'm an agent. I will also say the first time I met Melanie, I was tasked with finding her a place to smoke on the Yale campus with a limited number of stairs that could be traversed in this journey, which I did not complete. And thought that was the end of this relationship. It's the 14th, so there's always hope. David, what kept you coming back though? Well, Melty would let me leave. I was super inspired by the company and I think more places should be inspired by the company. And that's why I wanted to do it. I also love editing and synonyms. I'm very committed to certain editorial principles and then I'm able to work. So it's important to me the way things are arranged on the page on like this. Great. I have one more question and I'm gonna pass it off and see who else wants to ask some. But this struck me from a critical response actually. This question, what is the responsibility of the artist as a citizen? Is that something that you think the book is approaching in its own way? Is there something that you wanna say about that? I'm mostly interested from the reading knowing hearing more in that direction. Well, I think that it's a question beyond artists. It's a question of life. I mean, how do you understand, how does one understand themselves as a citizen? And even that word, I was called to task with that word by different people in the social justice community saying, that's a loaded word. We don't have another word for citizen and that's become a kind of loaded and difficult word because it excludes so many people because it means some people are excluded. And so I never thought of that. So that's a whole other thing. But I do think that, I don't know if, I don't know yet when the book reveals. Like, I don't know. You know, hearing it from you guys for the first time was like hearing it for the first time I've read it. Not as closely as he has, but I've read it. And I don't know what people are, I don't know what it is. So I don't have any idea whether it's, I don't know how to answer that question with respect to the book. I do think that the question of one's participation in making the world is a very deep and engaging and provocative question for everyone to take on. I just happen to know people in the theater. That's what I wonder about in terms of who we are. If I'd been a nurse, I wrote this. I would have started a medical school, you know. So there's just, there wasn't, I thought, ooh, it's all about artists. I just was in that community until I was talking to you. I don't know if there's something that you've seen inside of the book that speaks to that. Sorry, you're all such a close to it at this point. No, I could say something, but I feel like no one would take away a while. I want to defer making space for questions from the group. Questions? Anybody? Mom, can I have one second? Oh, nice. Speaking to, oh sorry, mom, thank you. I can hold it, you don't have to do that. Thank you so much. Hi. Speaking to the passage where they're talking about the gentrification of theater with how theater world is specifically in New York City now, what are your recommendations for what can be done? Make your own. Okay, yeah. Make your own, thousands of pieces. Make your own, if you have a coterie of people, start your own company. Yes, I actually, if you already can share the leadership, don't wait for those things to give you a break. Waiting is a waste of your time. And probably half of them are nearly as imaginative as you are. So that's what I think. That's what I would say, what would you say? Oh yeah, that's what I would say. That's what I did. Make millions of mistakes, make lots of bad shit. You know what I mean? Until you don't. Thank you. Other question? And don't go to graduate school. Just a short question. How do you feel about abandoning ship in the present political environment? Well, I don't think I'm abandoning ship because I'm still alive and I'm still going to do things. And I just may not do it with the structure of the family that has been for 25 years. So I don't feel at all like I couldn't abandon it if I wanted to. I'm not ready to retire. I don't know when that might be, but they may not. Does that answer your question? On the line of make your own theater, do you have a rise on more sustainable ways of producing theater? It's a really good question. It's a really super good question. I don't have advice, but I can say to you now that one of the things I'm thinking about myself in terms of the next project is how can I do it? Could I even do it for free? Like, what is one of the conditions by which everyone who made something felt that doing it for free was part of the art? And I don't mean that in some, you know, oh, look at us, we're doing this for nothing. No, no, no, I don't mean that. But I am wondering about, there's a lot of artists that are in this world that are committed to making art never for a transactional reason. And that's of interest to me. At the same time, and I think if you're gonna do it, you better be paid. You better be paid a living wage that you know. So I don't have, I don't have good advice for it. I'm sorry. Let me wonder, I'm assuming that you live in New York? Yeah, but I have a rent stabilized apartment. I went there being offended at theater, if I do. Where do you live? Well, I couldn't afford being in New York anymore and moved back to my own country, which is Italy. Right. And I'm sorry. I mean, I tell people not to stay in New York if they can help them. Go to Detroit, go to Seattle, go to, go somewhere else. Because this city is not the city I moved. I mean, some people don't care. But I, when I came here, same with Morgan, when we came here, this was an Elyse Salomon who wrote that piece. This is not the city I moved to. This is Dubai. You know, increasingly. And Manhattan's like, get it. But Brooklyn too, and now Queens is, you know, and the Bronx is holding on just because they're the fucking bookie down Bronx. Come and get it. But, but I, the only drag is that this is where people still come. Like the people with great appetites and sharp teeth and nasty backhands, you know. And like, they're here. But more and more, the people who are coming have trust funds, I think. They have to, I don't know how else they could live here. But I'm gonna get enough money to pay for their apartment working in the theater. So I don't know if this city is so sustainable for young artists. Not hungry, not ones that don't have support. I mean, one of the other things, I mean, when I came here, everyone I met was just hungry. A lot of the younger people I meet now, they're not as, they're not as, there's not the numbers of hungry as diminished. Because it's impossible to be hungry here. There's no sustenance. So, I don't know. I mean, come here and revolutionize the goddamn city. Let's do that. So, I'm glad to know that. I hope you can make good things there. Final question. Final question? I have a question for you. What would make, I know you've heard it, so it's sort of hard. What would you say to somebody else about this book? Like what would you say to another person you knew in theater about what you know about this book so far? Like, I don't mean would you recommend it, but I mean, how would you talk about it? Do not thumbs up, thumbs down. But just how would you say, I read this book or I heard this book or this is this? Please. Well, it's kind of personal to me, because I think in many ways. In many ways. You know the origins of mine, theater company, and you know that without the Founding Theater, there would be no medical evolution really. I mean, these folks often point to you. A lot of the thoughts and the ideas and the ways that we, of these attempts to operate, I think comes from more of this time, more than the inspiration for me there. Yep. So I think that was something that I've thought a lot about. And just listening to the amazing articles up there and the words are being said is like, yeah, I can feel the lineage, if you will, of that. I'll also say that it was definitely for me an experience of, I felt re-invigorated in terms of the word hope, and hope can be. And I had a sense of process, both in the, in what I heard and then in your description of how it's laid out. And this idea, because that idea comes up a lot, process and product. And the book itself is something tangibly with the product, but it's within it that you experience the process of how you need to get it together. Right. Are there thoughts on that? That's great. Let me just make loud. Yeah. That's something about kind of capturing a sort of gestalt sort of of a time that like, you know, because I mean, I didn't, I haven't read it and I'm just from hearing it, but it seems to, even the pieces that I didn't see were the things that I didn't, I missed. I feel like it puts, it puts it together with the things that I did, you know, or it reminds me of, oh, I missed that. You know what I mean? It puts it together and I realize, oh, this is actually speaks to like, you know, when I came to New York and what was going on and like, like, it brings together lots of ideas and lots of art and it kind of, like, I know it's, it's like a time cap, I feel like a time capsule a little bit when I was hearing people, oh, god, you know, like, oh, I could point to this, you're so humorous, you're like, how was like in New York at that time or something? I might just say like, read this. Well, it's interesting that I call it a moment. It, well, I think of that 25 years as a moment on the continuum of ever. I really do, you know, I mean, I also, I'm fully aware of what living through 25 years of doing that was, but the moment is a time cap. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because like, I mean, I saw a handful of found pieces in mine, but I remember the ones I missed. I remember the things that somebody told me that happened. So I connect like through that, I sort of connected to lots of different people that I knew, that I know, that I read about, you know. So I don't know, it has, it felt like, oh, there's like a real fabric here of something. So I might give it to someone and say like, if you wanted to know about that time or like, because I feel like there's a lot of reverberation, you know, in other people's lives from it, but it feels like it actually kind of materializes that time in a really interesting way. And I like that it's not just about the theater pieces, but it's about like all the ideas that you were trying to deal with. You know what I mean? Like it's not just like, here's all the shows they did, you know. Well, but the archive is pretty fantastic. No, I think that's what makes it distinct is that, I need to say one thing. Okay. I want everyone in this room to go out to that book table and buy a book, please. And it's only 20 bucks, which is really exciting. We find that really, that makes us super happy. And I'll just say that I'm honored to be here for the opening of the final production. Oh, it's so much. Thank you so much.