 It is my great pleasure to introduce our keynote for today. Ping Chong is an internationally acclaimed theater director, playwright, video installation artist and pioneer in the use of media in the theater. In his 39 year career, he has been a restless explorer of new possibilities and new directions, pushing at the boundaries of what theater is and can be. Ping Chong's work has been presented at major museums, festivals and theaters around the world. In 1992, Ping Chong created the first work in the undesirable elements series of oral history projects, exploring issues of culture and identity in different communities. Since then, there have been more than 40 productions around the world. Awards have included a Guggenheim Fellowship, a USA Artist Fellowship, two Bessie Awards and two Ogie Awards, including one for sustained achievement in 2000. His revival of the Angels of Sweden Award opened La Mama's 50th anniversary season in October 2011. Cry for Peace, Voices from the Congo will premiere at Syracuse Stage in September 2012 and tour thereafter. Ping Chong was an artist who toured early on the NPN, and I'm really thrilled to welcome here today in Tampa. Ping Chong. My glasses off, I can't see. I'm asked to do a lot of lecturing and keynotes lately. This fall alone, I've done four, and it's making me wonder, have I finally become imminent? Or is it that people are just trying to give me a hint that I'm on my way? Something of a dubious distinction when you've spent your life and career as an outsider critiquing the majority culture, only to end up in demand on the lecture circuit. Or maybe that old joke is true, that ugly buildings and sex workers get more dignified as they get older. But I'm not over the hill, just yet. There are still things I want to say and do. So let me speak to you about where I come from and the place I stand today. The place my water stands in. Just in front of the camera, sir. The camera. Okay. It is truly a great honor to be asked to speak here at the 25th anniversary of the National Performance Network, an organization that has led the field in fostering diversity, artistic experimentation, creating opportunities for artists and partners across the nation and around the world. So congratulations to MK, wherever she is, to the staff, the funders, and all of you on NPN's Silver Anniversary. The field is better off today because of all your efforts. It was way back in 1985 that David White, then Executive Director of Dance Theatre Workshop, remember the old Dance Theatre Workshop? Looked at the performing arts field and saw big problems. David, who was in my second show, I flew to Fiji U.N. South in 1973, wasn't destined for a career as a performer. He was a visionary and knew that systematic problems demanded systematic solutions. And he recognized that the only way things could get better was through collective action by artists, presenters, and funders working together to overcome imbalances in our field. So he called together a group of forward-looking presenters to discuss problems in the field. Things were bad. Artists were isolated from one another. Touring was difficult and poorly paid. There were no centralized sources of funding to support emerging experimental and diverse programming. You know the stuff big theaters didn't want yet. So with the support of the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, they founded the organization that became NPN to address these issues. It soon became apparent that NPN needed to be an independent organization. Over the years under the leadership of San San Wong and the dynamic MK Wegman, NPN has worked tirelessly to support the field and create opportunities for artists and presenters. A lot of progress has been made in the last 25 years, but many of the problems we face today are essentially the same as before and mirror the problems of the nation as a whole. So it seems to me that the 25th anniversary of NPN is an auspicious time to rededicate ourselves, to working together and to make a future in which the arts and artists can thrive. I will come back to this, but please excuse me if I start again at the beginning or at least what was the beginning for me. The Atom Bomb, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, JFK, LBJ, Richard Nixon, the fall of colonial rule in Africa, the Black Panthers, the Immigration Act of 1965, which finally gave equality to all immigrants instead of favoring those of European descent. Sex, drugs and rock and roll, Motown, pop art, art, minimal art, conceptual art, happenings. How many people here remember happenings? Charlotte Mormon and the avant-garde parade, Federico Fellini, Igmar Bergman, Ikira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, St. Yajit Ray and the great international cinema, the young type 50s giving way to the freedom and indulgences of the 60s, the founding of the National Endowment of the Arts in 1965 when fellowships were granted to individuals and funding was available for touring performances. The beginnings of all the identity movements, the women's movement, the Native American movement, the gay rights movement, the disability rights movement, the Latino movement, the Asian American movement, the excitement of change was in the air. The optimism and naivete of youth was in the air. Anything was possible. It was a time of cross-fertilization, the breaking down of traditional boundaries in the arts, the birth of interdisciplinary arts, which was called multimedia back then. Cafe Chino, La Mama Experimental Theater Club, Judson Church were all at the forefront of change. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the assassination of Malcolm X. It is against this backdrop that my life as an artist began in New York City, in the place which is my home, which has always been my home. Recently I was talking to Crystal Banzon, a young artist who has been working in my office while she pursues her own directing career. She expressed a simple wish that she would be paid decently for her work as an artist. She didn't understand why artists should be forced into a poverty mentality. Why shouldn't artists get a full, fair wage for doing their work, just like any other profession? She's right, of course. Sadly, that's just not the way things are now. Artists just aren't truly valued in the United States. We never have been. Our nation is more like the Romans than the Greeks, better at building empire than civilization. Sometimes I think our society, which is so focused on getting ahead at all costs and the live-to-work mentality unconsciously, punishes artists because we have the good fortune of doing what we love. In my youth, in the 60s and 70s, it was cheaper to live in New York City. As an artist, you could afford to do your work even if you were poor, and I was definitely that. But I did get by with a little help from my family, friends, and colleagues. I took jobs, house painting, moving furniture. I worked as a census taker, bartender, not a very good one. Film projectionists on Wall Street showing movies at lunchtime for the workers there. I had a part-time job selling admission tickets and books at the Guggenheim Museum. In this way, I managed to cobble a meager subsistence living, and in 1972, I began creating my own work and formed my own company. It took me 12 years of maintenance jobs. Playmaking, touring, and fundraising before my company was in a place to pay me a modest salary for doing what I loved. On the day I left my job at the Guggenheim Museum for good after seven years, I felt a sense of liberation that I had been longing for. It was an exhilarating moment. It was the moment when I would take my chances creating art for a living. It hasn't been easy. And sometimes it still feels like a fragile existence, but I have been employed full-time doing what I love for the last 25 years. And in spite of all the challenges the company has grown, we now have five full-time employees and a group of associated artists who worked with us on a regular basis. We offer health and pension benefits and pay everyone who works with us. And we get to do what we want to make the art the way we want, at least most of the time. Today, there is relatively little funding across the nation for the arts, modest touring support, and a whole lot more competition. Without question, private and governmental funders and national presenters need to do more to support young artists. The system, as it stands now, favors artists who institutionalized in the last century, while neglecting the emerging and independent artists on which the future of our field depends. I have been lucky to have a staff and management team that understands that the organizational structure should exist to support the art, not the art to support the structure. It is a small but hugely important point. We, both artists and administrators, must work together as a community to make creativity central to our institutions and structures. During my early years in New York City, I lived in a dark, dank basement, the gloom of which was alleviated by the warmth of a working fireplace. The basement was in a creaky old house built before the Civil War on Bleaker Street. It had pressed-in ceilings, which I could touch just by lifting my arm over my head. I paid $50 a month rent for it, which was unheard of even then. You made me lose my place. I didn't have to pay for gas or electricity because it was illegally sourced. In the winter, the wind would whistle through my dungeon of a home because it was full of drafts. The basement opened out to a backyard that was shared in the spring and summer months with other artists living in the adjoining basements next door. All this, thanks to my landlady, an eccentric artist named Lee Nagre, who helped many a young artist, including Basil Twist. It was a gregarious little community, including a tap dancer who lived above me and held tap classes once or twice a week over my head. I was really grateful that it was only once or twice a week over my head. Philip Glass lived catty corner from me in a squat loft building, and I would hear his hypnotic music wafting down Bleaker Street. The photographer Robert Frank, the Andy Walho film star Taylor Bede, and Abby Huffman's Yippies were all on the same street. A beatnik friend of my sister, who looked a lot like Morticia Adams, lived in a loft with her young sailing father and a pet skunk around the corner. Anyone remember what a beatnik is? I lived for 10 years in my basement home without seeing sunlight. When I finally moved to a new apartment above ground and blocked away, I didn't know if I could afford to pay the new exorbitant rent of $225. But I was happy to finally be basking in the sunlight. New York City was decrepit then. It was a sullen place with its shoulders hunched mumbling to itself. The rich in New York City, on the other hand, will always be untouched by what cozy and warm in their elegant digs. But there was plenty of the 99% even then, though the wealth was more evenly distributed. After all, the middle class wasn't dead yet then. It's true that it was a dangerous city, but it was also a city with more character and more complexity than it is now. There was no such thing as a metrosexual, or designer pieces, or wallmarks. Instead, there was Woolworths everywhere then. Anyone here remember what we did? It was possible to have Ma and Pa stores then. In fact, the city was filled with them. It was affordable to have a modest business of your dreams. My parents ran a Ma and Pa store and raised six children. Doing, trying to try doing that today in New York City. The city was once and all a real place then. As I said before, I was shaped by my city as an artist. I was lucky enough to work, to begin my work at a time of incredible sociable and cultural change. In a time when traditional values were being challenged, when the discrete boundaries of the various art forms were being challenged. For example, the visual arts no longer meant only paintings on a wall or sculpture on a pedestal. Dance and theater could occur in alternative spaces like roofs, gardens, parking lots, museums, galleries, instead of theaters. A time art event could be in multiple parks on multiple days in multiple spaces at different locations in the city. Dance, theater, or performance could be integrated in new and different ways. All this may seem obvious now, but it was hot off the griddle then. Experimentation was the norm and the visual arts led the way with the incorporation of media and new technology, inspiring dance, performance, and finally theater for a new adventure and new forms of expression. Projection and sound design weren't always an accepted norm in the time arts, but as we all know, things have to begin sometime, somewhere. My very first work, Lazarus, made in 1972, incorporated slide projection, recorded sound, film projection, puppets, and live actor. It was performed in a loft without spoken text. Soon after, I would incorporate dance, not surprising since I started my life in the performing arts as a dancer with Meredith Monk. The melding of these elements represented the vocabulary of a new kind of time art that was born in the 60s and 70s. 1972 was also the year that I first joined Meredith Monk's Dance Theater Company, the house, and a work entitled Neal Brain Lloyd and the Systems Kid. It was presented on the grounds of Connecticut College for the Connecticut College Dance Festival. The production had a cast of 80 people and included a jeep ejecting dancers before an audience performing small events. White, while horses and riders galloped in the background, including motorcyclists in whiteface, a centipede-like monster, four people painted red from head to toe doing a lumbering dance, Victorian figures playing croquet on a lawn, and most of it accompanied by Meredith's primal, sometimes hair-raising, wordless song. The performance took place in multiple outdoor locations, including a lake, the surrounding grounds of an arboretum, the stately, great lawn of the college, and in the windows of an ivy-covered building besides a sprawling, ancient oak tree. Meredith wanted fireworks for the finale, and since I was Chinese, she asked me. But the budget didn't allow it, so there was a sea of flares instead, accompanying the performers dancing by its light. Needlebrain Lloyd and the Systems Kid was a surrealistic, mid-summer night's dream never to be repeated again. The performance was three hours long with a dinner break in between. I had the good fortune of learning my craft directly in the field. Working with Meredith Monk was an eye-opening and liberating experience because I realized that a performance could be anything you wanted it to be as long as the audience was engaged. Time passes. I made my first work Lazarus when I was 26 years old, and now I am 65 years old. That was 39 years ago. This coming October, I will be celebrating my 40th anniversary in the performing arts. As I said earlier, one does not realize one's dreams without the support of those around them, and I have been fortunate in both my professional and my personal life in this regard. I did not do it alone. I doubt if anyone really does anything in any profession alone. It is therefore always important to be grateful to those who have helped you, to never forget where you came from, and to help those who are coming up behind you. Unlike visual artists, we in our field can't have a retrospective on the wall of a museum and see the through line, the ups and downs of an artistic life in an hour or two. But I like seeing artists through retrospectives because it comforts me to see the early steps and struggles, the doubts, the confusion, the tentativeness, the failures, and triumphs over a long career because it reminds me that we are not alone in our artistic joys and struggles. Looking back on my own work, I see that the themes and motifs have been remarkably consistent. My earliest work dealt with issues arising from the fact that I am an immigrant. It reflects the sense of alienation I felt toward the dominant culture, and at the same time, the estrangement I felt from my own culture as I acculturated. What it is to be other, to be the perceived outsider, has been my dominant theme. It is no surprise that my first work was about Lazarus, a man whose experience of returning from the dead would forever separate him from the living. But the theme of otherness, which began as a personal expression of anguish and alienation, that sense of belonging and not belonging, limited in its scope and reach, over time expanded into something bigger and more universal. Because if we were to elaborate on this theme, we would come to realize that we are talking about something that has plagued mankind down the centuries, which is exclusion versus inclusion, empowerment versus disempowerment, justice versus injustice, equality versus inequality. The macrocosm became the microcosm in my work. I am grateful for this elaboration because it connected me to the world when I was disconnected and took me out of myself and into the world. It made me realize I had a duty and a responsibility toward others in the world. It made me hate, include exclusion. It made me an empathetic human being. I have been other in different ways all my life as an artist in American society, as a person of color, as an artist of color, as an immigrant in all kinds of ways. It's the position that fate has allotted me, the fate of the outsider, but it's a valuable position to be in because I think every society should have a mirror held to it by the artist's outsider. And curiously, being other has brought me closer to my humanity. From 1979 to this day, my artistic home has been La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York City. It was the late Ellen Stewart while Mama, as we called her, an African-American woman who gave me a place to grow as an artist in New York City. She generously opened her theater to difference to the other artists of color, gay artists and renegades of all colors and strengths. She invited theater artists from all over the world because she passionately believed that we must all connect with each other. Ellen did this before any other theater did. Her inclusiveness was instinctual, part of her vision of the way the world should be and not a funding ploy, as it is in so many theaters these days. Mama was authentically inclusive. She was ahead of her time in every way. As a young woman, she came to New York City Penalists, eventually working her way up at Saks Fifth Avenue until she was designing evening gowns. Her work was so impressive that she was given her own shop space at Saks Fifth Avenue. However, the white seamstresses refused to work for her for a black woman. In the end, it was Jewish refugees escaping from the most horrendous exclusion in Europe who didn't have a problem working for a black woman. It was these women, these haunted women who first called Ellen Stewart Mama. I tell this story because it explains Mama's empathetic and inclusive spirit. She knew what it meant to be excluded and in the New York City of the 50s and 60s, there was plenty of exclusion. That story has yet to be told. Mama was famous for introducing a show in one of her three theaters with the ringing of a little bell. This year, eight months after Mama's passed away, East Fourth Street was officially renamed Ellen Stewart Way. A street fair was organized to celebrate the event on a beautiful fall day. In the evening, as the street sign was finally unveiled, throngs of people on East Fourth Street rang little bells in Mama's honor, accompanied by friends ringing bells from all over the world projected on a large screen. In the summer of 1992, I found myself teaching an intensive 10 day theater class in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with an international group of students. We would dine together, drink together, and create together. And it's so often the case when people have had enough to drink, they unconsciously revert back to their mother tongues. I found it magical to hear this babble of languages flying across the table over Dutch view. I thought to myself, I wonder if I could create a work using multiple languages about multiple cultures. There we were, people from completely different worlds, together being creative and therefore affirmative, instead of shooting or killing each other. When I returned to New York, I said about looking for people who spoke both English and their mother tongue. The project would be entitled, Undesirable Elements and Ironic Choice of Words. It was created at a time in the United States when anti-immigrant sentiment was on the rise and the AIDS epidemic was in full bloom. It was the beginning of the sorry state of our nation, our nation is in now. I wanted to do something as a reaction and response to the unfriendly climate. As the project evolved, it became an oral history theater work unlike anything I had ever done before. In form, it is a seated opera for the spoken word. The production interweaves the stories of five to eight people from different cultures based on interviews I conducted with each individual. The set consists simply of chairs, microphones, and music stands with scripts that the participants would use to read their personal narratives from. Little did I realize that the simple, modest work of people empowered to tell their stories of otherness, of what is desirable and undesirable in the world they came from, what was desirable and undesirable in the adopted home they found themselves living in would have such power and resonance. Little did I realize I was tapping into the living testimony, the living history of the 20th and 21st century from those who had lived it. With few exceptions, undesirable elements is always community specific and local. I drew off from the people living in a particular community with the help of the local producer. It could be New York City or Tokyo, Charleston or Rotterdam in large or small communities. As often happens, the original catalyst, which was language, became less important than the matter of identity, the collision of cultural difference, where one calls home, where one feels at home, where one is accepted. We ask, what stereotypes do we project on the other? What is it to be other in the United States? Who decides who the other is? How and why? As time went on, the subject matter expanded from its original focus, which was cultural otherness, to other forms of otherness. We have since worked with the disability community, teenagers who have lived through war, Native American nations, the African American community of the Hill District in Pittsburgh, the Congolese refugee community, and currently, perhaps most urgently, survivors of childhood sexual abuse. There has now been 42 undesirable element productions nationally and internationally over 20 years. I have interviewed people from all walks of life, all social classes from everywhere in the world, including Sudan, Ukraine, the Choctaw Nation, Tajikistan, Japan, Tonga, Mexico, Poland, Korea, the Navajo Nation, Burma, Cuba, Turkey, Sierra Leone, Kurdistan, Iran, Chile, Afghanistan, Laos, Suriname, Somalia, India, El Salvador, Vietnam, Sweden, Brazil, the list goes on and on. The object of undesirable elements is to move us beyond our prejudices, our stereotypes, to see the other's humanity as the same as our own. To raise our consciousness of injustice, of exclusion, wherever it may be, and to be aware that the past has a profound impact on the present and the future of the world we live in. All islands connect underwater. All human beings are interconnected. It has been a great privilege to be able to help access the voices of the marginalized, the displaced, the disempowered, and gain their trust. Never did I imagine that in the third decade of my career, something as rich, useful, and fulfilling as undesirable elements would come my way. In the 20 years that I have worked on this series, I am amazed at the healing power and importance of speaking one's truth. In cry for peace, voices from the Congo, the undesirable elements that will premiere at Syracuse Stage next fall, a haunted young Congolese woman shares her painful personal narrative. She experienced horrors in the Congo of which no human being should ever have to live through. But each time she performs the work in progress of cry for peace in Syracuse, in New York City, in Washington, D.C., she grows less fragile and more able to own her tragic story. When I first interviewed her for the production, she was extremely withdrawn. I didn't know if she could make it through the interview, but she clearly needed to speak her truth. I asked her, if the people who raped you, who killed your husband, who killed your twin sisters, who killed your baby, were here in front of you today, what would you say to them? She said, I would say, you did terrible things to me. You did me great harm, but I forgive you. I forgive you because I am alive and I have hope for my future. Since 1996, over five million people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo because of war, disease, and the desire for conflict minerals that are in every one of our computers, smartphones, and other digital devices. Let me repeat, that's five million plus people. It is outrageous that the quote unquote civilized world would have done so little to expose the worst Holocaust of our day. It is outrageous that the civilized world has done nothing to bring justice to the Congolese people. This far away place, which seemingly has nothing to do with us, has everything to do with us. From the history of Western slavery to the blood rubber genocide of the late 19th century, in which millions and millions of people died, followed by colonial rule in which the Congolese lived in segregated poverty in their own homeland, into the assassination of Lumumba by the West and the installation of Ubuntu as president and dictator who destroyed whatever infrastructure existed from the 60 plus years of colonial rule, to the present wars and blood mineral nightmare. The DRC has everything to do with us. This week, the presidential elections were held in the DRC and the outcome is still unclear. But will government there habituated to intense corruption as a way of life change? To date, the DRC, which is the size of Western Europe, has few paved roads. The government does nothing for the people. There is no infrastructure to speak of. For most of the people there, there is no plumbing, no electricity, no hospitals, no schools, in short, no public services. Everyone must fend for themselves to survive. Corruption is endemic. And yet, when I visited Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC this summer, I was overwhelmed by the spirit of the people there. They still have hope for their future. Crime and Peace originated through the desire of the tiny Congolese community in Syracuse to live in peace with one another because tribes were pitted against one another in a multitude of conflicts in the DRC, the origins of which lay unequivocally at the doorstep of the West. These refugees and Syracuse have come from a world no 3D glasses would want to bring into focus. The refugees have come from one of the hottest places in the world to one of the coldest, to an alien culture far removed from their own, but they bravely soldier on to make a new life in a new alien world. Two years ago, Cyprian Mehingo, leader of the Congolese community in Syracuse, approached Syracuse Stage, which approached Syracuse University, and through Syracuse University, approached me to help spread their message of peace and reconciliation among the exiled Congolese in the United States. There is yet a second goal to ask all of you, every human being of conscience, to help the Congolese people realize a democratic republic of the Congo that is free from strife, that actually serves the Congolese people and not the one percent there. Here in the United States, the advocacy organization, Friends of the Congo, is helping generate awareness and activism on behalf of the Congolese people. My lifelong journey negotiating the culture I was born into and the culture I adopted seemed at first a dilemma. I now see it as a gift to me, both as an artist and as a human being. It has taught me the need for connection, respect, justice, empathy. There must be a new paradigm of connectedness, of inclusion, of sharing, of belonging, of respect, of responsibility, of sacredness. Because with every passing day in our brave new world, we are losing more and more of our connection to ourselves, to each other, to the past, to our rich histories and to the earth itself which nurtures us. Because without this sense of connection, there can be no respect for life on this planet. In closing, I would like to read you a letter from a cast member of the all Native American production of undesirable elements commissioned by the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, to address the tension between the majority white culture in Lawrence and the Native American community of Haskell Indian Nation University, the only multi-tribal North American university in the United States. Dear King, our time is short. Tomorrow you will return to New York, and tonight our last performance will be hectic. But I wanted to take a moment to tell you how deeply appreciative I am to have worked with you and your company. From a project born in suspicion and doubt, we have been able to build something wonderful through trust and understanding. I cannot offer a gift that would demonstrate my gratitude, but as a small token, I will dedicate the song I sing in our production to you tonight. It is the song that is sung when the creator has come to your aid after you have been filled with despair. It is also a song that is sung when you are in despair to remind you that you already have many blessings. It creates a center and a solid place to stand. May you always find a solid place to stand. And to everyone here, I would like to say, be strong, be affirmative, be inclusive, and may you always find a solid place to stand. Thank you. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them. Otherwise, we cannot go on to our next event. Don't feel you have any pressure at all. Anybody have a question? Going once, going twice. Thank you.