 All right, so thank you guys for sticking around for this panel after the conversation. Go start from here. I came here just two hours ago, and I already feel energized and inspired by the energy, the bus, and the sense that I had just shortly with me here that you guys are all making history and moving forward with a very positive agenda. My name is Roberto Varea, and it's my honor to be here moderating a panel that was originally convened by Michael Malik and Catherine Coray, who couldn't be here. So they reached to the bench and asked me to connect with this work that is about framing MENA content in academia. My work is from the Latinx perspective. I started the Performing Arts and Social Justice Program here at the University of San Francisco in turning 20 years next. Woo! And of course, I admire and support as much as I can to work for both friends and everything that comes from this amazing company, Taranj and Tolgan. So I will introduce the panelists. I will share with you quickly the framing questions that gather us in reflection, but certainly with the desire that this becomes a conversation. So we're going to begin with a short statement per panelists, but we definitely would love for this to be a dialogue most all and without further ado then. Framing questions for us are sort of examining the role of the academy in relationship to MENA theatrical production, training, and publication, how in the traditional university theater system there has been little room for MENA playwrights in the American theater canon leading to opacity of representation of MENA writers, directors, actors, and designers. And some of our framing questions are why aren't MENA playwrights regularly taught in university college curricula? Why aren't more academic theater programs including MENA works in their seasons? What can be done and what has been done in the experience of the panelists and what you can contribute to this conversation to engage MENA content in the academic curriculum, the campus stage, and in the area of publication? What strategies can be employed or have been employed that can result or have resulted in more MENA plays produced by university and college departments? And also in the area of scholarly publishing in trade journals or books? And how can theater and performance studies scholars create more books, say, sized dissertations and other publications focused on MENA work? So again, a container to reflect on, but not limited to, and if you already feel that there are some critical questions missing, please contribute with those as the conversation ensues. So I'm going to introduce the panelists very, very shortly. As you can imagine, there's a lot I could say about each one of them, but they were all very kind to agree to have a very short bio. And I'm going to do it for three of them because we decided to expand the panel with those present. And so we're going to have two folk who are going to be here with us to share in their perspective from their work in academia and whose bios I don't have, but they will contribute some critical, vital information about themselves. But I am going to introduce them in the order in which they will be sharing a short statement. So beginning with Leila Modizade, who is a theater artist and educator with a focus on theater for social justice and community-based theater. And she's sitting there with her glasses on her head. Besides her career as a professional stage actress, she's best known for her solo shows and also collaborations with Pink Charming Company for the past 24 years. She currently teaches at UC Berkeley and has previously taught at San Jose City College, Aloni College, Baruch College, Texas Tech University and the University of Mississippi. Next, Tariq Hamami, who teaches at the City College of New York, and who, when his term counts, is going to share a couple of things about himself, followed by Josh Saburi Sadeh, who is a graduate student at the University of Missouri. And then we're going to hear from Natalie Handel, who has worked on over 20 theatrical productions, either as a playwright, director, or producer, author of Eight Plays, and her most recent work have been produced by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Butch Theater, and West Mr. Abbey in London. She teaches, researches, the Mina, the Asperine Literature Theater, and film at NYU, her recent poetry collection, Life in a Country Album, is praised as illuminating the luxuriance and longing of the reclamation at contemporary Orpheus, Natalie. And last but not least, Fresh from SFO, Layla Buck has performed and developed her work at the Public Theater, New York Theater Workshop, live on public mosaic arena stage called Shakespeare and the Wilma. She has lived, performed, and taught theatrical tools for literacy, conflict, resolution, and intercultural communication to UN delegates, eight workers, youth, and leaders throughout the US, Europe, China, Australia, and 11 Arab countries. She's part of the inaugural Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater, usual suspect, NYTW, and an MA at John Professor at NYU. So let's give them a warm welcome. And now we're going to start with Layla. I think you can hear me? Yeah. So I was trying to think about one or two things that I think would move this issue forward in academia. And I came up with a couple of things. One is interdisciplinarity. I feel that as academics, if we can partner with Near Eastern Studies or Middle Eastern Studies or whatever they call their departments, there's a way to find not just support and sponsorship there and more audience, but also there is a lot of power, I think, for theater departments to partner across discipline. In answer to those questions, I think there's underwear racism that runs, and that's probably part of the reason why we don't see as much produced by main playwrights. I also think there's a certain lack of knowledge and accessibility to the work and the playwrights. I mean, I'm at UC Berkeley where they're pretty conscious and they're very progressive in terms of, I think we have Taranj coming to direct soon. Yeah, so they really do try. In a lot of places where I've been, there's a kind of tokenism that happens where they'll have a pretty white, dominant, traditional male canon represented, and then they'll have the one slot. They'll have the African-American play or the Haitian play or something. So I feel like as long as they have a tokenism mentality, it's gonna be hard to make what we do integrated into just, oh, it's just one of the many great things. It's instead it's like, oh, well that's the little sidebar slot, so that's why I think that happens. So one thing was interdisciplinarity and pairing with other departments, especially the departments of Near Eastern and Eastern Studies. And the other one was building relationships with whoever's on the play selection committees. I mean, I end up sometimes being on those committees, but if you're in a school that doesn't have kind of open sharing around choosing the season, I would say make friends. Really build just human relationships with the folks that are on those committees because you can try and, you know, what did they say? Decolonize their minds or you try to open people up and they can't be forced open because then you have like a liberal white guilt that starts to play and then something funny about that. So I think it's about real relationships. You know what I mean? Anyway, that's all, that's what I thought. Thank you. Is it working? Yes. I'd like to please say a couple of words about your work and jump in. All right, hello everybody. My name is Tara Kamami and I teach at the City College of New York and the Borough of Manhattan Community College, both part of the CUNY system in New York. In terms of my work in academia, I'm a playwright by profession. I will teach playwriting when we can get a section of it going, but for the large part I teach introduction to theater. So my work in academia largely deals with students who are 18, 19, maybe even 20 who have just left high school and have never seen a live stage production before in their life. And I know this because I asked them the first day of the semester have they ever seen a live stage production before? So my class is mainly an introduction to them for just the world of theater as a whole, which has issues in and of itself to get how much could you get in in a semester. And in terms of getting a minor artist on stage in academia, there's obviously many problems that we face that we're all gonna talk about, but I do find a large part of it is that there is this want to do the familiar at a college and they want to do things, anything that was created from 1950 to 1975. And so you get a million productions of Edward Albee and David Mamet and Dan Yankees. So, and of course that excludes not just minor artists, but female writers, African American writers, Asian writers as well. And so I think there needs to be a push for not a for current theater and that will I think will also help nurture bringing in not just minor artists, but artists of many different backgrounds because as we know for a long period of time, not that it's all that much different now, but during that period of time, people, minor artists, female writers, African American writers are not allowed at the table, they're not being produced, and so of course they're not in the canon of what these colleges are looking for. So, that among many other things. Thank you, I can thank you for reminding us that there are different ills of universities with different kinds of visions and some are very conservative, others are more progressive, so that this tradition will not be the same, right? Josh. Yes, so my name is Josh, that's what he saw there. I go to the University of Missouri, Columbia, and since I'm still a graduate student, I am not as far as what I do, a lot of what I do has been appointed to me by those that are in higher positions, but so in terms of taking control of the work that I do and the research that I do and the knowledge that I produce has been about exploring my own identity, construction, how I've come to understand who I am and how that has impacted by how others view me, and I'm right now working on an auto ethnographic study which takes my own life experiences as data, as research, and puts that into a larger project of solo performance, and that that is knowledge. And in terms of what our university does or our department does, I think that our theater department is actually very strong in terms of the diversity of stories that are represented on stage and how students can create their own knowledge based on their own experiences and have space to perform those on stage and in the campus community. So I feel very fortunate to be in that program, but then the weight is on me, the pressure is on me to communicate that knowledge, that story, which is scary, but also empowering. Thank you, Natalie. Hi, it's so wonderful to be here. I want to take just a step back a little to look at the evolution of where we were and what we've come in the last 20 years, because when I started off, and Layla and I sort of started out together, there was actually nothing in academia that we were not present anywhere. And I mean, there was like the classical texts that were taught at usually the Middle Eastern departments were rather conservative, they were teaching classical. And in the other departments, we were absent. And I think in the last, I think we have a lot to work, we have a lot of work to do, but we've moved forward in amazing ways. I tell educators that it's important for us to create new syllabus so that the students have other classes that they can take. So for me, when I was, you know, until 9-11, I was pretty much invisible in the, in academic setting. I couldn't say, I couldn't speak about my back, where I came from. My story, usually, although they were war-based, people didn't know what, either they didn't know and, or I was told I should never mention the word Palestine. So the fact that today and for the last 15 years and especially for the last 10 years, I've been teaching the diaspora, the Asian diaspora. So it goes into Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, West Asia. And that creates a lot of conversation. First, it exposes us to each other. So it creates a certain kind of connectivity so that we don't live in sort of these isolated places. Second, it is part of the class that they have to interact and they have to go to, to see plays and interact with artists. So for example, I have a lot of guests, lately I haven't been my guest. I've had a lot of writers. I encourage sometimes an artist from one part of the world that's doing something completely different aesthetically so that we can speak about diversity and aesthetics, a hybrid, because finally as was spoken before under the notions of identity and its complexity, we speak so much about identity in the classroom and how to really bring those stories to the public. And so it's important that we start allowing that in the classroom so that the young writers can know that that's possible. So many times they come in and say, can I actually write a story like that? Can I present it in this way, in this fashion? So this is very important to work. And earlier on we spoke about having more critics in creating organizations. All this is what we have to bring to the classroom so that they know that they are the ones, just like we did back years ago when we created the bra, it's a terrible sandwich. Well, we didn't remember. When we created the bras and they can tell you that, I'll still remember, I still remember, it was probably the most incredible moment in my life to get there and to have theater artists coming from all over the Middle East and in our voices with our stories, we were on stage. It was electric and I think it's grown so much and I see what the students know compared to what they did 10 years ago. And of course there's a whole landscape, I travel all over the country and I might go to Rhode Island or another town where they are not aware. But what I know for sure is that through stories we make connections. And when we've made these connections, the students then have to really think about what does it mean to come from the East and also most importantly, you were speaking about this idea of perhaps our communities are not in agreement back where we came from. But here we're having in America, we're having a conversation about what it means to be American too. So we have a different experience. So these are all conversations that we need to bring to the classroom and we need to connect with people working professionally and those new generations and that new generation. Thank you. What do you think? Yeah, I have not been texting, I've been taking notes for the record. But yeah, just to jump on some of that, I think that I come to academia as a practitioner. And so I'm grateful and I wanna just name, I started, to your point, Josh, I started writing as a performer. I was, my first play that I wrote was at my undergraduate thesis. And because I had an advisor who was an adjunct professor, who was a working professional director who encouraged me, based on my life experience, to write my first play. He's still, and another professional playwright who was visiting for one semester, Robert Myers, so Tim Raphael, who now runs the Newest Americans program at Rutgers Newark, a wonderful director. Robert Myers, who now runs the Center for American Studies at AUB. Also a wonderful playwright. They were the working artists who were there for a semester and changed my life. And so that is how I started writing. Michael Madagnajar is how I got that play published in my first play, which has been a huge thing. And his, I love that I get to now teach his work in a class that I teach for undergraduates. And Catherine Coray was, first of all, to that point about Nebras, which was our first Arab American theater company in New York back in 2001. We began before 9-11. And one of the biggest things we ended up producing was in collaboration with Catherine because she is also a practitioner within academia who works also within academia at NYU and through partnership with New York Theater Workshop and NYU, we did a festival of eight plays from and about Palestine called Aswat, that was a collaboration between this academic institution and professional theater institution. Because of, largely, because of Nebras' connection to New York Theater Workshop and because of Catherine's connection to NYU. Catherine is the ultimate connector in so many ways. Catherine is also the reason that I was connected to another working artist at NYU, Kristen Horton, who's a fantastic director who teaches at NYU in the Art Gallatin Interdisciplinary Department, which is where I now teach, essentially, because Kristen is a working artist who recognized something that she felt was of value in someone that I don't have an MFA, I have an MA, I don't have a PhD. And so the invitation to join an academic institution as an individual artist in that way was an opportunity, again, by a practitioner who was within that, who was bridging those worlds. I also, when I was a master's student at NYU, the way I got through that was because, at first, I frankly struggled with the, I resist academia in general sometimes as an artist because, not entirely, but, yeah, there are things about the way we define research and practice that felt constraining at the time, and I was a working artist and only able to take one class a semester, basically. And it was because I had a working artist as a mentor, Judith Sloan, that I was able to complete that degree and complete a second play as my thesis because someone understood the value of that versus the kind of research that another wonderful professor, but who was more strictly an academic, did not understand. And so I just wanna name those people who have been there to sort of grab hold and lift up and recognize and value and support and the value of practitioners within academia. And so now I get to teach a class on participatory performance and community engagement. I get to teach a class on representation of Arab-American more primarily focused initially and now it will expand to sort of writing beyond our borders more largely. So about any group that you are not a part of, which for many playwrights is what we mostly write about, it's not always our own experience, right? I've had Andrea in my class, I've had all kinds of people within our community to Ron, Skype, Dim, we had, so I feel like being able to have working artists in the room to teach use of plays, to really be able to have the voices of practitioners within the classroom is so vital. And I'm grateful, you know, Catherine even reminded me before this panel, speak as an artist, speak as a practitioner, and I think overall within academia, I'm grateful to the Gallatin School at NYU, which is interdisciplinary because there's an energy of understanding that there can be this bridging between, you know, more pure academic research and practice. And I think my brain just shut down, so that's what I'll say for now. I'm gonna keep it. I just wanted to add like, when she's, of course, Catherine, she's an amazing example of just like being here with all of you of how really we can help each other and how we can connect, really it's each other and wherever it is we are, whether we're practicing or we're teaching or whatever we're doing, that is where the power is. It's this very strong of what we can create and how we can move forward. And just one more thing I wanted to tell on my little note here is just to name the financial realities that depending on the institution, but the privilege that is required just to get the degree that, you know, not everybody works hard and gets all kinds of loans to do it. It doesn't mean you have privilege if you have that degree, but what people have to sacrifice to do that and what that means about access and how that intersects with whose voices are represented I think is really important to name when we talk about academic institutions in general. Thank you and so many ways that we could move from here and I know eventually soon we'll be opening it up, but I just wanted to throw a couple of questions that you guys know and you've mentioned different areas and aspects of nuanced a lot, what we began to discuss, the idea of scholars, people who are there to do research who are just mostly driven by writing and criticism and so forth and the figure of the artist scholar, so the person who's also there to contribute and the university recognizes research and publication that normally takes the shape of a journal article or a book, also has creative work, right? So it is also an important sort of point where the university honors the work of an artist scholar as research when it could be directing, acting, playwriting, et cetera. Within that world in regards to either putting your foot in the door to be a part of having a seat at the table and all this metaphors we can think of and or dealing with obstacles, is there anything you guys can share as in both articulating that perhaps a sense of as it was mentioned, friendships, network building, how to access resources between this worlds of what's considered more creative work, that's considered more scholarly work and also within the MENA academics, as it's also, I imagine as we think about Latinx, she connects the, or Asian American, where we are often forced by the mainstream narratives into conversation with each other when those not normally would happen, but the stage becomes an incredible platform to play out that connectivity, right? I'm sure it's the same for you as is for Latino place where there's a Mexican story that has been embodied by actors from Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, so far directed by Brazilian and all of it, right? Because we're all Latinx, right? So what of that is important in regards to sort of breaking through has been in your experience that sort of acknowledgement of that common ground connectivity amongst those differences in academia? Just on that I want to recognize someone brought up the census, thinking in the academia is very important in terms of scholarships, rents, helping people and because institutions are gatekeepers, you're talking about this, without the designation of being something other than white, we don't get the same attention and funding a student would need and that's why maybe it's a little bit more obvious to say we're doing a Latinx plan, we're doing an African American but this is nebulous territory when we don't even have a box for the students to check to this point. Yeah, to kind of piggyback off of that, I think that this idea of diversity is something that a lot of academic institutions talk about but I think we're at a point in time where we need to think about what does that word include? The schools that I teach at City College and BMCC are lucky enough, they do take risks on plays and they do a lot of different things but I used to teach at another school in suburban Pennsylvania and this was the one time in my life where I actually had control over what plays could be produced and there was a bit of pushback on what I could present there. Maybe largely because it was a Catholic university but not so there was a kind of pressure on what you could do what you can't do and then you add in the structure of what academia is in terms of employment where I was an adjunct, most people are adjuncts and adjunct work means you can be let go at any time without reason at any moment and so there is this added pressure to it and even in terms of faculty what is diversity? I've applied to many jobs to departments that say that pride themselves on we are a diverse department with many different backgrounds and you look at the faculty list there's not a single Middle Eastern person on there and I can say well I know for a fact there's at least one Middle Eastern person applied to this job. So all that to say is I'm not sure in terms when we're talking about census and what you were just saying that box that you have to include yourself in when people are even in academia are thinking about what is diversity? Many times Amina artists are not thought of in that realm there. I hope this connects, it does in my brain right now so I totally don't. Just in terms of just the balancing of the specificity of our communities and then the connectivity right? And I often feel even with the course I've been teaching wanting very much to say I want to teach a class about specifically what I know best which is the Arab American theater and not pretend that I know basically almost anything. I know very much less about Iranian American theater, Turkish you know as it is Arab is a vast category right? And so being able to focus on that initially and then being encouraged to expand so that you know expand the access expand the interconnectivity which I also love because I'm getting now to sort of adjust the syllabus to include different colleagues and groups in different ways. And in the process I'm also figuring out well how do I not make it so broad that now we're losing the focus and the presentation of a culture that is rarely seen in the same way? And so I think that's a question and I want to as much as I've talked about practitioners I also want to again name you know Malik Najar's work you know having said when people write about your work in an academic way and it is published it is suddenly legitimate in this way that you know it exists that you know the history of the Arab American theater movement exists because it was put in a book you know because and so the need for that the importance of that and then also the need for conversations within all of these fields across every community around what is knowledge and what is research and I appreciate we just had a convening at Gallatin at NYU about practice-based research and what does it mean and what can be qualified as research what does you know what qualified as knowledge which is a broader question that again is about who gets access and what kinds of intelligence and experience are valid within academic institutions it's a huge part of decolonizing academia to validate personal experience of the people that were often written about so yeah I mean I can say more about that but I think that sense of how we classify knowledge and how we connect to each other's experiences of things like colonization things like how our stories have been silenced or censored or controlled by others is I think very important. Well I mean like you that's why the more the more we are in academia the more we can bring different perspectives like what it is about knowing the Arab-American I grew up in four continents so for me I'm interested in the diaspora so when I'm teaching like the Arab diaspora and I go through my syllabus I want to teach the Arabs in Europe and then that gets very complex because you're living as Scandinavia you're looking at Germany you're looking at I mean the experiences are very vast the Arabs in Latin America which I always have to explain that many do not call themselves Arab Latinos or hyphenate themselves there have been in recent years some who have created you know for example the Film Festival and so forth but in essence it's a very different way in which they identify themselves the Arabs that are in Africa the Arabs that are in Asia the Arabs that are Arab-American and my whole thing is I'm very interested in the stories and how they're speaking to each other in relation to where they came from and their experience and most importantly generationally because the experiences that are when we speak about like Arab-American but oh my God so vast what an Arab-American in the 20s, 50s, 80s and now are experiencing we have to speak we can't just say Arab-American like that what generation how did they view themselves these are all very important and then the other thing is because we mentioned earlier the idea of language is how are we communicating with the greater the greater community in relationship to language so there's the language of theater and then there's also you know what language are we writing in and how are we also communicating to our countries of origin so all these things but to go back to the students because we're just allowing those students who all have incredible stories to connect to what we are teaching them and presenting them as wide and as varied texts and plays and films and so forth as possible really I think that's where it is that's where they can grow and later on they can choose where they want to place themselves I just wanted to say something quickly about and this is things that I'm still thinking through but text-centric knowledge and how it's some of the smartest people I know my Iranian grandmother Tuba she communicated her knowledge to me without text and so how can theater the work that I do embrace that? Actually, this is important because I recently got a fellowship together a database or a resource kind of website for educators, acting teachers and even students outside the traditional white male canon and I am open to putting more main artists up there for access but I'm also finding that because a lot of cultures have oral tradition and different ways of communicating that these texts and I'm not sure if it should be someone's dissertation like an ethnography to go out and you know, like as an ethnomusicologist you record maybe we need to start recording some of the stories that aren't written down but I know I'm actually struggling with that project and also devised a lot of devised work these days is trying to tackle and take on the challenge of texts. I do find that, not to be all doom and gloom but something positive I do find is I do think now is the time for men of place to be introduced into college campuses because I do find that there is a difference in the outlook on the world between my students who are 18 and 19 now as opposed to 10 years ago when I was teaching the classes that there is, I don't know in a way more openness to it. An example I could give and this is even more on like a more maybe subconscious or psychological level I have a project where they create their own characters and they fill out the sheet and you know, it's their name, age, gender, race and all that and I find that I have a lot of Middle Eastern students that sign up for my class and 10 years ago I would give this assignment to them and every single student their character was white regardless of what their ethnicity was and now I find now that my students create characters that are more similar to them and I think that that says something about the openness of the new audience that's being generated out there because for me personally I find an introduction to theater classes just a class to teach you about theater and help you to become a theater audience member to better know theater and so this idea, I think that the new batch of students coming out don't want the white male canon that is the previous canon of plays and musicals and everything out there. So I think now is the time for this to happen I think there's an openness to it and kind of like we were saying there is an element of gatekeeping that we need to find a way around. I'm just thinking also in relation to access and sort of how and why plays do or don't get done overall but certainly in academia as well I just want to raise something that and Yusuf forgive me if I'm shout out if I'm saying this wrong but I just remember talking with you about this question of sort of casting and authenticity and casting and the balancing of wanting to make sure that when our plays are done they are cast appropriately and the way that the playwright wants them and there's someone who has some access to that culture playing those roles but then also recognizing there are a lot of places in this country where there are not actors that have that cultural background nor the budget to bring them in and so then our plays not getting done and how do we balance wanting to have these stories told in a broader selection of places with wanting to make sure that where that's important to the playwright they're cast authentically that's a loaded word but you know in a way that is honoring what's necessary to bring into the space in an embodied way around the culture and so I think that question of casting to me is also related to access and yeah of our works. Critically about, I mean I'm thinking how important is that we have this very permeable space between academia and the world out there where companies live and people who are professionals in the field that if you think of universities as a space for the construction of knowledge and we think of art and performance as an epistemic to itself, right? As a way of knowing and understanding this unique to itself. The question of the embodied knowledge that in this case it's sort of not only the writers, directors but also the students who will be those on stage in this university spring with themselves is quite critical. So it's at least for Latinx folk like me as in California where the demographics are soon to be where we'll be majority. We still struggle with the fact that may not be enough Latinx students in the art programs and theater that will be a casting pool where we can put our necks out there and say yes we're gonna do this play by Sheree Moraga and we're going to cast it with those who belong in this stage of this university. You know if I don't rally the Mecha student clubs and some of the other, though you better show up, you know I'm in trouble, right? How do you deal with this point that you're raising? I mean is this something that at a certain stage there has to be decisions made and an openness that would not normally happen outside academia or that the recruitment of students with a mean background needs to be critically a part of the conversation and of course in addition that they also don't go to other careers where their parents will know if you don't even think about going into theater, right? So how do you guys deal with that? And you also being a student, you might have a perspective on this, maybe just do. But I'm asking this and we're opening it up. So I have to say one quick thing, two quick things. One is I wanna also say that I used to be very strict about authenticity in casting and then I've had so many experiences where embodied knowledge is there's a spectrum, right? So there are folks who come from two Arab parents but have never lived in the Arab country or have different relationships to that culture and folks who have not a drop of Arab blood that grew up in their entire lives in an Arab country. For example, I've seen Greek Cypriots play Arabs in a way that is so to me just like my uncle or my grandfather, the embodiment, although it is a different culture, there is a connection, right? So being mindful, and I say this to myself too about the policing of that in a very rigid way and at the same time being able to honor when it's important particularly to the playwright who is of that background, this character needs to have this particular knowledge. I also, one of my favorite experiences in academia as a playwright was with Andrea Assef in Art to Action at USF Tampa doing a play of mine that's about Lebanon and Israel in the 2006 war with students who had neither of those backgrounds and literally no knowledge of Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, any of that and them stepping into those roles in an academic setting, it wasn't a production fully but in that context was so valuable to their embodied experience of these places they had no knowledge of. So that also being something valid because they didn't have that knowledge and what acting can do to step into those shoes. So I agree with Leila. I think according to where they're at and the group of students that you're working and again when we're talking about where they are are they gonna go on stage or is it more of a classroom, it's an incredible journey for them to step into those roles and discover those characters and that space that they have no idea. And it's so complex our world, there's been so many conflicts and really one of the best ways is through art for them to enter that. Otherwise they're always standing away. I would just say and I hope I'm not distilling it too much, I understand that it's complex but the students won't come if there is no opportunity for them. So if there's a lot of planning that goes on in departments for which shows they will do that season and if you're carefully thinking about which show you'll do and if you're worried about what the students will come allow them to have that opportunity and I think if you say this is our season, this is the show, come on out to auditions and they see it in the programming, they see it then why, I shouldn't say why wouldn't they come but it gives them that sense of responsibility to show up. I was just gonna add in too, I mean when it comes to casting and authenticity, I mean it is important for there to be an opportunity for Middle Eastern students to be able to play Middle Eastern roles but I think there's always a double side to casting because the reason why we need that is because that same Middle Eastern student is not being considered for the role of Hamlet, you know? So when you're the only Middle Eastern student in the room you're not going to be playing Willie Lohman, you know what I mean, like if that's all that you're doing but so it's a double-edged sword because I think about, you know I brought up before like the school I taught in suburban Pennsylvania we didn't have a single Middle Eastern student so had we done a play, a minute play we wouldn't have been able to cast it that way and so I think it's, I say it's a double-edged or a two-sided thing because in order to be open for non-Middle Eastern actors playing Middle Eastern roles then there also equally needs to be Middle Eastern actors and student actors being considered for non-Middle Eastern roles. Yeah, just to piggyback on that, so my experience in academia, it's a balance and it tends towards colorblind casting I've found and the problematic piece is when you have a student who is a person of color and is problematic if a person who's not a person of color plays that role because obviously you had to even buy the experience but I found that it's mostly colorblind casting that happens to give people a chance to give an African-American man a chance to play Hamlet or a man actor to play something else. I've found something odd in my classes. Most of my classes are majority people of color at Berkeley. Maybe I have four white students in the rest role because they've made a real effort to diversify the student body. Not true, faculty's still mostly white, upper echelons are mostly white, but the students. But what I've found is because of what happens before college and high school and elementary school there's a kind of indoctrination with, there's a kind of internalized racism that happens with the training that by the time they get to college they've internalized it to the point where I'll give them a choice. I'll say, oh, you're from India. Oh, if you have something that you wanna do for your monologue, we'll have a translation. Do it in your language or I'm really encouraging everyone. And they pretty much are very much wanting to do the white male canon because of what the training has been before I get to them. So anyway, just thought that was interesting. And certainly for training programs that also can result in them trying to break barriers and have a job as opposed to being considered only for certain roles. But we're mindful that we're getting another way by which we are in connection that, well, we in academia could certainly be the ground for the training, the development of audiences and actors, et cetera, that we don't begin to be a part of those vicious cycles that then continue to be perpetrated in the professional world. Can I just add something else to it? Because right now the question for us at Berkeley anyways, preparing people to audition for MFA programs and also preparing them to audition for theater, your audition material is problematic because we're training them to get to take on anything in class, right? But then do we want them to internalize the self-perpetuating racism to play characters that only through the racist lens of a white casting director can see them? So this is the conversation we're currently having. Okay, well, a good place perhaps to know more about what you guys are thinking on that side of the bright lights. Any comments that I will, I think I might have a microphone that can float, so. Any of them can float, any of them. Okay, I'll just have mine float. Yeah, I do think, I'll be off and I'm by the way, I'm here from LA. I do think that casting is an important discussion to have and I think it's related to academia very much because faculty has so much say in casting in university productions. I wanted to clarify, because when you said colorblind casting, I had a reaction, it was like a colorblind, but I understand what you're saying, like blind casting. So it's not like you don't see color, if you do see color, you just, yeah, I just wanted you to clarify that because I feel like I had a reaction to it. I just wanna make sure everyone understood what you actually meant. No, you're right, thank you for that. It's a term that, I mean all these terms are in flux, but this is a term that we use often with casting in theater, meaning you would have an opportunity for maybe a main actor to play Willie Lohman. You wouldn't have to have the body-white experience, you could have someone else play that role. So you would be blind to color. It doesn't work really if you're not on the target end of the racism. For example, there's a problem if a white person plays a fellow, it's problematic. So it's a way of giving people opportunities based on this white male canon. It's not intended to take parts away from people of color or we don't always use people of color, is that all of these words are in a way very problematic and these signifiers are really not, they're not to the point in a way, but often the term people, the global majority, has been used, also different terms so that you're not identified, obviously, like color of the entire target. And brown face is harder to combat in battleings than black face, isn't it? Because there's the brown face issue as well. Hi, thank you all so much for your work. One of the things that came up in our conversations this morning was the issue of criticism of professional theater, specifically Arab and Middle Eastern storytelling. And I was curious, the majority of the issues you addressed were about training performers, but what are ways that you conceptualize academia to potentially help in creating critics who are of color, who are Middle Eastern or who are able to engage with that work on a deeper and more nuanced level? Usually the critics would not be necessarily in our department what we are teaching is more dealing, it's not so much dealing with criticism because a lot of the students that are getting PhDs and that are writing about theater, and they're the ones that would write critically and in more academic books. But in relationship to criticism for newspapers and so forth, I think, first of all, we all could do it and those of us who would like to do it can do that. And I think I've seen much more criticism out there, not enough, but I've seen much more than, there exists much more than before. So the idea is when you are with the students because you don't know where they're gonna go from there, you also can bring that up because it's part of the training and part of the journey. I actually give them an assignment that they have to go see two plays and they have to write a critique of it. And so who knows, they might end up liking it and because until they go to the field and try many different things, they don't necessarily know where they stand. And in any case, it's a good thing to do, right? So I think really those of us who are in publishing and as educators who are connecting to those of us who are in publishing to creating these deaf works so that we know, listen, this playwright is presenting there, please send someone. I do that all the time, like for people I know in magazines, I say, can you cover this? Can you critique this? Whatever, whether it's books or theater. So again, it goes back to community and networking and all of us here knowing each other and knowing that we can write for this magazine or that magazine makes and going forward. I would just say, I was not a part of the discussion this morning, so forgive me if this has been talked about or just interrupted me if it was. But I think for me, the question is actually more about what is the purpose of criticism and where does it come from? Because for me, as an artist, I don't wanna be critiqued by someone who has never actually done the thing they're critiquing. Doesn't understand the complexity of what we're trying to do from the inside. And so I feel, and I'll just say that. And so one of the things I'm trying to do in the class that I teach is, and the four students, especially the first time I taught it, I was figuring it out, was it's a writing workshop, so they're writing not a full play, just scenes that they get to work on throughout the semester that have to include an Arab character in that case and this next semester it can be broader. A character from a culture that is not your own is really whatever that means to you. And then they are also reading critical theory about representation, about the history of, whether it's specifically Arab-American or, and so we're having these conversations about representation and questions of how we write and who gets to write what and what it means to have all these questions. And they would come to me and they would say, it's really hard to move from the creative, let me just write my thing brain to the, oh, but I wrote this thing and it's not because of my bias about this and my assumption about that, and those are very different brains and I feel like anyone who's going to write about theater or anything should have some experience from the inside in doing it and also that the purpose should not be, this is good, this is bad, this should be produced, this should get good box office, but really more about, as a community, asking ourselves, for me it's about asking each other the same questions I would ask myself, which is, huh, why am I choosing that for this character or what is my perspective on this thing that I'm writing about, whether it's mine or not, you know, as a way of making my work as meaningful or purposeful as possible, not better or worse than someone else's, right? But I argue a little, although I, as an artist, I agree with that, but there is a structure, okay, and so if we want to integrate, for example, these plays in classes, in other classes that we are not teaching, if we want other academics, oftentimes they don't have the background and if they have a text that can help guide them, it helps them to integrate that text in their curriculum. I hear that all the time, like I write a piece and they say, oh, does it really help me teach this play or they tell me, would you mind if I, you know, I asked you a few questions to help me guide whether it was something in relationship to the historical part of the play or whatever, that's one. And in relationship to magazines, I mean, if you have a play out and you have a New York Times review of the play, it takes you, it opens up a lot. And that is simply the way that we, the community and the structure of things. So we cannot, we have to take that into consideration that as a community, we have to have more reviewers out there and we have to connect with them. But I don't think those things are in opposition. I think that we have to also challenge that, we also have to challenge that structure. And I, you know, and that's all I'm saying is the people who are doing that and who are defining the careers financially and otherwise of artists, I think need also to be held accountable for where they're coming from. And that should be a larger conversation about that structure. I think too, in terms of how, like for your question, how do you help cultivate critics and critique of men, work? I mean, there's obviously many good qualified writers out there right now should be writing about it. And we need to figure out a way to get them into those positions. But in terms of me as a professor dealing with students at a young age, at that point, I feel like it's a matter of also helping to teach this generation how to express these issues that they see. Because I can give you an example right now. I just recently, last week, was talking about waiting for Godot and I had a Latinic student say, well, this is a very white play, you know. And I said to her, okay, so what does that mean? You know, like expand on that. Like you have this impulse, what does that means? And so to help either men as students or Latinic students or whoever, when they get out into the world, once we create these opportunities that we still have this, I guess, what would you call it, like influx of writers who can write about that. And so at least in the college level, I think it's about teaching or giving students the freedom and the courage, but the confidence to write about it, right? I think of a student I had one time, this isn't critique, but I had them write a play. She was a Latinic student, very quiet, never really spoke up. And I told her to write about something she knows and she ended up writing this beautiful short play about someone trying to cross the border and all of the problems they face and then the person wakes up and they're back in Mexico and a speech of Donald Trump is in the background and it brought the whole class to tears. But I think that the point is when these students are in academia, at least in some instances, they're being told if they just in another class jump up and say, wait, those are very white play. The professor's saying, no, you're wrong. Figure out a different way to think about it. So I think what to answer to your question and what you do is we have to cultivate away at the early stage to better articulate what the problem is or what you see or what you want from the students. We have a question on the problem. Hello. So this is all, I've been ruminating on this. I'm really interested in like a collective comment. It feels like this moment is a culmination of a lot of things. And I've been ruminating a lot on like air of futurity and what does an aesthetic of an Arab future look like or Middle Eastern rather with being informed by but not being defined by the trauma of our past and colonization and also the ongoing trauma of neocolonialism imparted by the US real war machine. I like, so in your estimation, what do you think and what are you actively doing to help this? I'm only three years out of college to help our generation define this air of futurity and the aesthetics of it and what does it mean? Real simple question. Sorry, great. In terms of my own lived experiences, I recently, probably in the past two years, held a lot of resentment towards my family. And I think that that stems from the trauma that my family experienced being ripped from their home. And if I don't do the work for myself, I can't move forward. So I guess for me, it's starting here, producing something that hopefully will empower others to either work on themselves. It's still, yeah. Thanks. Yeah, for me, there is no answer than looking in a mirror and seeing how I have been conditioned to behave and just sharing that story. Well, I don't know about speaking to the Arabic, I mean, Brownian background, but I know that, I love how you said that, that the experience of war and cause is not defining you but being informed. I know for myself that I was reaching, even Therese asked me to do a play reading once and the woman was in jail and she was, I don't know, it's so hard because war has so shaped and informed the experience. And yet, me as an actress, I took this stand for a while. I think it's over now, that stand I took, but it was a stand where I just wanted to do comedy. And I just thought, you know, I need to laugh, people need to laugh, can I just laugh here? And I was constantly being cast as the victim and in jail and raped a lot and just on the floor and I was like, I don't know, it's just a little bit more. I mean, it was a thing and sorry, for a while, I was just like, I totally respected finding other actresses, so that's what I do. And just to that, I mean, to the embodied thing, what are we also, and I ask myself this, I try to ask myself this as a playwright as well as an actor, what are we asking people to embody, right? And when is that re-traumatizing or when is that, you know? Because there's a beautiful power in what actors do on stage, you know? But it can be, you know, depending on how it is handled and what the experience is, sometimes we're asking people to channel their personal experiences or channel the I believe ancestral things or just fit into something where actually I don't have experience of war or I don't, you know, sort of fit that trope. So in general, not just within our communities, but overall, I would say, what are we asking actors to embody and how is that perpetuating or breaking cycles viscerally for people? When is it good to represent that thing and when is it just perpetuating? You asked about, you asked about the future. Well, you know, things keep evolving and every generation brings to, now we have a whole new experience of this generation. We also have new migrants, right? You're working with, for example, I was working with Palestinian migrants who had their parents were refugees from 48 in Syria and then now they have left Syria and now they're refugees in Berlin. And so we, things keep moving, right? In our region with, you know, one thing after another, it really changes. So the future is really, first, we don't know, but what I hope is that we can listen and read and see as many diverse voices as possible. And when we come as a community where people are trying to find a space, for example, if we were in theater and they have a play and they have this platform and connecting, I think that's the most important thing. We can march towards the future together and stronger. I think there's a question. Is there a hand up there because the light sometimes, no? Actually, this is that question. Just to offer a more positive view, I'd like to share some experience. I started teaching at the university when some of you were not even born, 1981. And at that time there was perhaps in all the conferences there was maybe one or two Middle Eastern professors that you could just say hello in a different language. And I think I've seen a great growth in both students and faculty. So there's something that you should all be proud of. Sitting here and listening to you, I think that we can contribute that to three things. Admission, adaptation, and education. Now I'll explain. Admission, one of the things I've tried to do, when I came to the college that I'm teaching and I've been teaching for the past 20 years, there was not a single foreign person on the faculty or in the students. It was a completely white Catholic community. And it was fascinating because nobody wanted to call my name. They wanted to give me a different name and I had to insist, no, this is the name, learned. So very early on I started getting involved with the admission office. So when parents would come there, I would talk to them in their language. For example, we all know that the theater and film industry are among the top money making in the world. Now we don't say that we have 800,000 actors in New York City who are already waiting on tables, but if you do the math, they really, in average, these people make a lot of money. So that entices the parents to really resist less. They still resist, resist less. The attempt of their students, their young children to want to at least take a course in life. The second thing is adaptation. I learned that we can really get people involved with understanding the Middle East through adopting the plays that are already familiar with them. Example, the Los Tatu can easily be adopted to a Middle Eastern community in Brooklyn, New York, Atlantic Avenue, New York, easy. We just did a production of Hamlet put in the Green Movement in Iran, and it really worked. People came from all over. We're just doing a production of Dario 4, The Open Couple, which is adapted for the Iranian community that came to America after the Green Movement. And they all worked, they all did work. So people become a little less scared of hearing about our part of the world. Remember, we are the troublemakers. We are the troublemakers of this world and our young children think of us as that. As soon as you speak in accent, you're a troublemaker. So that's the second thing. And then the education. We all have, and I assume that in your universities, you also have topic courses, right? To you, topic courses that you can choose what to teach. Well, I think it up on myself that every single semester, I offer some kind of Middle Eastern art course as a topic course. Right now I'm teaching film and social change in the Middle East. We're talking about what happens in the Middle East through social media, through films. What does the Arab Spring look like if there was no Al Jazeera? What would it look like? And that all of these somehow familiarizes our students. It is not, we are really facing a revolution. We want to make a revolution in the American Education Institute. And to borrow Mao's phrase, revolution is not the middle part, it's not gonna happen overnight. Right? So let's, you know, you guys are much younger than me, so continue, continue educating your colleagues as well as your students to trick us through, find ways of treating them to understand, you know. We were, through trick us through, I was able to get money from my colleague to bring Frank and Roberto and more together. No, no, no. No, no, no, no. I understand it's not adaptive to play there. You know, in a small college in upstate New York that that made them ended up in here, in Golden Clare, and in Los Angeles, you know, work here at Best of All. So it's really, there are all these possibilities. Let's look at the positive and how we can move forward. I also want to say just to piggyback on that quickly. To the point you raised, I think we also, as a community, as communities, to make the generalization, need to encourage our communities to value the arts. Because that is a big part of also why we don't have more students is that they are not encouraged to study the arts. So I think we have to also call ourselves out on that. Totally, I just have to piggyback. So UC Berkeley, I mean, at this point, the STEM classes that just dominates, and my students in my acting classes, a lot of the, well, most of them are studying math, engineering, computer science. And in their heart of hearts, they want to be actors, but a lot of people, especially if their parents are immigrants, have a certain need for financial vibrancy and understandably so. Anyway, and people coming from other countries for their green cards where they're studying here. So anyway, I think the, just to piggyback on what you said, the arts might be important in their hearts, but the practicality of paying rent or trying to make a living is squeezing out some of these first generation of people out on the immigrant. Just to add on that and also bring back what you had said about interdisciplinary at the beginning, some of the work that I'm doing with the applied theater is creativity. So I go into bioengineering classrooms and work with students and say, how do you communicate the knowledge that you have to your audience? Because a lot of students in science classes, although some have this natural ability or did theater in high school to communicate, it's just not valued in those classes. So that's, for me, that's been a touch point to me and us students that aren't involved in the arts, but are in science classes. Yeah, I get this question a lot sometimes from my students too about like, they just literally ask, well, how do you make a living at this? And I tell them that you can make a living in being a theater artist, but it's going to take a lot of work. But the thing I remind them is that there seems to be this impression that, well, if I study biology that I'm just gonna walk into a six-figure job as a doctor. When I say all of these safe things that you're studying, you're not just gonna walk into a job, it takes a lot of work. The same amount of work that it's gonna take for you to be a working actor or something like that. And sure, maybe the upside of earning, you might earn a little more, but it's not a safe bet, no matter what you major in, you're gonna end up doing a ton of work. So you might as well do the thing that you enjoy. And then sometimes that gets through to some people. I don't know if it'll get through to their parents, but at least it gives them a little bit of hope to do what they want to do. I tell them, do you wanna make a living or do you wanna make a life? Yeah, exactly. There was a hand over there, and a syringe, and there was a hand behind the syringe. And I think that might be maybe a third one if we push it, but we're close to the time. Yeah, I just wanted to double check. Am I understanding this correctly that you're not teaching Middle Eastern plays in your classroom because you can't cast it with your students? Did I hear that right? Because you don't have Middle Eastern students, and I misunderstood, so that's not the case. Yeah, I certainly don't do that. I mean, the text comes first, and then people get to interpret, because they're interpreting literature. So for me, the text is of all importance. Yeah, I know. Whether or not we have Middle Eastern, I mean, I have a lot, but whether you have or not, for me, I believe in text. So you are teaching Middle Eastern plays, and you are casting them with students in your classroom who are not of Middle Eastern heritage. Have I done that? Well, I have a lot of students moving. Actually, I did some where I had some South Asian students actually playing some Middle Eastern plays. Yeah, I did do that. Yeah, because I just want to say that, I mean, part of our challenge on the production side is to meet, to audition actors who are already familiar with this canon, whether they are of Middle Eastern heritage or not. Part of the problem with critics is that they're not, they don't learn these plays in school, right? So they come, they see a production, they don't even, they have no context, no background for understanding it. So my hope is that all of you are teaching plays from or about the Middle East in your classrooms, regardless of who your students are, so that they can dig into the material, right? Sure, sure, sure. Okay. Sure. Can I? Can I? Just like I said, I'm a graduate student, so as far as my appointments go, they are given to me, like the hierarchy of, so I'm not in a position where I instruct plays to students yet. So that's, you're right. Of course, you're right. That's a silver sign, we have plays before you know who's gonna sign up for the class or not. Oh yeah, you pick what you're gonna do. Right, so you know if you have to have it before. I appreciate this conversation. There, I went to a graduate program where it was like a majority of Latinx. I did cast my play with majority of Latinx. I think speaking to your point about, well, you know, a person is not gonna be cast with Hamlet. Like we're all dealing with that struggle across communities of color. It's not, you know, in the community, we do deal with that and there's a lack of representation, but everyone's dealing with that. So it's okay to have, and I'm not thinking you said anything about it. I'm just speaking to your point. My question's for Romero, actually. So I, you know, I'm of needed descent and this is just like a question to academics, but I've come up in Los Angeles in like a renaissance of like Latinx theater and I engage with that all the time, but I do ask the question, it's gonna make me cry. I do ask the question all the time, like can I partake in that conversation or is it appropriate for me to play the role of a Latinx person? I don't wanna engage in brown face, because it can, it's like different backgrounds, but there's also, there has been a conversation between the Middle East and Latin America for a long time. So I guess I'm just looking for a little bit of guidance in that world. We can talk afterwards too, but I'm just thinking about West Side Story. We're talking about brown face, right? So the gang of Puerto Ricans was mostly cast with Latino and Middle Eastern people who were the exotics at the time, but they all had to wear brown face on top of their brown faces because they had to match Natalie Wood's brown face. So she wouldn't look weird, right? So that was the space of solidarity that wasn't intended, but that was developed. Where perhaps those involved began to look at each other now as part of their same community. And I feel sort of that way about, that there's so many examples outside of that horrible one of, say, you have a Spanish, it's a Chicarinian project where you have to go online and actually click and see if you can guess who's Iranian and who's Mexican. And I hope you'll get it wrong, right? And at the same time, we're getting it right because we're all the same in a way where we are creating a space of connectivity. I think we're both, as it was said earlier, by, I forgot your name, but I appreciate your point. Because I relate it to people who could pass as white, but we're members of a community of color and that we are multi-racial people, but that we are tied together by profound cultural roots and that need to be acknowledged and framed in this country as a space of solidarity. We belong in communities of color that to me are not just spaces of resistance, but spaces of affirmation. Because who wants to blend in with a mainstream that it sort of washes things into sameness. So in that sense, I feel that both by virtue of life experiences that are very, very similar and that other important space of representation was what do we look like? There's a lot to be done and connect within our communities. And I know that ultimately we could result in somebody's opinion or not or gatekeeping or not, but in my book, we are always welcome. I didn't mean to make you like the sole voice. No, no. Excuse me for that. But I think, I mean, we started, I think I've ended up here because at some point we were talking about this as part of Reorient with Taranj. So where are the connections that our communities can experience and learn from one another? We are at time, unfortunately. So with that and hoping that this continues and that you all can, if you haven't yet seen the place you come in a couple of hours to the same spot to enjoy this amazing place, let's give our panelists a round of applause. Thank you.