 I'll wait till everyone's seated and quiet. Okay, great, thanks. So I'd like to pass the microphone to LMDA Board Chair, Brian Quirt, who's going to introduce and moderate this session. Brian. Thank you, Ken. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Brian Quirt. He, him, his. As Ken said, I'm the Chair of the Board of Directors and on behalf of all the Board of Directors, many of whom are here, I want to welcome you all to LMDA 17. Fantastic to revisit some old friends and meet you again a year later after Portland and so many new faces and it's a real thrill to meet all of you. I am here today and in fact a couple times during the conference to introduce sessions that have come out of the Bly Creative Capacity Grant Program. And it is a real honor to be part of that program to have been part of creating it over the last three or four years. As many of you know, the Bly Creative Capacity Grant Program was established by and through an enormously generous donation to LMDA by Mark Bly, a former Board Chair, a member of Very Longstanding, a conference organizer, someone who has attended many, not quite all of the conferences in our 30 plus year history, but almost all of them. Mark contributed a grant donation of $100,000 over four years. We are just entering into the fourth year of the program this fall. In the first three years, we've had the amazing good fortune to offer grants to four artists or groups in the first year, 2014, four in the second year, 2015, and in 2016, we were able to offer three grants. I wanna take just a minute before I introduce a few words from Mark Bly, who couldn't be here with us. He has a series of conflicting projects in New York right now, but has sent a message, which I'm gonna read in a moment. But firstly, I just wanted to thank the members of the founding committee, particularly Cindy Sorrell, who is here, a former Board Chair, the founding chair of the Bly Creation Grant Committee, and the chair for the first two years, and who is now taking on the wonderful and valuable project of beginning to document the impact of all of these projects, now that many of them from the first two years have reached completion or heading towards completion, and the ripple effect of those is starting to be seen, both among the artists who created them, but also among the various communities that they were directed at. I also wanted to acknowledge Vicki Streich, Jeff Pearl, Beth Blickers, and Liz Engelman for their participation in the committee, particularly at the founding level, and our adjudicators who joined the committee this year, playwright, Jacqueline Lawton, who many of you know, and Canadian director, dramaturg, Yvette Nolan, who participated in the process this year. Isn't that fantastic? Yeah. Mark Bly sends his regrets, and he asked me to read a few words to the session, and this is what he sent. Tana Hasey coats in his letters to his son in Between the World and Me, writes, quote, you have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face, and the hounds are always at your heels, end of quote. A heightened wind of racism has begun to blow, writes Mark, and the rabid hounds of conservatism in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. election have been set loose. In the face of this, we were pleased to award LMDA Bly grants and fellowships in 2016 for projects that helped to unite Black theaters, to champion the arts through dance dramaturgy, and to have an impact by funding environmental dramaturgy in the face of disastrous climate change and a national leadership that ignores inconvertible evidence. Phaedra Scott's Black Theater Commons Project unites Black theaters and artists through an innovative online national platform. And Phaedra is here and will be articulating the details of that project on Saturday at 9 a.m., so I hope you join for that. Kate Bredesen's Portland in Motion Dance Dramaturgy seeks to introduce institutional dance dramaturgy into the Portland community through year-long conversations, workshops, collaborative, and solo projects. Kate couldn't be here and sends her regrets as well, and we hope that she'll report on that project next year at Next Year's Conference. And finally, the reason we're here for this session, Amritha Ramanan and Alison Carey's environmentalism in action through contemporary and classical plays demonstrates how dramaturgs through a green-turgy boot camp and then returning to their own respective theaters can have a significant impact on their community's future environment through their dramaturgical work. All of these projects, concludes Mark, reflect LMDA's growing desire to have an impact beyond traditional dramaturgical boundaries, and we look forward to receiving more projects of consequence from our members in the upcoming year. I'd also like to remind everyone that tomorrow, in one of the breakout groups at 315, the Spiderweb Show, which was a recipient last year of a Bly grant, will be doing a demonstration and articulation of their project, which is particularly fascinating on a technological level. I believe the grants are having an impact of substance, and we look forward to another round this fall, and I want to offer my congratulations to all of the recipients, and now pass it over to Amritha and Allison to speak to your project. Thank you. Hi. Hi. How are you all? Beautiful. Hey, everyone. As Brian said, my name is Amritha Ramanan, and my pronouns are she, her, hers. I'm Allison Carey, and my pronouns are she, her, hers. We are so excited and honored to be with you today to share a little bit about the project that we are so humbled to have received a Bly Creative Capacity grant for, and wanted to just acknowledge a few things. First of all, I have to say, I wanted to echo Carmen Morgan and Lydia Garcia as well as Ken in the recognition of the land that we are on in Berkeley, and the native people who own and cultivate that land, the Chutenio, Huchian, and the Muikma Olone tribes, because how can we begin a conversation like this? Any conversation, but particularly one about the environment and land without recognizing the people whose land we are on and the lasting impacts of colonialism and environmental racism, and how can we incorporate practices of decolonializing our field? And so that's something that we wanted to launch into that really intersects with the work that we are interested in engaging you all in for the next couple of days. So Allison and I wanted to share a little bit about our personal interest and point of focus into this project and how that's manifested in some of the companies that we've connected with, and then really wanted to say that we are no way, shape, or form experts in this. We are discovering it. There is a brain trust here. So wanted to be able to actually engage in a conversation and dialogue and really get thoughts and ideas. So the majority of our time, we hope to dedicate to that. But I'm going to turn it over to Allison to talk a little bit about her personal story into Green Turkey. Yeah, I'll talk just a touch about my personal path and then also talk about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where I work and it's a particular entry point into this work. So I was co-founder of Cornerstone Theater Company. Spent much time around the country and a lot of time in Los Angeles and even while in Los Angeles, spent a lot of time in the Central Valley of California. So the stories of environmental change in California are and around the country are obviously astounding. It's been going on for decades. It impacts the lives of people every day and they know it. And so my passion for this work actually started there. Obviously it touches on my desire for my children to have a, and everybody's children and all children in the world to have a viable place to live in the decades to come. But I think the very personal stories that I learned from people who are facing this problem started me and it got so profound that actually I decided to leave Cornerstone for a couple of different reasons but I decided to go work for an environmental organization and I was so psyched and I knew it was exactly the right thing to do with my life and then Bill Roush with whom I started Cornerstone called and said, so I'm moving to Oregon and I'm thinking that we should have this big history play project and would you like to run it? So I immediately forgot all about the environment and decided to move to Oregon. And now we're in a program called American Revolutions which commissions plays about moments of change in United States history. And of course a lot of the moments of change in United States history are environmentally based or certainly environmentally impactful. Now interestingly of course when you decide to give up on the environment and you move to Oregon you are moving back to the environment. And Oregon is a very specific place. It's a place that has, I'm sure many of you know the Pacific Northwest was sort of a hotbed of the environmental movement in the 70s with the tension between the logging community and people who didn't want the land logged. There was certainly in terms of the challenges of the environmental movement and being so the large money organizations tending to be white, tending to be colonial and the ways that that damaged the environmental movement and still actively does. So I got to, but the Oregon's economy itself has made a transition right from being about logging to being about ecotourism which is a whole other manifestation of various colonial practices. So, but when I got to Oregon I thought well here I am in this very place where we love our trees and everybody must care about this very deeply and I remember we were gonna build the new building which we eventually did and I went to our executive director and I said, our then executive director and said so are we gonna put green practices in our buildings? Lead certification or any one of a number of wonderful things and he said no. And I was shocked that it actually had not been part of the conversation and I can't speak to his motivations or the motivations of our board but I thought wow there's something really interesting going on that sort of social disconnect and cultural disconnect and intellectual disconnect and moral disconnect between this institution and the pressures and the realities of where it's located in terms of being five hours from a city and in the middle of nature. So at this moment a whole bunch of other people at OSF started to feel the same things had been there people who had been there a lot longer than I had and we started something called the green task force and it was a very large group and a very sort of rambunctious dedicated group that focused mostly on production practices which is really really great but we never seemed to talk about the art in terms of the content of the art and part of that I think was that there are a lot of people who didn't know what to do artistically in terms of how to talk about this that it was perceived to be something by many people as primarily about nature which was about trees and animals and not about people which is strange but that's sort of the way a lot of environmental art was created and especially perceived by the rest of the field and I think also one sort of the as the years went by the organ of this green task force this group of very dedicated people lost heart people stopped coming to meetings and partially that was because at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival I'm sure our production practices are no more or less green than a lot of people's but our carbon footprint is huge because people come from all over they come on their planes and they come in their cars and at some point people were just like it doesn't matter what we do like that central existential truth is not gonna change and so isn't it just hypocrisy to try to pretend to care which could be said of anything right so we kind of the green task force fell apart it's still going a little bit but not that much and I think also there is an enormous amount of excitement and Carmen is here, Lydia is here many, many people at the organization that we started focusing very, very dramatically on our equity diversity and inclusion work which is awesome and obviously we have miles, miles, miles, miles and miles to go and we know that but also I think that we who in the green task force failed to kind of make the case that environmentalism is a social justice issue and it's all part of the same thing and we did not communicate that effectively or we did not convince people or we did not make the case or there was so much going on right because people, human beings only have so much bandwidth and when your face was something like climate change the tendency to despair is can be very profound I hung out with a guy named Tony Lizerwitz at the Yale Communication Project Yale Climate Change Communication Project at this moment and he said well so the art that nobody, like the art seems to be sometimes didactic and sometimes despairing and that's not helping and you have a problem with having a big carbon footprint and that makes you feel bad what else can we do and he started talking about the way Americans especially white Americans have been disassociated themselves from the natural environments and he said well that's a problem for everybody what can you do about that so I started to think about instead of trying to do something that we weren't already doing because we had failed at that what could we do that was taking advantage of what we were already doing and it was really going after this question of just you know stories on stage they all take place in an environment right they all have something happening beyond the theater walls the questions that we ask in the plays the answers will have impacts on the environment even if we don't think about it and the challenge is we don't think about it right and so it was like well we do 11 shows a year how can we grab those shows and re-establish them as environmental messages because every story is environmental right it didn't happen and then Amritha came and life became instantly better and for those of you who know Amritha you're not surprised that I would say that and I when Amritha actually applied for the job she and I drove around and sort of I'll let her talk now but she was able to see it and make it happen in a way that I was not able to and so now I'm gonna let her talk there thank you thank you Alison making it better as are you I feel like there's synergy there thank you for all of that and it's interesting because I know we've talked about some of that history but even just hearing that again and that has so much meaning and so much value so I'm grateful to be present for that before I start talking about OSF though I did wanna just lift up a few kind of personal points of ideology for me as well as talk about two organizations that I've had the honor of being connected to that I feel really gave me a sense of this relationship between art and environment so within my cultural construct my family is from South India my father's family in particular has farmland and rural trivandrum I've always been very curious about how the environment is really innate to one's practice culturally one's practice artistically and the amazing Leslie Ishi is here and we were actually talking about just how there's so many cultural contexts where this is actually just this is naturally present and then I started working in theater and realizing as Alison did that there were many variations of how the environment was really thought about in a framework of social justice and in a framework that was really part of our artistic culture and so about three and a half now going on four years ago I had two really kind of life changing opportunities in this the first was that I studied with Adi Shakti which is a theater company in Auroville, India and then from there joined a double edged theater in Ashfield, Massachusetts as a company member and both of those organizations yes for double edged and both of those organizations had models where they had theater centers and art centers that were on farmland and for Adi Shakti they had six acres of farmland that they cultivated as well as three outdoor theater spaces in the natural environment and for double edged theater they had an artistic center that was on a former 105 acre dairy farm that they cultivated and so with both of those companies and I should say they are a few of many companies that are doing this kind of amazing work and many organizations and communities that are doing this work the relationship to environment and art was there wasn't a hierarchy they were just interrelated and interconnected and to the point where all of us who were training or company members valued taking care of the environment in our job so to speak or in our positions there as much as we did creating our art so there was that cultivation and creation in simultaneity at double edged we would spend as much time weeding and planting as we would devising our art and with double edged in particular double edged is a physical theater ensemble that created and creates a site specific theater that travels to different locations with the audience so every summer they would put on and they continue to do a production where you would literally go across the patchsters, the hills, the streams and watch the environment be animated by art and that there would be a permacultural practice where we would literally grow our own vegetables plant trees that supported these stages so the cultivation of the stage was actually taking care of the environment and that had so much meaning for me in terms of the constant recognition the constant awareness of the land that we are on double edged also recognize the tribal nations of the land and really would work in partnerships with native communities that's something that's relatively recent for them but is continuing to develop so all of this to say when I interviewed for OSF during my interview I forget exactly what I said but it was something outright to the point where I'm like this type of ethos needs to continue in whatever I do and then Alison and Carrie and I continue to have five hour conversations weekly and we do no weeding at OSF where we sadly don't, yeah, no weeding at OSF but that could change and so then we started to really think of with Green Turigy as Alison lifted up the notion that a conversation around the environment and the many facets of that should not be segregated to plays that are labeled environmental plays how can we look at every piece of work that we create artistically and really take on an awareness of those points of conversation and how can we as dramaturgs really be change agents in moving art to action and allowing this to be part of the work that is really within the sphere of what we do so that's manifested in a couple ways and I will openly say it's still very much an exploration we're still figuring it out but this year we have an amazing cohort of dramaturgs at OSF, Martin Key Green Rogers, Leslie Ishii, Lydia Garcia, so many who we started to engage in these conversations and say what's interesting for you and I'm gonna lift this up Martin has been doing some amazing curriculum work around this with her students Leslie is part of the Arctic Circle Committee that's been working with indigenous peoples around this I mean it's just amazing the amount of work Annalisa Diaz who's coming later today has an amazing initiative on decolonizing practices so really it was very much how do we actually share ideas and resources to make this in some ways a dramaturgical collective where we can have allyship and support one another and then we also started to experiment with existing programs and projects at OSF so for every play we have an educational study guide and we asked our education team would you be willing to incorporate questions such as what is the broader environment of our works whether metaphorical or literal what are the parallels between the natural world and the world of the plays how do the characters intersect with the natural world and really actually have those questions be part of the dialogue with our communities with our students with our audiences so that's a little bit of that but that is, thank you hey can I ask a question do we have five more minutes or do we have more than five so we need to cut right to the chase we do need to cut to the chase and the chase should be this one right yes so we're gonna two exercises but we're only gonna do one which is so we have this boot camp happening tomorrow where as Amritha said we this is all about us creating together that's everything has to be collective or we're doomed so this is true of this as true as everything else you may be participating in the boot camp if so awesome you may not be able to if so awesome if you wanna do it now if you change your mind and wanna do it now awesome we'll also be talking about it on Saturday what we learned what we're continuing to explore but we would like everybody in this room to participate even a little bit and Amritha we'll tell you how sure okay so to my left over there we have a green turgy simmering pot thank you Leslie Ishii for that naming and what we wanted to do is just engage anyone who's willing in an opportunity to be able to write down on a post-it that'll be distributed by our amazing volunteers a suggestion, an idea or something that you feel is critical that we have to explore during Friday's boot camp and this can mean if you were attending you can still contribute because we're gonna go over them together if you're not attending please contribute and we're gonna incorporate that into the boot camp and for those of you on HowlRound if you wanna contribute just feel free to tweet in your idea with the hashtag LMDA 2017 and our friends at HowlRound will collate that so really we need collective thinking around this we wanna hear what is meaningful to you either in what we said or what we didn't say that we really need to lift up so we invite just please share your thoughts, ideas, questions, put them on there and then that'll be part of our ongoing work and including in that if you have a beautiful piece of art in your mind that you think is important and needs to be lifted up to the field whether it's a new play or a classic play or anything at all share that too because we're gonna be creating not only tools but resources for people who wanna focus on this kind of art and it could be something that has nothing to do overtly with nature or it could be something that does so just share whatever is in your heart with us and we will hold it and thank you so much. Just before you wrap up the bootcamp here obviously is a huge part of this project but it will continue through the season at OSF is that? Oh yeah. Just in terms of the longer term plan. We hope it'll continue for the rest of our lives. Yeah. Exactly. But only if you help us. Yeah. And like all the Bly Creative Capacity Grants we'll look for ways to disseminate information, the lessons, the content at future conferences but also hopefully and ideally between now and then as well as the progress continues over the course of the coming months. Thank you. Yeah absolutely. Thank you. Great. So I see post-its are being distributed. We've got some pens and pencils and yeah just throughout the weekend also if you just want to find us in the halls or want to connect and say hey this has meaning to me I want to talk about it or you should really know about this individual because we will be as part of this project creating an online virtual resource kit that's really crowdsourced that has different suggestions and links for folks to connect with. Please let us know and thank you so much. Thank you all. You look awesome by the way. Yeah. Yeah it's a beautiful group. Thank you so much. Thank you both. Have a great GreenTurgy Bootcamp tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you everyone. I'm going to pass you back to Kent. Great. So we're going to shift gears here and invite up our VP of Regional Activity, Joanna Falk and...