 I'm a board member of CATA and I am your moderator slash facilitator for this session. And before we begin I have been asked to let folks know that you can now, this is very exciting, you can now donate to CATA on the CATA website. Again we have an incredible volunteer led board that does an amazing amount of work to make CATA meetings happen and to bring artists in for these conversations and so please do donate. And if you have any questions, Jeff is back there. Your hottest honorary Asian can tell you more about how to donate to CATA. So, are you ready? Whoa, I'm dropping pieces. Here we are at this session that has been titled, welcome, welcome, come on in. Centering Our Voices as a Revolutionary Act. This is a panel of Middle Eastern slash Western and Central Asians slash MENA slash all of these very complicated ways that we try to name ourselves in this community. And the challenge of naming might be one of the things that we talk about as we talk about identity but this panel conversation follows on a build on our last CATA conference which was held at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in which we had a weekend pre-conference that really focused on what at that time was framed as West and Central Asian American artists. We also want to name that we want to be inclusive of our cousins in North Africa because for our community it's not necessarily geographically defined in that way and that's one of the complexities that we will talk about as we open the conversation. But we are trying to, CATA itself has always from its inception had to create a very broad and inclusive understanding of what Asian American in the 21st century might mean and give folks an opportunity to self-identify into this kind of coalition building, network building organization which really started as a movement and became an organization. So we're here to partly talk about why are we here, why are we together and how do we have this conversation. So I also want to acknowledge that Heather Raffa just flew in this morning from New York because concurrent to this CATA convening has been a mixed fest in New York focusing on Middle Eastern artists and it's like sad and wonderful that these conversations are happening in two locations at the same time and so it's really wonderful to have Heather here to kind of bridge the conversations in two locations and fill us in on what's been happening. So also a little bit about the structure of this. The panelists are going to introduce themselves in a moment briefly and then we generated a whole bunch of questions among ourselves more than we can probably get to in the amount of time that we have of things that we think are like juicy and we want to talk about together and we're going to just make a space where you get to listen to us having this conversation and flowing between some prompts and questions and then at the last 20 minutes or so we'll open it up to take questions and comments and I encourage us to not so much a Q&A but really have a community dialogue but we're going to ask you to listen for a little bit first. So with that I'm going to pass to one of our co-hosts for the Kata Conference, Jamil and from Silk Road Rising to start off introductions and very briefly panelists I'm going to ask you to say who you are, where you're located, what your discipline is, how you identify if you wish and what else did we say? Yeah, I think that's pretty good. Jamil you want to kick it off? Please say thank you to Jamil for being a co-host. There's Mule Korey, also a proud board member of Kata, founding artistic director of Silk Road Rising, co-founded with my husband Malik Alani right here. I am a producer, a playwright and an essayist. I identify as mixed blood Arab American or mixed blood Arab and Slavic American and we can throw queer into that equation. He, him, his. And based in Chicago and we are entering our 16th season as a company and really excited about all the intersections that we're seeing playing out this week here at CONFEST and looking to build on that. So we'd like to go next. Thank you so much. Hi, I'm Choranjee Gyazarian. I'm the founding artistic director of Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco. We're the first American theater company focused on the Middle East. I'm Iranian, Armenian. She, her, hers. Good. Whatever is needed. Keep going this way. My name is Novid Parsi. I'm a playwright. I live in Chicago. Identities, I'm Iranian-American, gay-Iranian-American. My parents are Iranian. They were immigrants and I was born here. I lived in various places in the States. I've lived in Chicago for about 15 years. I've worked both with these wonderful companies represented to my life. And this year's Silk Road Rising produced a play of mine through The Elevated Line which was a big production. Hi, I'm Heather Raffo. I was born in Michigan. I'm Fuwate Moore. I'm an Egyptian-American playwright. I also sometimes will call myself Arab-American, Muslim-American, whatever. Middle Eastern. Mostly a playwright. I have done some other things. I've recently acted in a play by Jameel Corey, which will be screened in January. My work has been, I've been affiliated with Chicago dramatists, produced at 3CAP Productions, had works at Silk Road, and also actively involved in the International Voices Project, which does work in translation festival, a yearly festival. I'm involved with the Arabic language programming of lots of translation and direction for that. Anything else? Did you say how you identify culturally? Culturally, yes. Also, Fuwate just flew in from Egypt. Yes. So, yeah. Last night. So glad you're here. Thank you, and I feel privileged to be invited. Also, I didn't do my other part of the introduction, so I identify as Arab-American, and I am Lebanese-American on my father's side, third generation, and white-European-American on my mother's side. I use she, her, or they, or non-gender pronouns. I'm also queer-identified, and I live in Tampa, Florida, I'm the founding artistic director of Art to Action Inc., which is based in Tampa, New York. So, I'm going to begin, and when I can go in any particular order, because I really do want to be in conversation, with this question of why are we here at Qatar? What is it, like, how do we locate our various identities within a more broadly inclusive Asian-American framework or conversation in the 21st century? And what are the benefits of being in that coalitional, broadly-identified conversation, as well as kind of when do we need to be specific about who we are and the specific things that are sometimes families or communities or theaters or artists are struggling with? So, I'm just going to open that, and I'm going to merge one and two for the second time, and say, and just acknowledge that, like the Latinx community, the Middle Eastern-American community is vastly diverse in how we present racially, right? Some of us are very white-passing, some of us are very dark-skinned, some of us are readable as Middle Eastern, some of us are not. And so, that creates this really, and legally and historically, we have been categorized, legally categorized as white, but that's not the lived experience that many of us have in the United States. So, the question is kind of, you know, how do we navigate these things around identity and how we identify ourselves and what it means to be here at the National Asian-American Theater Conference and Festival? So, anyone want to jump in? Sure. So, my name is Jamil Khoury. I will introduce myself as Jamil Khoury, and people will hear Jimmy O'Koury. I don't have an ounce of Irish blood in me, but nevertheless. So, I struggle with this question. I like to think I'm politically a person of color. Experientially, it's complicated, because of how I think. And absolutely, I am the beneficiary of a great deal of white privilege, of white male privilege, and, you know, assumptions that people make about me on the street, and so forth. You know, don't tell my story. So, I have a really hard time relating to any number of categories, and I'm forever negotiating that. Yeah, I get the same problem when I introduce myself, and now I try to introduce myself slowly, because when I say, hi, I'm Fuwate Moore, people will say, oh man, how are you doing Fuwate? They assume my last name is Moore. And I'm thinking of starting a hashtag, I'm not a white male. Because I don't feel like it. I'll jump in. I mean, more than anything, my personal experience is that of an immigrant, and one that is, I don't know if misunderstood is the right word, but there are many surprises in the U.S. You know, when you come here as a teenager, and you've sort of grown up in one country that's, I don't know, you sort of identify one way, and then you come here, and then people put labels on you, and you have to sort of figure out why that is, and some of it is historically, I don't know, there are some historical reasons, political reasons. But for me it was really difficult, and in the beginning I used to make fun of the census categories, because, you know, Caucasian, I mean, yeah. So for those of you who know Armenia is on the Caucasus Mountains. So if anybody is Caucasian, it's me. So I would say, well, I must be Caucasian, but then, you know, Caucasian is perceived in a certain way, and the more I was integrated into the American society, I then was treated in a certain way, and there were many assumptions about, once people learned that I was born in Iran, there were many assumptions about Iranian women, many assumptions about my religious practices, I grew up Muslim and Christian, and, you know, I don't have a problem with either religion, and, you know, there are just all these assumptions, kind of, you carry them as a burden in a way, and that burden becomes heavier and heavier as you become older, and you interact with more people in multiple fields. And once I, by the time I started working in theater, this sort of politics of representation and identity were at the core of my work because I wasn't seeing, you know, my stories on stage, and I wasn't seeing representations of the kind of woman I am and the kind of family that I grew up in, and so it's an ongoing daily struggle, I would say, to, I don't know, reduce one's identity to a checkbox, and it's a disservice, I would say, to all of us. I understand it has administrative and political uses, but that's what I saw in my mind lately, is that we have a very unique experience being American dealing with this, but I think the Middle East is very much dealing with it as well. My perspective is hugely influenced by war. Being Iraqi-American, I can't get away from that part of my upbringing because at 20 there was the First War and then there was the Second War and there was 13 years of sanctions in between and how many years of occupation. So it's like my relationship to being Middle Eastern is hugely influenced by constantly having to bridge two cultures for the sake of kind of keeping them alive and together and talking to each other and not seeing each other as enemy. So that, I can't get away from that when I think about identity and polarizing my identity or saying, what am I? Because it's been, you know, since birth. I've been navigating two parents in two very different places and then communicating that to anyone else in my community. But I also, I'm also in pursuit of this because Iraq itself was arguably one of the first melting pots as many of these cultures are. And it was a place where so many people came through and many Iraqis will say that they felt quite one with their nationality and their brethren and sister in and now it's in quite a crisis. So things, the way we're being pulled and torn here is something that I'm seeing happening to a country where people will say they don't even feel Iraqi anymore. And I think it's just an interesting way that our conversation here in America is reflecting in the Middle East in general and that takes me to another thing that's been on my mind is because internally to our community as we talk about majority religions and minority religions and color of skin and all these different country of origin and the different ways that plays out I feel that, I'll go back to that. I feel like I'm taking it down a different road. But anyway, okay, I can go. And on the one hand it feels like we're talking identity so much and it's pulling us apart in a, not in a bad way, in a discussion way. And then I keep thinking, gosh, the Middle East is in the middle. I know it's a problematic term Middle East, but it's still in the middle. So maybe our community is actually one of those bridge communities in and of itself and the way we start to create work with our African neighbors and our Asian neighbors and our European neighbors might really be something at the crux of the dial itself. So that's my latest B in my bonnet is, oh, isn't it kind of cool that some of us do pass and that some of us can navigate three different communities? Absolutely. Right, because maybe we're going to be a bridge builder in how we create the art that is going to cross dial. Yeah, so my experience of identity resonates with, and that goes to everyone else's, I want to say here, the idea of name, how your name is read, every time someone hears my name or sees my name, nobody can see it. There's that question, where are you from? I don't know how many times I've answered this question, how many times, how many different ways I've had this conversation. Where are you from? My husband and I were first dating 12 years ago. He's a white American. And I said, watch this person coming up to us. He's going to hear my name. And here's all this conversation. I'm going to say, what's your name? How do you spell that? What is it? Where are you from? And I'm going to say, I'm from Texas. Because I know what they're asking, right? What are you going to tell them? So I'm going to say, I'm from Texas. And where are you from? Well, I was born in New York, but you know. And then finally, my parents are from Iran. It's just that expectation, that demand that you have to tell your story at all times. And with that is that assumption that you are not from here. You are not of us. Even though I'm as American. I'm more American than Iranian in so many ways. But it's more complicated than that as well. And part of it is also skin color. And the way that Middle Eastern people, Middle Eastern descent, can be read as various things. And if it's summer and I'm a little darker, I'm red in a different way than if it's Chicago winter. And I'm lighter. And then part of that also related to those two things is how other people define you. And whether those other people are individuals or the state, or documents like the census. Early in my life I would check white, because I was told Middle Eastern is white. Even though I felt the violence of being erased in that way. And then I would check other. And other just didn't seem like it either. And I just wished there was a second fish box. It's interesting. It's complicated. And this is how I negotiated and navigated in my personal life. But then that also informs the arts and the writing. That's always the question. With every play, do I represent Iranian-Americans? What other ethnicities do I represent? Is there that expectation that I have to write Iranian characters because I'm Iranian-American? Even though I've never been to Iran, I don't speak Farsi. So anyway, we can go down that path as well if you'd like. I want to also offer my perspective on this. I identify as a person of color. I was raised by the white side of my family because my father and mother split up very young. But my father was quite noticeably darker than I am. And in some way, whatever people think Arab-looking is, my sister is more Arab-looking than I am. I'm often read as Latino or all kinds of things. But I find, I recently found, I want to share this because I find it a fascinating history, how did Middle Easters come to be categorized as white on the census? There was actually a legal, I had to do research for this for anti-racism training recently. And there was an actual legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Syrian man who arrived to the U.S. during segregation and wanted to be categorized as white. And you can understand the stakes of that in that particular historical moment. And at that time, these categories, the categories are renamed and changed throughout U.S. history in these really disturbing ways. And at that time, the category was Asiatic or Mongoloid. That was the actual category, right? And so this guy won this case, this blows my mind. This guy won this case at the Supreme Court by saying, if I am a Mongoloid, so was Jesus because I come from the same land. The Supreme Court freaked out and were like, oh my gosh, we can't call Jesus a Mongoloid. And so when I came onto the board of Kata, the way that I think about it is also that recognizing that this is an extremely American conversation around race and identity and category, and this whole notion of Asian American is actually a construct, a political construct in response to U.S. imperialism and military intervention in Asia. So the experience that we are living is the formation of an identity in response to American imperialism and military intervention in Western Central Asia, right? So for me, that is the reason, if we acknowledge that all of this is constructed anyway, that is the reason for us to be in the room together. I wanted to add something. So I pulled up a group of new audience surveys that have demographic questions. We've been doing it the same survey that you guys did. We've been doing it for five years and we knew from the beginning that this question of do people self-identify as Middle Eastern is a big question because we wanted to sort of track how people's feelings towards that umbrella identity is changes over time because in a way Middle Eastern American is a term that we began using and I don't know that it necessarily existed in sort of representation, conversations before that. So we wanted to see if people self-identify as Middle Eastern and then we knew that many may not and we wanted to see what the breakdown of identity is. So we listed all the countries that we considered to be included in the umbrella, including Armenia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, so all of, you know, it's a long list of, I don't know, 25 countries. We included languages, what languages other than English do you speak at home, and religion. You know, you identify as any of these religions and we mainly included the Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian. And what's interesting is that now looking at five years of data, that of the people who don't self-identify as Middle Eastern, many of them, I think it's actually about 12 or 18% of them, identify with one of the specific countries that we consider to be in the Middle East. And many of them may not identify with a country or self-identify as Middle Eastern, but they speak the language at home. So these sort of personal ways that we each connect with our identity is very complicated and I don't, you know, it's just really interesting to track it over time and track it from production to production, depending on who's in the audience. It's a really interesting study. I want to say something about legal battles that were fought like 100 plus years ago. Today, this is taking a somewhat different tone with regards to the 2020 census. Now there have been such a strong push to include a menna category in the census and that was really seen as a victory on the part of activists from within our communities. My understanding is that under the current administration it's being taken off the census. It will not appear as a category in 2020. However, a lot of people are now saying we don't want to check that category under the Trump administration. Like, you know, does this become tied to a national security discourse of some sort? So it's really, you know, once again shifting, you know, the contours of that conversation. Who we are legally. So, you know, and the stakes of that on the one hand are about how do we have political power if we're not counted? And on the other hand, what happens if we're counted under a regressive government? So nobody brought up the issue of representation in our work and what stories we get to write or tell. And it's interesting that there is this kind of thing like by virtue of being quote unquote Middle Eastern almost all of us are culturally or ethnically or racially mixed actually. Like, you know, if you look at Lebanon, it's like centuries of conquest after conquest after conquest. What it is to be Lebanese is not at all clear in any kind of racial DNA kind of way, right? So, but, and yet we are, on American stages faced with these questions of representation that I think we've kind of been talking about throughout the week in various ways here at Casa. And then there are some things that are specific that we have to deal with. So I don't know if anyone wants to say anything further on that or we'll go into the next question or what is important to say about, what is important about representation in our work or producing it? I think we should recognize the voice because we're represented by different categories of voices. Some of us are American born ethnically connected. Some of us are expats. And there's also the other category of theater translation which I love because it brings a perspective that is pure from the Middle East into theaters in the U.S. but it has to be categorized as such because that should not overwrite our voice here because we bring a different perspective. Especially the expat category, the problem is that when I go and talk back in Egypt people tell me you don't have the right to criticize because you don't live here anymore. And I tell them no. I'm following everything and I want things to be good here so I can speak. And then when I speak here well you're not fully American, you're naturalized. So that category of the expat voice is the one that I would like to see expand a little more and reach audiences. Because we have something to say. I think it's such a large and tricky landmine of a question and topics of representation and ethnicity and identity. We are so focused on identity. So much it seems at this cultural moment and I lived long enough where I can see these moments come and go and it does seem that it's partly because we're living in a regressive, reactive government that also is focusing so much on identity and I understand the progressive response which I also share is then to also focus on identity but a different way, from a different angle with different values but still focus on identity and for me that's not usually the starting point as a writer when I'm thinking about plays. I'm not discounting that it is for many people I'm not discounting the value but I'm just saying it's not universal and it isn't for me. I don't start by saying as an Iranian-American playwright what kind of Iranian-American play am I going to write? It's more what, which I think a lot of writers work this way. What interests me? Having to learn to pay attention to what grabs your attention what grabs your imagination that process that every writer does which may or may not include identity and ethnicity or may include it in various ways that aren't a simple one-to-one I'm a Middle Eastern playwright so I write that at Eastern League whatever your name is but it also means that when I do write as I have plays that don't feature named ethnicities that conversation we were just having about still being perceived view to the lens still applies to the work so I wrote a play recently that was given a stage reading where ethnicity was not at play you know there was a casting note please cast diversely but that was it and the main actor, the main character had a kind of different sounding name but the producer assumed because of me and my name and my background and I wanted that person to cast be cast in that way in that kind of mean way and I really didn't and once I explained that he was totally on board and funded a lovely stage reading but just that assumption that you and a director of that same reading said to me see if people will see your name and they are always going to assume that you are writing that way even when you're not just looking at it from like an artistic producer artistic director perspective I think it's very common we see it in our playwrights, in our community that people feel a burden of representation people feel the responsibility I must tell the story of my people and I must share the full history of 4000 years Egyptian history or Phoenician history and so I think that is very alive in our community but more and more what we encourage people to do is to write the story that feels urgent and real to them and go at it from a very personal artistic like follow their personal artistic path and more often than not the end result has elements of their culture in it and that I think is organic and is true to them but I think this idea of especially because of what's going on politically I think we all feel like we must correct the zeitgeist out there and it's a heavy burden and I encourage playwrights in our community to sort of tune that out when they can and that corrective intervention is impulse it comes from such a defensive place tragically I have this very distinct memory of being 12 years old so I think it was 1977 and reflecting to myself that I am associated with two categories, two communities Arab and gay who everyone hates no one around me in any context had anything good to say about either of those identities so I did have this very keen sense that we have to somehow correct that through narrative through stories I probably didn't use that language in my head but that was the sense of reaction to something very sad very tragic and the need to then explain the whole history I remember that we have a few years ago we produced a play that was about two women caught in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war and in their dialogue there was all this exposition sort of explaining the history and the border and the geography and I'm like you don't really need this you know the player I would say but people don't know where these countries are or what their relationship is or when the war happened or how it was and we took a lot of it out because the story stood for itself I didn't need all of that pedagogical the teaching and I agree with all that is being said especially when Ovid says we don't start without planning to do this you do what you're interested in and you're doing but at the end it's the voice that comes through and our voices are colored by our own experiences so I can write a story about nothing that has ethnic correction but when you read it there are these ints of something that are always in there I'm also an engineering a chemical engineering professor so everything I write has a little bit of some shade because that's what I know these are my experiences and the more we allow ourselves to be comfortable and naturally the more this will come out the voice of that community that is not heard I want to give Heather a chance to respond to this question if you wish and then throw us into another one yes if you all want we can continue that piece we want to get to this so we pose questions to each other by email prior to giving together and some of us just met today for the first time and this one really everyone wanted to address how is a central or west Asian or middle eastern or minna choose your term how is a theater our theater movement revolutionary given the title of this how does our work challenge our own communities and mainstream audiences and I just want to say as we dive into this I just want to remind us that for our community revolution is not a metaphor we have very very trans national communities some of us have families that are living through war or revolution as we speak and it's important to think about what is revolutionary in the U.S. context and also please know it's not a metaphor for us so what so what does that mean for us to build a cultural movement a theater movement together so anybody want to join my members in Iraq at the start of the second war and I now have two so the refugee crisis is real they're scattered all around the globe some are waiting to get places some are stuck in different countries you know and so it it's you're right Andrea everything feels revolutionary I mean when I wrote nine parts of Desire it was the first Iraqi female protagonist in the English language and so I think every act our community does is pretty much revolution I think any one of us fighting and getting up on stage in these critical times is revolutionary it just is and it continues to be over and over again these are dialogues that are you know have to be had and were perfectly placed to have we have the history you know to allow us to bridge these conversations so yeah I think it's also a fairly new community as in the last couple decades right I mean as a gathering force theater community it's fairly new and I think that that's also really exciting thing I'm thinking about most is the multiplicity of our voices and how that can have a bigger impact on the American theater so Taranj and Jamil naturally do this because their whole season can show an audience how diverse the voices are outside of theaters like theirs there's maybe one slot for a Middle Eastern artist every five seasons maybe at best right so and then the pressure on that one play that one play right that direct to whatever to be like we have spoken to this national if not global right crisis that's going on and then you know this is maybe harkening back to the last question but how many of our plays get picked up or don't get picked up based on what we're writing about right so I think that I'm really thinking about how there can be more things side by side so that everybody's involved in a broader conversation and not just pigeon-told into whatever conversation one artistic director thinks might be valid I want to speak to a particular revolutionary act so at Silk Road we showcase playwrights of East Asian South Asian and Middle Eastern West Asian backgrounds we've often said we've made a special commitment to Muslim voices and to combating Islamophobia through storytelling and in a very humanized so not Muslim angels or Muslim demons but Muslim human beings and I'm not saying this in a self-congratulatory way about our company but it is the act that I am probably most proud of because it's the act that we get the most pushback for so I just want to put that out there and also there were many years when we could not get funded for anything that had the word Muslim in it that was sort of the the kiss of death no one wanted to touch the number of reasons you know there was just too much fear too much anxiety too much you know concern so I think naming because most of us probably come from a somewhat secular place and it's been very important for us to specifically name Muslim experiences within this repertoire Well the Patriot Act actually forced foundations to make sure that their giving is not going to Muslim organizations or the arts included which are we're assumed to be supporting arts and religion yes actually and some of our great I think this is important some grant contracts for example have a clause that say you cannot use the money to support any artists who calls for the end of a state which is a code for let's not talk about Palestine right so yeah we have to as producers and presenters and funders we have to navigate this stuff I want to sort of go at the question from a different angle so when we started Golden Thread there was a lot of questions about is this going to be an Iranian company is this going to be an Iranian Arab company how are we going to define our mission and who is our community and about three years we had those conversations and we sort of landed on Middle Eastern American theater mainly inspired by Asian American and Latino American theater experience without those histories and all that had been accomplished by those communities I probably would not have gone in the direction that I did and sort of the mission the way it was defined at Golden Thread would have been possibly very different but this idea that despite and maybe because of the multiplicity of experiences and voices that are in our broad community that we are stronger because of them we are stronger when Arabs and Iranians and North Africans and Armenians and Turks and Kurds come together and sort of fill the coalition that doesn't take away our individual voices but says together we are more powerful and we are louder and we can take more space I think that is a credit to Asian American theater that in many ways also includes nations that were at war together that have invaded each other yet the communities here in the US come together and collaborate in a way that they probably can't do in the home country which is also the case in the Middle East at Golden Thread we bring individual artists from communities that have historic animosity or currently are at war and nowhere other than the US I would say they can actually come together so it's an incredible opportunity we have to do a kind of collaboration that is not possible elsewhere and when we think of Turks and Kurds and Armenians and Arabs, Persians Assyrians, Berbers we're told we're not supposed to like each other either for historical reasons political and that has been so, I would say successfully rejected and refuted within the Middle Eastern theater community and I think that's hugely exciting and the experience of watching Turkish American artists watch a play about the Armenian Genocide which their government tells them did not happen and them agreeing and acknowledging and feeling and expressing empathy is you know, it's very revolutionary falling upon what Jamil was talking about Islamophobia and responding to things sometimes playwrights will naturally veer towards one of the two extremes angels and demons that he's talking about either be very defensive and say no, no everything is great and whatever or you know, we're really horrible and we're showing it up here and that's what you want to see but what is really revolutionary is to actually come to the center and have a capacity and self-reform and showing that these are human beings and this is exactly the same experience as everybody else in here and we're not afraid of talking about things and pointing them out especially in the Muslim discourse there is always a fear of talking about any specific topics because of backlash no, this is how it is, it should be but everything should be open for discussion we should be able to go after things and talk about them and for example, I address the issue of polygamy in one of my plays and maybe people say is that very important? it is because of how it affects the lives of people and when you put it on stage you say here, discuss and see if there is something that can come out of that without being attacking my own community but with like let's put things out there how things get revolutionized I wanted to say that in my own work, I have experienced like that thing about what we're told we're not supposed to like each other by being queer identified and as a Lebanese American I was raised Catholic not Muslim and and I was very much taught that I should somehow be afraid like there's this Muslims and queer people aren't supposed to like each other but I have experienced more fierce solidarity and support from Muslim women than like anybody right? in terms of like having the courage to have these inter-community conversations and what does it mean to stand for each other and what does it mean for me as a queer Catholic raised Arab American to fight Islamophobia because it affects all of our community because anti-Arab or anti-Middle Eastern prejudice and racism is intimately bound with Islamophobia in the United States so we're all affected by the way that these multiple forms of oppression were and and what is revolutionary to me is when we work together so this can continue we're moving toward like opening it up pretty soon but I think right before we do that I want to say that we had this other question we wanted to tackle it's kind of two questions that I'll roll into one around how can we do better at reflecting and supporting the diversity within our communities and building solidaries in the intra-cultural work and then also in the across identity you know how can Middle Eastern American artists more fully be a part of this broader Asian American movement or movements happening by theaters of color and artists of color who are working on on coalition building and so I'm going to put that question to the panel and then from there we're going to just have a dialogue yeah anybody want to say anything about that? I mean I don't have the answer but my thought is that with this a lot of old building in arts world and other worlds that we live in I think a lot of that is being able to having the artistic license not just write our own stories I think that there is a real impetus now to feel like we have to tell versions of our own stories it gets back to this focus on identity that we're talking about and as several people this week have said that in some way that's part of the theatrical enterprise but it's one small part of the theatrical enterprise which is really about creating empathy with people not like us and being able to feel like you can't tell someone else's story because they're not like you and then how do you define not like you is that identity is that gender if I can only write gay or running men then that's a very limited theatrical monologues and that's my concern with this kind of focus now on the authenticity of our experiences which is not to be dismissed it's also not the totality of our experiences and certainly not the totality of our artistic imaginations and I just say that because it's allowing for that I think then builds towards this greater cohesion that we all want I'll jump in and this is a conversation Andrea and I have had but I'm really in pursuit of something that's not empathy and is value oriented because I feel like I feel like the last two decades of my theater work were so concentrated on empathy and did a really good job at it I mean I got somewhere with it we've all got somewhere with it it is super duper but but then some it's not enough so that sense that we're all telling our own stories we're all telling our own community stories challenging our own communities and others and creating empathy like profound empathy for people finally understanding people from the Middle East are feeling and they're humanizing it's just not enough it's just well enough I think value is very different than empathy back to this idea of yes one Middle Eastern slot every five years but also that's in competition with the one Asian slot with the one Latin slot and then we're all in competition like not that we're in competition with each other right now I'm just saying that ish like it's not a pathetic story we get to feel sorry for those people and then they're those people and they stay over there as those people and value is what you want I'll write a play about whatever the F I want to write the play about and they're going to put it on stage because it's a good play and it's next to the other good play and we're in the same season together and we're pushing up against each back to the multiplicity of voices like within the Middle Eastern community when those dialogues start happening it's way better if we're in dialogue and our plays are pushing up against each other in the same season and we're naturally crossing over audiences going ah ha yeah right then it's value and other people are just watching the good plays for the value of the story it's not the representation of that play from that community that had to say the hard thing of that tragedy that's going on in the world right now so I don't know I'm just I just feel like my brain's exploding with the empathy thing and not only for having pursued it for so long and knowing it's good no I'm not negating it's so it is so needed and it's what theater does great but I'm in pursuit of something and I don't have an answer one of the things that Jamila and I have been talking about and I think in our community in San Francisco Bay Area we talk about a lot is sort of centering our narratives defining ourselves in relation to some perceived white center so adapting plays from each other's communities writing characters from each other's communities in our plays not assuming when ethnicity is not defined when ethnicity is not ethnicity of a character is not specified in a play let's not assume that goes to a white actor could be any any kind of like that so those are like practices that we are now we've made like our practice and told a thread and we encourage our playwrights to also we've never in our our mission is if you're a playwright of Middle Eastern descent you can write about any topic maybe because I'm a playwright I've never wanted to box myself being forced to always write about my experience or my community so really encouraging our artists to whether it's through co-productions which we've had a number of co-productions with Asian American theater with African American Shakespeare really build concrete collaboration relationships with other communities through the work relationships that's based on artistic exploration and that historically there always have been relationships between Asians and Africans between Asians and Arabs this is a pre-colonial pre-European and Iranians I just want to say it's a very short space between empathy and pity and I think as theater makers we are all of us in this room we are in a negotiation all the time with white liberalism and white liberalism loves its victims and you know so the fact he's going to apologize the fact that you know we refuse also a victim's status that this isn't about being downtrodden and miserable and so forth has also been a big challenge or you know what type of work people want to sanction did you offer anything or should I just open it up just very quickly there are a couple of things that I like to hear is when an audience says I've never seen anything like this before or they say oh I didn't know that about just I don't know if that's empathy or not but the lead mentioned the word universality and that's what we're all hoping for is to mean that oh yeah I mean that sounds exactly like my story in that community so yeah now we just want to open the floor to like what's percolating with you after hearing this conversation and also a question that I didn't ask that maybe is a question for the room is like what feels what feels urgent the work before us we're getting to the end of this conference you know what feels urgent as we move out from here I raise my hand too early it's fire so one thank you all so much for doing this and taking this place here and sharing it with us that and it's all first up my name is Michael Rose Grant and I am a theater student an undergrad at Boston University and so I identify as Hapa my mother is from Muson the archipelago of my which through colonization has been deemed as the Philippines and my father is a white European American I just wanted to share that so what I'm sort of like hearing and what is on my mind is that there's sort of this like juxtaposition this is sort of at the start of the conversation between like a desire for a label and terminology and nomenclature that fits ourselves because we like to or I like to proclaim a certain identity because culture matters so much to me and it's such an important part of my life that I like to be able to say something to someone to try and start to explain where I'm coming from what my life has been about but there's that's contrasted with like a longing for the labels to not define our lived experience because how can any one word especially an English colonial word explain my lived experience of being in this body for all these years and being in the world that we're in like how can anything really describe that or try to sum it up right so in this conference we've been talking about like language revitalization the importance of oral history and communicating stories and sort of that role and that we play as theater makers and one of my friends from university who lives in Chicago her name's Irian she says if you can say it it's a word and I really like this because to me that gives us the opportunity and I'm sort of wondering if this interests any of you like for us to start creating our own words because if we felt that America as it exists today hasn't and English as it exists today hasn't provided us with the words we want to express how we're feeling how we are as human beings like should we be developing our own nomenclature to take back who we are from the people who have tried to label us and like how can coining terms and making that known through our art through program notes through whatever mediums you want how can the creation of our own language and dialogue be used going forward that to me sort of responding to that question is kind of urgent well I just because it's you know I like in my gut I hate the term Middle East and the fact that we say golden thread Middle East center stage like every time I see that I'm like it's I'm stabbing myself but so having said that so back in the late 90s we didn't feel that we had the power or the voice to sort of fight that battle the battle of language we tested like you know New York Stern or you know Middle East North Africa or Swana is an acronym that's popular in the Bay Area Southwest Asia, North African so we tested a few of these but people don't didn't all recognize what you were referring to whereas when we said Middle Eastern most people had a general understanding of what we were talking about even within that term golden threads definition of the Middle East is very broad and inclusive which we always have to educate people on but my hope is that we will continue to use that term until it becomes obsolete and until brilliant minds have come up with a term that is both realistic and recognizable and I would love to endorse that term when it when you come up there's a couple responses and then we'll go jump in so I'm hearing Michael telling us that you guys are saying we want to develop a cultural identity but don't you dare label us so it's a double-edged sword and it reminds me of the conversation about affirmative action when you discuss affirmative action on one end yes it's needed because it's correcting something that has been happening but at the same time it is an acknowledgement that there is a racial problem that has not been resolved so it's never an easy debate thing and when we are in transition that's what happens so we need to be keep pushing and want our own identity but at the same time resist people using it to isolate us and I just want to add in the first years of Silk Road I tried really hard with the term Southwest Asian and I just kept repeating it to people and they would respond so you do theater from the Philippines and in Thailand that's what they would hear so yes but not in the Southwest Asian context with all of this of course it assumes like ancient Greece and Rome are the center from which everything else is defined as west or east so if we are trying to map so that's where this language comes from and then I also want to lift up another thing that connects us is the colonial history and the responsive theory of Orientalism which was penned by Edward Said who was a Palestinian and so for all that whole European colonial period it was all the Orient and it's a specific US political agenda that has created Middle Eastern exceptionalism and created this term that we're all like using because nobody else knows so I just wanted to acknowledge that I think these questions around language are really important because they carry these entire political histories so I saw Jonathan now there's one I was interested in what you said about the census in the UK when the money got onto the census in the last time round and so because in the UK the census decides where resources are allocated with our local government the Chinese went into Asian last time and then our community centers it's electroshut because Asian has been in the UK taken on by South Asians and if money goes to there they will often it's not redistributed and Asian as we know West Asia for the Southeast Asia so I guess I'm wondering is it some of the states that you have using these labels can or cannot access but it sounds like it's different and I guess the other thing is about I certainly relate I was taught to hate Japanese and then I went to live in Japan quite often because my family from Hong Kong and again I used to run Yellow Earth Theatre years ago which was again mixing all these companies that used to be at war with each other but I found moving forward finding different touch points currently with group artists producing the first black and Asian opera festival in the UK happening now we've got some Armenian Nigerian etc etc but it's our love of music that we talk about those kind of things it's sort of like it's a political identity but I thought surely is a way to bring the art into the centre of this so yeah so segmentation and bringing the art into it really quick on that music is so important because this kind of segmentation doesn't happen in the music and literary fields it happens in theatre because our bodies are racialized when you start the music field it's very clear the relationship between musical forms it's just so apparent it doesn't even need to be a discussion and also in poetry in the literary community there's this much more easy inclusion and it's something about theatre that has racialized all of us on American stages that makes these separations I don't think we have this winter's birth in the imperfect term but a necessity and a bonding point to bring community together because of discrimination and the need for it to bring us into the room together and to have a political face and I so appreciated the comment about how theatre makers of ethnicity that we can bond with other communities of ethnicity and how important that is that we don't segment ourselves but that we come together and to represent other groups within our work as directors or playwrights or producers that because of the United States has all of us in it let's put ourselves up on stage in all our richness okay, pull your hands up high so I can see it and we'll just go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom and we might be done so let's like, I can't keep it rolling just as a contextualizing thing I offer and I said this in some other settings that when we look at the composition of the world people of color are 80% of the global majority and we know that things have changed already in many cities in this country so I offer this a good friend of mine who keeps pushing me to say rather than person of color free people of the global majority because I think there is a sense of solidarity empowerment and language matters and it really shifts the gaze and the centralizing of whiteness thank you so much for this discussion I'll identify myself I'm Bani, I use he, him, his and my background is Turkish Sephardic Ashkenazi Eastern European Jewish and Cuban I've been thinking so much about how the establishment of nation states is such a factor in the complexity of these individual and coalitional identities and that we take that concept as such common sense and the way that a nation state both kind of smushes people together into a synthetic identity that maybe didn't exist before and then also creates subdivisions that maybe didn't exist before and so my family coming from Istanbul, part of my family you know, I've always sort of I never identified as Turkish until I came to the Middle Eastern America convening at the Lark because I mentioned that I was Turkish Sephardic and then all the Turks in the room were like hey, don't be like you know, but it's like well my family wasn't from Turkey, there was no Turkey we were from Istanbul in the context of the Ottoman Empire and ethnicity functions very differently in that kind of an empire than it does in a nation state which says everyone has to be Turkish now and you know, when in fact people have, Turks have Kurdish and Armenian and all the critical sources of the backgrounds they get flattened and then that creates a lot of stress in my head based on these historical events that I wasn't even around for whereas conversely like the other example I think of is in Palestine and Israel you can't maybe this is changing a little now there's no sense to people if you say Arab Jew like it's a oxymoron you know, and I had conversations with people where you have to say Mizrahi which literally means eastern and that's the term for the majority of Israelis who are who have at least some Arab background but if you say Arab Jew even though it's equivalent to saying Arab Christian or Arab Muslims it doesn't even make any sense but pre-state of Israel people identify as Arab and Jews, Muslims, Christians whatever their intentions but it wasn't this thing that didn't exist suddenly this person isn't real anymore and so I'm just thinking about how not that necessarily there's a new language that will suddenly make sense after all this history of colonization we can't get rid of that but in thinking about at least how do we conceptualize even if it's complicated and it still takes an hour to explain we need to go back and sort of look at the history of how constructs were imposed and even in our reactions to those concepts how are we still bringing those concepts with us that don't actually make sense in our contemporary being especially in diaspora anyway, yeah so that's been on my mind that deconstructing the history in that kind of detail has so much to do with how we think of ourselves moving forward I'm going to take the people who had their hands up and then come back to the panel so just take notice who is next hey guys, I'm Patty thank you all for being here very much and let's see, first of all I want to float it out there just for all of us at the time because I'm so grateful to be here that I'm not sure if you all know but there was an Israeli we therefore strike a massive five-story theater complex in Jerusalem thank you and I don't know, I just want to float it out there and find a way that I don't know if absolutely we can respond in our various groups or as a whole to because there's a massive outcry from the National Theater in the UK and Carol Churchill and the artists I've spoken to that that bombing happened on Thursday I don't think I want to float it out there but a general question I'm more and more leaning towards identifying myself as a Elicano who lives in the United States and was raised in the United States there's many people in the Philippines and I know that I'm very conscious of the fact that the travel ban initially included the Philippines I'm very conscious of that I'm very suspicious of when it may return it might be added so the work that I'm focusing on for 20 years I wasn't focused on the United States war and the Philippines and I was ranting on that but now I'm in a place where I want to be more vulnerable and I think about a quiddle how the beautiful, exquisite vulnerability that was shown and I know all the pieces but I want to move towards more vulnerable places so it's making me feel extremely vulnerable and I'm wondering in this time of Trump contemporary history the past couple of decades going backwards and going forwards how do you take care of yourself I feel genuine terror in researching I'm kind of paranoid to begin with but also thinking man I actually canceled the trip I was going to take two of the Philippines to the southern part of the Philippines where it's been a long stand in Muslim community 100 centuries long in the southern part of the Philippines and I canceled the trip because there's massive shootings of random people pulled out of their houses going on now and I'm just wondering about how do you take care of yourself whether it's with coalition building or if you approach a topic or personal part of your work or something you're researching how do you care for yourself like I said coalition building I don't think all of that how do you care for yourself intellectually, mentally, emotionally, sexually socially as we continue to do this long as we continue to belong to a continuum of revolution how do you do that it feels like we might want to answer that question before we take a few more questions is that cool because they might have somebody they must say about that because I think that's relevant to everyone and you know I've always heard the stories of people being randomly selected at airports and I say you know I've been lucky I've never had that but now just in the last three months I was given this SSSS on my past on my work pass yesterday in Frankfurt I went for this randomly selected thing and three months ago into the Dominican Republic I just smiled through it and I you know because people are actually suffering a lot more than that so if that's the best they can throw at us let's just run through it and do what we have to do I think when we check in with whatever impact we're having that becomes really an integral part of I know our own self care because you can forget that very easily and we get so caught up in the work and we get so overwhelmed that we often times believe we're not having impact or we're not affecting these conversations and our communities and when we give ourselves permission if you will to sort of check in with that to recognize it's empowering and it's healing and maybe it's odd that we do lose sight of that so often but you know I think producing theater can sometimes be very lonely and very isolating and all the work that goes into in spite of the very collaborative nature of theater and all the work that just goes into sustaining an organization so those kinds of doubts can very easily set in and have a corrosive effect on. I think there's an element to PTSD that is part of being who we are and maybe even if we might say that's a too strong word it's not when I consider the violence you're talking about and the violence that's in everything I've ever worked on or researched but at least if it's not that it's not so either way and I think that one thing that's been coming up in the multiple inter-community discussions we've been having is how there are many different pockets of people doing work and yes they know each other for the most part not always people were surprised to say oh I know this artist in Philly who's got her own mix fest going on while we're doing the Atlantic mix fest and we need to know each other but the thing is we might all be starting from zero in building up in each place so I do think that there can be a way that we coalition build and communicate or something that builds on more so we're not all starting from scratch each time but the thing that's been on my mind especially when it comes to conferences or festivals and these things I just want a retreat portion it's never happened but it's always what I want people always say come, lead a workshop come, speak come, do your play it's all great can we do a pre-conference where we're all getting our bubble bath we have skills running Middle Eastern festival we all gather the day before somebody's really good at yoga somebody's really good at movement somebody's great at voice somebody's great at writing exercises somebody's a perfect meditator whatever it is somebody's a good cook and you just pre-conference together artistically to the table because everybody wants it we have to wrap soon but I know there were two people on the docket and then I saw oh maybe you were on the docket so let's hear these two real quickly and then we'll I'll try and keep this short Aya, she heard hers I kind of want to question and push back against Andrea's idea that things in music and the literary tradition are clear again, musicologist speaking so I'm going to push back the idea that there aren't racialized bodies in music if I heard you incorrectly, please correct me but I mean we wrestle with Said all the time in orientalist music studies and bodies are often implied through sound and especially racialized bodies and so two cents feel free to whatever thank you for them thank you and I want to lift up the normalization of identities and whiteness and stuff like that that you were talking about and how it's informed by all the different impressions and historical forces and everything so my partner and I and a couple friends of mine were talking about genres and how this kind of idea of a universal character or person who gets to be universal and we were talking about who's the kind of character that you see and so my problem with the predominantly white institutions not just whiteness and so we started coming up with all these different identity categories and then putting the first letter of each of them on sticky notes and then trying to make what would that genre be and so we came up with a number of them and we came up with white hearing, able-bodied, rich male, from a metropolitan center slender slash muscled from the United States, Protestant culture English language cisgendered in your 20s and 30s 40s and we put the letters together and it formed warm suspect a tiny percentage of the entire global population and so we're actually representing outside of that particular genre so I love you all we are at just like a final very short word reflection close out I think we have our homework cut out for ourselves lots of ideas have come out here and we should be working on it I want to just build on something that Danny had said because he made reference to the Ottoman Empire we've never healed that from that Ottoman history and it creeps up all the time so I want to also recommend that we grapple with that as theater makers and men of backgrounds I want to say that I really appreciate this conference and making space for us and the invitation to participate just going back to the question you asked about self-care I would say that it's the last two years have been very difficult and particularly as an Iranian living in the US and the US-Iran relations going to hell and watching the effect of it on my family in Iran it's been extremely difficult and I'm an artistic director of a company there are people that I care for I protect and then there is like me sometimes feeling really alone and vulnerable and unprotected so connecting with my colleagues and connecting with other artists having our monthly phone conversations me and Jamil those conversations and gatherings like this where they rejuvenate me and they make me feel hopeful and empowered not empowered enough I would say but slightly better just kind of stemming off that likewise I think like probably most people in this space have felt kind of PTSD for the past couple of years and I feel like every day is a state of shock in some way I think more because there was such a moment of we have turned the page in several other pages as well so I think the answer for the care and living board is really just to keep writing for me and hoping that these companies produce no that's a lie and it really is just that act of courage and blind faith there is a kind of religious quality to this revolutionary quality to this gathering as well and that's what writing is yeah I'm just I like the idea of pushing our boundaries and working together and just creating together back to that pre-retreat idea pre-conference idea just getting in rooms where we can create together is exciting we're going to learn so much from each other and all the other people in all those other communities that are 80% of the world's population that's I mean this is that's do we even need a revolution? just go for it we really need to take the self-care piece seriously because to a certain extent surviving and thriving is also a revolutionary idea and we have to find the ways to make sure that we're healthy and we can't hold space for others if we can't hold ourselves and so we've got to make sure we slow down sometimes to do that self-care work for ourselves and all of us and I'm going to put my kata hat on for a second and say that I think kata it's been a conversation throughout the morning in the activism session I think we're developing the organizational muscle to be responsive and I thank you for mentioning the theater in Gaza and I want to say I'm interested as a board member in figuring out how kata might want to speak out as a network as a body and the travel ban and other things that are really impacting our communities and the work that we do and just say thank you all for being here and being present listening and being in this movement with us and together and thanks to our people