 All right, so we're gonna go, it was off, now it's on. All right, so we're gonna get started. I'm just gonna do a couple things. The first is I would love for the people who came in after we did the stories and have not yet introduced themselves to just say your name and just to come up and introduce yourself and say where you're from. So I know a couple of you are sitting here so you can start. Sure, hi everyone, my name is Megan Carney. I use she, her, and hers pronouns. I'm here from Chicago, Illinois, representing Rivendell Theater Ensemble. Glad to be with all of you. Hi, my name is Tara Malin. I'm the Artistic Director at Rivendell Theater Ensemble and Megan and I over the last six years have been building a project about women in the military called Women at War. Great, who else? Greetings, my name is Umoja Abdul-Ahad and I'm helping Carpeback Theater celebrate its 47th anniversary, moving into the 50th coming in 2019, so we're looking forward to that. Great, who else joined us here, great. Hi, my name is Bart Pitchford. I'm a PhD student at UT Austin. I'm also a veteran from the US Army with deployments to Iraq, Yemen, and Pakistan. Great to be here and thank you all for discussing this. Hi, I'm Kedda Carpenter. I'm a faculty member at University of Texas at Austin. Oh, you already did. Anybody else at David House? And I'm David House, the Executive Director here at ArtsEmerson. Good evening, everyone. I'm Nolan Vivins, just an old soldier and I basically have worked with the National Initiative for Arts and Health in the military and I'm really happy to be with you, thank you. Great, did I get everyone? Great, okay, so I'm just gonna do one reminder before we start. So this, we're gonna have a conversation amongst ourselves. The inner table here is gonna, we're just gonna talk to each other so you don't need to lean back or out or in any other direction, but to each other like you're at the dinner table. And then, but you're gonna do it with a microphone so that the outer circle can hear you and the live streaming can hear you. So the important, important part of this for it to be successful is that the outer circle has to actively listen. So no side conversations out here, ideally no phoning or that kind of thing as best you can. And so to actively listen and then we're gonna talk for 45 minutes here and then we're gonna break up and then we're gonna talk to all together for 45 minutes. So as you're actively listening, you're gonna have comments, thoughts, questions and you'll have a chance to bring those into the room after we're done talking here. Okay, great. And I have microphones that you can pick up there. So I'm gonna hold on to mine. So I am gonna have you introduce yourself at the same time that you do the first question. So for, so that we can keep things flowing. I'm a big, I'm a big sports fan. So I watched this show called Pardon the Interruption and it's a very important show in my life and that show, you get like a certain timeframe to do something and then you're interrupted, right? So we're gonna run this very first prompt like pardon the interruption. So I'm gonna time you, you get one minute to talk about your project, the specific thing that you're working on and if there are two of you from a team, I suppose you each get a minute. So I suppose that's cheating, but I'm cool with that. And so you're each gonna get a minute. I'm actually gonna time you and I'm gonna stop you at a minute. Okay, so it's nerve-wracking, but exciting. All right, so that's how we're gonna go. I have my timer and anybody feel ready to start with the prompt and then if you would say your name and then just talk about the specific work you've been doing in 60 seconds. The prompt is to talk about the specific work that you're sitting at the table for 60 seconds. Yeah, okay, so Marty's gonna go. Yeah. Is this thing on? Yeah, okay. Hey everybody, Marty Pottinger, live in Portland, Maine for the last 10 years and run in something called Art at Work, which I started years ago. And the project we've been doing with the vets is a couple of projects that's called All the Way Home and one is performances, story exchanges and they happen where the vets are rather than bringing them. So a university vets club, a post, a gathering and a get-together, holiday celebration. The other project is a comic books, writing a comic book, a personal comic book with vets who served in Iraq and Afghanistan who are battling PTSD about how they are winning that battle and it's about their life story. It goes very young, very old in their experiences and they each work with a comic book artist and it's something that will ultimately be online and they can have copies and we wanna do one with their children and some of their spouses as well. And then the last one is a listening wall. Great, thank you and that was great. It was great modeling just to remember even though you have a microphone we're still talking to each other. It's very hard to do. The microphone makes you wanna talk to everyone. Okay, so who's next up? Wanna go around? Yeah, let's pass it around. Hey everybody, I'm Megan Carney. I'm here from Chicago where I do a variety of things but I'm an ensemble member with Rivendell Theater Ensemble where we're an equity professional company. We've been around for 22 years and we focus on advancing women through the arts. So we have a really particular kind of lens around gender and other social justice kind of frameworks. And we have a project called Women at War which we started several years ago. It's based on interviews with over 75 women who served and deployed in recent combat and came back to tell their stories. And we developed this through a series of community partnerships, story circles, interviews and created a main stage show for our production season a few years back and now we have a show that tours. And each show is accompanied by a town hall discussion where we have veterans and civilians talking to each other and it's really about raising visibility for women veterans who are often invisible in the stories that we tell when we think about veterans and trying to connect them with support services. Great, take it. My name is Tara Malin and I am a colleague of Megan's, the artistic director at Rivendell Theater Ensemble and she just gave a lot of my backstory. So I'll just tell you a little bit more about the Women at War project and its genesis which was in 2009 I was asked to direct a show, a workshop at DePaul University and I walked into the room and there were these 10 beautiful young BFA students and they said I could devise anything I wanted so I brought in Helen Benedict's book, The Lonely Soldier which was interviews with women coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan and the first day they were all talking like, yeah, oh my God, like, so I just don't even understand like why a girl would even enlist and I thought, wow, we have a problem and we need to start addressing it and then flash forward, we ended up with a grant through the Chicago Community Trust to develop the program but that was really the seat moment for it. Great, thank you. We're going around, okay. I'm Victoria Marks and I'm based in Los Angeles and back in 2003 when we invaded Iraq I felt like I wanted to know what it would be like to be a choreographer who was a citizen artist and so I began to just look for I don't have veterans in my family so to open up conversations and gradually we have a very big VA hospital in West LA and I went over there to the combat rehab program and gradually, gradually, gradually I developed a project that was what I called an action conversation and the idea was to bring a group of veterans into a room with a group of non-veterans in fact these were graduate students, dancer, choreographers at UCLA where I worked and that we would have a productive conversation both in sharing certain experiences of our training and physicality but also with so much to learn from one another and the idea behind the action conversation was to move and then talk and then move and then talk and the moving always came from the talking and the talking always came from the moving and gradually after 15 weeks we made a performance great, thank you, great why am I so nervous? and we're all here, but they're all there my name's Raman Bhaka, exit 12 dance company I'm a classical ballet dancer who joined the Marine Corps and served in Fallujah Rock I'm interested in work that explores the human experience particularly the combat experience and the experience of the military and how combat affects everyone associated with it through exit 12 I've been able to explore that in a number of ways we've developed a repertoire of work that talks about the military experience from all angles the two projects that I'm working on currently one is to bring four women together and have them go through their experiences and see what movement develops I want to kind of step away from the classical ballet paradigm the second one is a project that was done that is going to be done in the UK with UK military, exoraki military looking at developing a brand new Rite of Spring based on the military experience Hi, my name's Joe Good and I'm the artistic director of a company called the Joe Good Performance Group a few years ago I got really tired of my own voice I write all of my own work and I thought it would be interesting to interview my friends the ones who didn't die of AIDS the ones who were left about the challenges of being who they are and use those words verbatim to make a performance I ended up being a series of performances which we call the human kind series and I had all these elaborate questions at first and then ultimately I had one question which was what do you do when you fall down to get back up and that morphed into the resilience project a very smart curator friend of mine asked me to do that project with veterans and I did Thank you Hi everybody, my name is Peter Snowd I'm a playwright and I live here in Boston about five years ago a good friend of mine gave me a book as a holiday gift called Call to Serve Stories of Men and Women Confronting to Vietnam War Draft it was a collection of about 30 interviews of people who had different responses to the draft some resisted, some went to Canada some went to, you know, answered the call to serve or drafted went to Vietnam somewhat conscientious subject and so forth so and he rather glibly said, okay Peter why don't you make a play out of that I was like, okay, and I did so let's see so the play has four vets in it three combat vets and a nurse who served in Vietnam in a field hospital all of them had PTSD and we premiered the play here in Boston took it on the road for three performances in Massachusetts and Connecticut and then we actually raised the money to film the live performance in Boston and it's now out on video through a thing called the Media Education Foundation which distributed documentary films to colleges and universities primarily thank you Hi, my name is Helen Stoltzfuss I'm co-artistic director of Black Swan Arts and Media in Oakland, California we create and produce our own work that travels beyond the borders of race, religion, politics, ethnicity last year my creative partner Albert Greenberg and I created over we had worked for several years collecting interviews we created and produced a piece called a performance event actually called the prepared table, a feast of foods live performance and stories from Iraq, Afghanistan, and the fob forward operating base of the US military yes, it's a very long title we had 100 people seated at tables like this 10 to a table and we fed them a feast of traditional foods from Iraq, Afghanistan, and a typical military base interwoven throughout the evening were videos of actual interviews with Iraqi and Afghan refugees and US military veterans who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and live performances with hip hop dancers jazz musicians, acrobats, chronic chanter, Afghan traditional singer we great, thank you, great hi, my name is Tel Castellanos I am a theater maker and artistic director of the Combat Hippies Victor, you actually reminded me that I had been doing this work before I started doing this work in 2003 I was commissioned to write and direct a hip hop dance theater piece and that's right around the time of the invasion and I chose I created a piece called Scratch and Burn which was my response to our invasion of Iraq and I don't think I necessarily fall into anything I think things just kind of unfold the way they do even sitting at this table here today but I was contracted to teach a spoken word workshop to Iraq war veterans and we created, we actually ended up creating a theater piece called Conscious on the Fire which we are currently touring and have been awarded a Night Grand Foundation to create a new piece which I'll let him finish the other minute and talk about two for one I'm Anthony Torres I am the executive director co-founder slash performer with the Combat Hippies I'm also a social worker and as the school I went to taught this trauma-informed curriculum based off of the work of Bessel van der Kolk talking about that his book is The Body Keeps the Score and with the theater work that Teyo taught us it gives us a venue to share our stories, incorporate performance and it's not only had a great impact on us but also others so our new project is to incorporate to record oral histories of Iraqi refugees along with fellow combat veterans and try to give a more well-rounded narrative to the experience of war and its impact but also to resiliency and healing. Great. So thank you for that and for indulging that it's a great way for yeah, you were exactly at a minute that was very impressive that was very impressive but thank you for that it's a way to get everybody's voice in the room right from the get-go in a short period of time and just to hear from all of you so we'll take a more relaxed approach to our conversation now but yes, yes I find moderating panels that sometimes not everybody gets to even get into the conversation and so that's an important way to start so I'm wondering if we could just toss around the question I mean, we've put this convening together that clearly there's something unique about working as artists in communities with active military and veterans and just wondering what are the key strategies for doing that work what makes it different for you as artists and if you might talk a little bit about that and you can get deeper into your specific projects that way and there are three mics around so yeah, so I was saying we put this convening together because clearly there's something unique about artists coming together with veterans in active military that is something that I think we often think of the arts and the military as things that live in different poles of the world and clearly you've managed to bridge that pole and so what are some of the key strategies you've used to bridge that pole and some of the kind of key learnings that have come out of your work specifically in this area? I'll jump in, Helen Stoltzfuß, food so if you feed people they will come and something happens when people are sitting around a table eating food so people, civilians, military, atheists, Jews, Muslims, people who were strongly for the war people who were strongly against the war Iraqi refugees, Afghan refugees all these people live in the Bay Area that's what's amazing military personnel are all seated together at a table sharing food and because it's a table there's a protocol around that so you introduce yourself and you pass food you maybe talk to each other which is so different than sitting in an auditorium and everybody's facing this stage but you don't relate to each other and so relating to each other was an important part of the for some people it was the most powerful part of the experience was who they sat with my favorite table was a table where there were vets of Iraq and Afghanistan sitting with Iraqi and Afghan refugees and they talked to each other and they exchanged contact information so I think that's a really critical part for us I just to, I love, I had written down earlier the idea of the shared meal and one of the things that we were doing with women at war that I just basically stole from the theater of war folks which was just amazing sort of template on how to use the theater piece as the catalyst to the conversation was kind of making sure really ensuring that the audience was intentionally comprised of both civilians and military folks so that there could be in fact a conversation our project Megan when we developed it we really wanted that town hall to be a huge part of the experience and not just an add-on like for the 10 people that stay after the production but really be a piece of it and when, during the town halls when we were successful in making sure that it was like 50-50 in our 50 seat house that's 25 and 25 the conversations that erupted were really stunning just to harken back to what was just said in the Liz Lerman thing which was so amazing it's about bringing it in together and sort of blurring those lines so that we can actually speak to each other I was a mental health tech in the Army for four years I was a psych tech in the Miami VA Medical Center for almost five years and I hosted an open mic I think it was 2013 when this project was presented I just thought with my personal love of writing that this is an untapped resource in the veteran community or at least in my community in South Florida and I found myself kind of going to every little poetry workshop and presentation and book reading and when this opportunity came up to have a writing workshop for vets I just felt using this as a tool can compliment therapy and medication helps so many people but what else is there? If therapy is talking, talking is expression then there's other ways to express yourself and that's been a really powerful tool and we try to encourage fellow vets to do that and it's been a great experience so far you're asking about techniques strategies, learning, things that you've done I mean so I'm hearing bringing people, civilians and military veterans together is one strategy, food is a strategy, workshops I mean so just trying to kind of get as much into the table as we can here so I can tell you what not to do and I'll preface this right so in my 10 years of work that I've been in this space being totally honest I felt kind of an imposter in both worlds in both the artistic world and in the veteran world and I thought that I could make it a little more authentic and a little more honest and a little more safe by first making the work autobiographical so most of our beginning works were experiences that happened to me or my unit or things that we experienced or things that people close to me experienced that I had permission to use and then when we started working with other veterans that I hadn't met before we tricked them into coming and working with us and I use the word tricked they were coming to do a writing workshop they thought and they ended up dancing and then they ended up performing right so now looking back at 10 years and looking where I'm going next and the new projects I'm going on I think this is the first time I've felt that I've actually developed the tools and techniques to approach a project the way I think is the, I don't wanna say correct is okay with me of approaching a project from a place of knowledge, a place of wisdom with the tools needed to and the structure, thank you Liz to actually do something that I can be proud of I don't know if that helps but Super helpful I'm thinking about timeline you know and being really realistic about the time it takes to do something like this because just underscoring heard throughout the day people talking about credibility and we're all talking about relationship building and that does take time and in my experience we would have really successful workshops where you go in and you meet somebody but you're just like, I would just feel like we're just scratching the surface we're not, because we don't know each other yet so why would you tell me the truth about your experience unless I show up next time and I share a little bit more about myself and then we have a relationship and then we're building together and then eventually our storytellers got to decide whether or not they wanted, what they wanted to contribute and how they wanted to tell it but there was a relationship there by the time we got around to a recorder or saying this is gonna be in a show and that was a big learning lesson because we submitted it for a grant and we were like, all right, we're on the grant timetable and it just didn't happen like that so then we were like, okay, let's circle back and figure out and it turned into like five years of getting off the ground and it was worth it and I'm also thinking about how, just doing, I had done oral history projects in what I would call subcultures before and for me a lot of it was like really honoring veteran culture, military culture and veteran culture as a culture that I didn't know much about and sort of owning my ignorance around that and doing a lot of education and asking questions when I didn't know and just sort of entering the space like that and then building on the information so that I could be a different kind of collaborator and participant in the room. Yeah, go ahead. I think this work more than any but maybe every work is there's the importance of figuring out how to trust your own thinking and make your own mistakes and that it is the only way you kind of get to learn what there is to learn as you go forward. A couple things I've thought about while doing it and one is we don't have a professional mental health person present even though very intense things are shared and I think making sure that the reality of mental health professionals is clear and available and spoken and shared but one thing I think I learned the hard way was to not have story exchanges in a traditional mental health facility to actually do it in the VFW post to do it at the retirement home to do it at the events, this and that just because it's opening a door that we're not actually trying to open for that. Another thing was, oh the power of listening to really structuring it so that the vets were helping each other like really making that clear and they know that but just to make it quite clear that you're listening to this other one's stories actually you are doing the buddy buddy helping thing and so that the vets are clear that this is a vets helping vets project and so I think that was helpful and the demographics I had a couple events that we had really key people who were in support of the project that couldn't come to a workshop because we would have too many non vets and the people who came, everyone had to agree to participate as themselves and that was awkward to set up with the people involved but they did agree, it was one of our congresswoman that kind of thing we're usually not having those kind of conversations it's usually something done with the staff but it really felt like I needed the congresswoman to personally agree to participate fully and deeply and then the last one is just the importance for us a balance of attention so and for me I mean to not it was important how deep the vets wanted to go and how little they felt they had space to tell the kinds of stories they were sharing and they went there sometimes very quickly but the way they were invited and the way it was set up was to be like what's your funniest story? What's the longest weight you had? What's your MRE story? What's your buddy that you'll never, you know that you still stay in touch with story that kind of thing so to really make sure that that's just embedded and kind of integrated in the entire process I want to, yes to everything and I wanted to add just to add another thought which is a little hard to parse quickly but I wanted to talk about resistance and very often we think of resistance as like a door closing I think of resistance as an incredibly active form of participation and that if you're listening really closely it's not a door closing it's actually one of the most fervent ways of saying what's going on and an example just of that and another huge learning moment for me is that always after food as Fett says he starts reminiscing or remembering the smell of flesh burning and the oil fires in Kuwait and his friend says stop it, don't do that that we do in therapy, we don't do this here and I'm only listening and I'm quiet and then I say is it that Manuel can't tell this story or is it the story can't be told and the other guy goes gee I don't know and so I think that always being a good listener and a respectful listener but also not letting a moment that seems to be emphatic or door shutting be a door shut it's actually a door opening to a whole deeper understanding about what's really going on. Great, anybody else wanna add to that who hasn't added? A couple of things that I think are coming up around the table I think one is that question of I wonder in terms of building trust how like is it different I mean as artists we know trust is a key part of the creative process right but trust inside of and I think Megan you're talking about doing oral history projects like we've all probably done some version of that how does this differentiate and is that related to trauma is that related to the military being so far away from artistic practice more generally or what are you know how do you identify the challenges of building trust in military and veteran communities? I think one if you talk about motives both your own for wanting to be involved with these stories and somehow reveal your own vulnerability in that and then ask the person that you're doing the oral history with what was their motive for wanting to tell the story is it really gives them agency it gives them a sense of purpose and they can address what they want to address and come at it from the angle they want to come at it from and also I mean I think of the larger project for me it beyond understanding veterans and their experience is how can we be compassionate with each other as human beings and when I express that motive and say I think you have something to teach me and others because of your experience it gives them a lot of power and allows them to shape how they want to deliver that message. I think building on that idea I think it's like that question what do you want people to know that they don't know or what's not out there and we encountered multiple times in workshops or talking with people if you would say like well what are the stereotypes people have about women veterans? Oh man you like open up the door to like these brainstorms and all these ideas that circulate in our culture about who veterans are and who women veterans are and the women that we were working with were very aware of that and I often felt like acknowledging that that was out there and there were some things that showed up in every one of those conversations but acknowledging that that's out there these misperceptions are there kind of freed up the room and allowed us to be in on it like all right well let's get beyond that then or let's even get beyond the statistics like let's kind of get to a deeper kind of truth and that was a way in for us that helped kind of build that sense and maybe because some of those narratives are so pervasive and there is a code of silence around certain things that we kind of had to break through that and I did feel like that was a little bit different but that did feel unique to this project. I have a couple of other questions about this question of as I'm listening I think often artists think that they understand the full range of human emotion and so we have great confidence in our ability to tell stories that are emotional and intense and I was just thinking about watching Liz and her project and what an emotional experience that was and how those stories are not as familiar as other kinds of stories and I was thinking about you Marty saying that you don't have somebody who's a trauma person in the room and I just wonder about like that relationship between like how you manage this experience of trauma in your various artistic practice or are there moments that you have felt in over your head with the work in any way or so I'm just kind of curious about that. You know something that happened early on is when we originated the project we were working with a service organization called Vet Cat which was Veterans Creative Arts Therapy and about a year into it when we started getting ready to do the initial interviews it was with a therapist in the room who really didn't allow the vets to talk to us directly she was sort of the conduit do you know what I mean and it was, it really and it felt like we were being pitted against the vets in a very strange subtle kind of insidious way. Yes like she was protecting the vets from us which I think didn't help them trust that we were in it for the long haul or about motivation about what our motivation why we were doing this it wasn't helping and then once we kind of moved away from that and Megan led this amazing story circle although you know Tanisha is also a counselor just a very different but it was with 15 of us and Megan had us tell our stories too and we began by telling a story as well and then all of a sudden it was like the dam opened you know but we had also been kicking around with it for two years at that point and the veterans within the community had been seeing us showing up at these different events and you know it's like I think they just needed to trust that we were not gonna be going away but it was really interesting to me like we weren't gonna go away and then it was interesting to me how once that one person was sort of removed from the room and we were able to sort of deal with each other one on one and build these individual relationships and then they started to trust us with their stories in a really interesting way that I've never completely unpacked why that happened that way and I just say that the people charged who are working in the mental health system with that so we all know this but they are on the front line in a very real way and so it totally makes sense that they will throw themselves on some metaphorical real version of a hand grenade in order to keep the vets from being heard or traumatized or re-re-re-somethinged so this is a good topic to tap on. A lot of people want to, there's a lot of funding in and around working within the veterans' communities and I think a lot of folks are trying to have, maybe in some situations, certainly in Chicago I have heard that there have been people who have been abusing that opportunity and maybe not in it for the long haul or maybe have questionable motivations and so I think it makes the veterans' community very sort of keeping folks at arm's length for a bit. Oh Chicago. Oh Chicago. Oh Chicago. Oh my God. Just a quick comment on the trust issue and I think there's a real difference between being trusted with the story that you're given but then there's another element of trust which is how it's presented on stage and I made a really bad blunder. Well it wasn't all me but we had one vet who was in and out of the project and wasn't sure he wanted to have his story in the play and he eventually said he would and then there was a scene in which he has kind of a flashback and to his combat experience and how that represented physically on the stage was a question and the director I was working with wanted him to sort of have a get on his knees kind of scuttle to one side of the stage. I wasn't sure about it, we went with it and in fact Al LeVet concerned for his own reasons decide he didn't want to come see the play anyway but I got feedback that somebody was pretty upset that we had represented that knowing Al being an incredibly resilient person who goes into schools and talks about his vet experience even though it re-traumatizes him so he's a very brave and resilient guy and this was not a good representation of him and when we filmed the play we actually took that scene out of the film but it was a big lesson for me it's like not only about having someone trust you with their story but trust you to represent it in a way that feels right and authentic to them so. I want to speak to what you said earlier to Tara in reference to telling your story that's one of the things that I did and looking for ways how I can relate to these veterans on a different level, right? And because the divide does exist, right? Military veterans and civilians and we know it exists and it's there but there are other commonalities and we would talk about things like we, most of us were Puerto Rican actually who grew up in the States and so that was part of our commonality there was, we talked about our fathers and how in our relationships with our fathers and through these conversations the structure of the piece came about which was, I said let's do childhood military service and post-military service and it was these childhood experiences that really connected us and made us relate to each other and my story is not the story of a veteran but it has its own struggles and trauma, that's right and drama and trauma, yes. Part two, we met with, I met with Teo before, we did a four month writing workshop through Miami Dade College live arts department. We met before the workshop which was gonna be a weekly workshop for four months. Four veterans showed up including myself which I ended up forming the hippies but we talked and he's kind of like I am not familiar with this at all, how do I approach this? When they mentioned his name for the workshop I said Teo who? I did my research and when we met I was like your reputation precedes yourself like I know who you are, I know the work you do and I feel it would really gel well with the group because one of the hippies is a relative of mine the other two were friends so as we started aligning commonalities versus differences it really started coming together and one thing that I loved about Teo's approach was that it was like hands on but hands off at the same time he was kind of like molding us and crafting or when a story came up he would find a commonality and say let's explore that more or he would kind of guide us and that gave us a sense of freedom and kind of autonomy but also with his experience and direction. What I really grasped the most was what he mentioned was the universality of the emotions and feelings of the experiences that that is what everyone can relate to pain and loss and hurt and suffering and also growth and resiliency and this idea of that sharing stories brings us closer together. I just wanna say that they call me Papa hippie now. You asked about failures or mistakes and I think I've so far completely failed in actually moving things forward on military sexual trauma and so that's primarily with women so they'll tell me a story and then I'll never see them again or they won't they'll you know that was my story thank you so much please don't use my name and so it's such a key issue and I obviously think I have a picture of why that doesn't get to the page or the stage at this point but I'm wondering if anyone here has thoughts about it especially YouTube maybe. Yeah I was sitting here thinking about that it's interesting you brought that up. You know we part of that I was saying that grant timeline earlier we did a workshop public performance at we had a university collaborator in Chicago at UIC University of Illinois Chicago and so we did a public workshop of what we had so far and they were like just scratching the surface stories but we had like standing room only crowd you know we had a lot. We had to be for 60 and 160 people showed up it was like we're just fabulous fabulous and horrifying. Of the public yes. Of the public veterans civilians and just a lot of community parts really fantastic and we it was like a huge artistic risk because we were so aware of what it wasn't you know. It was just nascent right. Okay so that but what was great about taking that risk is there were a lot of veterans there who watched it and saw with us what wasn't there and then because we did the town hall a lot of women came to us after that and said this is missing this is missing and that was like the greatest failure that turned into like the greatest gift you know because we took the risk to put it out there before it was done we invited that community and like all good audiences right during previews or whatever to come into it and say here's what I see here's what I want to see you know and after that stories about military sexual assault or military sexual trauma started coming to us with permission to use it and nuanced stories so not just like this happened but also women spoke to us about how they handled it how they looked out for each other like accommodations that were made or decisions that got made or things that got moved forward or up the ranks or didn't and why you know and we were able to represent that it became a really significant part of the show and something that always kind of you know that we would be unpacking in those town halls because at the time it is still in the news but you remember like a few years back when it was like a lot in the news and there was a lot of like legal policy stuff going on and that's kind of when our show hit so it felt like a really interesting confluence of the time and then that sort of that workshop moment. Just to tag onto that and kind of harken back to what are some of the strategies I think when we began it particularly myself I'm a civilian right and I don't have a I don't have many close relatives or friends that have served and so I was really on the outside of the military culture in a huge way and about as clueless and my understanding of the military and the military culture is that you were all the same like you know probably you all joined for the same reasons which you know Megan spent a lot of time and energy talking about where motivation lies like why did you join but understanding the subtleties and the differences and the unique experiences that every single person we talked to and so every time the show would begin or the stories would begin to tilt one way making sure that we had the counterpoint story do you know what I mean so for someone that would tell us about their experience that was really challenging and really hard and how they hated what the military did to them the next day I interviewed a major who talked about how equipping her service was and she would go back in a heartbeat so I mean I think one minute they would be saying how it was amazing and phenomenal in the next minute there would be tears pouring down their faces they were talking about coming home and really looking for the commonality to steal your phrase in people's experiences good bad whatever there are moments that they all started to kind of land on the same point as we were listening. I don't know if that's helpful I don't know why that bit just popped up for me I think the different experiences and the different branches you know what we started to learn that I still keep saying to Meg and oh my gosh we have to figure out a way to how to get that luckily the production's pretty fluid so we have opportunities and I'm constantly asking her to rewrite and put the difference between the branches and how somebody from the Air Force speaks about somebody who's a Marine or how a Marine looks at you know and to the civilian world that is just Helen I just wanted because I've heard this thing about commonality coming up and commonality in our trauma and I think that is really key in our what to me is the larger question which is how do we deal with these wars that have happened you know a great wound has opened up our nation and I think it's our job as artists as storytellers especially just somehow try to heal it or at least shed light on it you know ancient shamans took on the trauma took on the pain in order that the community could transcend it and I think that I guess I'm saying how important I think this work that we're all doing is and the trauma is the thing that unites us the three communities that I was interviewing who none of them would talk to each other of course and all wondered why we were interviewing the other communities but you know the young American soldier who suffers moral injury from pointing his gun over and over again at an Iraqi family the Iraqi mother who tries to find a doctor to give her a C-section at the moment that Baghdad is in flames and bombs are going and she can't find a doctor and the American who sees his friend or she sees her friend blown up by an IED that's planted in wounded dogs by insurgents in all of those stories they are all suffering trauma and I just feel really strongly that if we don't look at the larger picture of trauma in these wars we'll never come to terms with them I mean we're still doing World War II we're still trying to figure that out and we can't only talk to vets about it we certainly haven't even begun to deal with Vietnam you know so civil war I mean you know these wars demand that we expand our context Thanks for that prompt Asher because something's been on my mind since I got invited to this gathering which is that some of these larger questions actually going beyond your larger question which has to do with our society in general and I think we have a culture of violence in this country which is profound and not adequately discussed and I just noted down some questions that I think I personally have been thinking about and maybe others here will think about too and I didn't know how that get expressed in our discussions about artistic representation but let me just quickly just say them because I wrote them down here why does our country spend more on its military than the next seven countries combined? Why are we permanently at war? Why are our police departments as we saw in Ferguson at Standing Rock increasingly militarized? Why as Arthur de Groot noted in that howl around posts last week are nearly 230,000 veterans transitioning out of military service every month. Why does President Trump propose to boost the military budget by $54 billion and cut domestic programs by the same amount including yes the national endowment for the arts? Why do a great many Americans feel comfortable with all of this? I don't think these are just political questions. Oh, why do people feel, why do a great many Americans feel comfortable with all of this? And I would say these are not just political and social questions, they are moral questions and as artists we I think want to investigate and interrogate moral questions and I just want to put that out there. I don't know what to do with it but I needed to say it. I'm gonna give Roman and then Marty as a final word so they're two final words and then we're gonna break back out. That's a lot of pressure. Yeah, sorry. One of the, a couple of things I've been thinking about and bouncing off of both of you. You know, when we started, when I started this work I definitely was looking at an impact on the audience from a couple of perspectives. I wanted to go into a theater and I wanted to show the audience a war that they were not seeing on the televisions. I wanted them to feel the war that they weren't feeling and I wanted them to like walk out feeling that they needed to do something or they needed to connect with a veteran or they needed to like advocate for a veteran and so we, I created all of this work about, like you said, trying to harness that emotion and use that emotion for good. Question mark. And then I experienced two things which kind of made me transition a little bit. One of them was the feeling of the audience after the show was just so heavy and so many people were asking, so what's next? And it forced me to look at what's next and to create what's next and to start looking at that vision of hope for the future. One of the works we now perform is a work created with the Rocky Youth that talk about hope at past combat. But going further, where does that conversation go now bouncing off of your question? Like now we've kind of encompassed this feeling of showing this war and showing this combat and then coming out of this like, let's all like grow flowers and look at the sun all day and feel it on our skin and then the reality of life, how do we connect the two of those? And this is more of a question, something I'm investigating is how do we find kind of the, I'm gonna steal Liz for a second. You know, how do we take those two things and kind of turn them sideways? Great, Marty, final comments on the inner circle. I think the questions that have just recently been asked and issues are mine and all of ours as humans, I don't bring them into my work with vets at all except in, you know, it's like, what is the objective I have? Why am I doing this work? What are these questions I'm asking myself for these questions I'm, you know, and so those are questions I think we're all, I mean you said a good point, it was like what's your motive? So I don't, what I do do is work really hard to try to get vets there who are asking themselves different questions. And so whether that's somebody from veterans who's decided to be a part of Veterans for Peace in Maine, whether that's, you know, every vet is different. And so to, as in any piece, to try to get as diverse a particular group together and then how can I get out of the way and make way at the same time. Great, so thank you all, it was a great conversation and I really appreciate the honesty and integrity in the conversation. So what we're gonna do is you'll go back to the outer circle and seats and then we'll just have an open conversation. So thank you. Great, so we've got some microphones. And people to pass them around to you. So what are the things that you've been, you active listeners in the outer circle? Questions, comments, thoughts that you're having from that conversation right back there, yeah. And if you would say your name when you, at the top, that'd be great. Sure, Jeremy Nobel Foundation for Art and Healing. So maybe to continue as the outer circle, what I think was a really important dialogue that was happening in the inner circle. So, and maybe I'll make it personal as the people around the table did, by the way, I'm just so admiring of the work of the people around the table, so I wanted to thank them for that. So I'm a medical practitioner and a public health practitioner, that's one part of my world. And then I'm also an artist, I'm a poet. And when you think about the work and as people were describing it around the table, I think it's incontrovertible at this point that creative arts expression improves health and well-being for individuals and community. Lots of ways it does that, growing evidence-based to support it, and clearly that's underpinning a lot of that work. Then there's also an important question, which is from the aesthetic point of view, is the art being produced important art, is it good art? And maybe it's what Roman said about taking Liz and not making those dialectical questions right and turning them side and have them be in dialogue with each other, because there's no question in my mind that both important and good art is being produced in this setting and also it's serving a public health and a medical requirement, not even nice to have but a need to have. And I'm just wondering about the thoughts of other people, but how we continue having those perspectives be in dialogue because I think they're equally important. It's great, it's a great provocation for the room. Somebody, thanks. Oh, great, thank you. I got handed a mic. Sam Pressler, Armed Services Arts Partnership, ASAP. Don't have a direct response to that, I just wanted to make a few quick notes, particularly on key strategies. So for context, we offer arts classes and workshops for veterans, service members, and their families as a means to help them reintegrate into their communities. So we do stand-up comedy, improv, creative writing, storytelling. I kind of wanted to hone in on the key strategies perspective because I think it was very programmatic in the conversation, but maybe not as much tactical and just wanted to say a few tactical things that have been really helpful for us. So coordination is something we don't think about, but how do you think about engaging the veteran and military community? And for us, what's been really helpful is forming relationships with the existing network of veteran and military service organizations in those communities. So having those lunchtime conversations with the leaders of those organizations, so they build that trust with you to refer their members to your program. Working with the local VA hospitals, there are many, many social workers who are interested in this and open to it. Working with colleges, their coordinators, their student veterans organizations, those are all really important outlets. And what we found is for our classes, we typically have 10 to 15 people in each class. We typically get 30 to 45 applications for those classes. So we're seeing that the demand is really very much exceeding the capacity when you use those channels. Another thing that I didn't come up but it may be as implied is training. So what are you doing to ensure that the practitioners are equipped to work with that population? I know trauma came up as one, so how are you training people to deal with trauma triggering situations, but also just more broadly like military cultural competency. And there are a lot of accessible trainings out there, a really good resource that we use and we partner with a group called Psych Armor. It's free online trainings on military and veteran cultural competency that I think if you feel like you may have a knowledge gap, our professionals have found that really useful. The final thing I'll note on just programs is something that didn't come up, but accountability. Accountability for the instructors, but also accountability for the people coming to the programs. I think there's a inclination sometimes to treat veterans differently. I don't think that should be the case. I think these are people who've contributed and contributed at a very high level when they were in the service and we should expect that in a large way when they come to our program. So we ask them to commit to our classes. We say if you miss more than two classes, you're out. And we call them if they're five, 10 minutes late and we found that our graduation rates are between 90 and 95% through that class. So how do you create that culture of accountability within the program? And then just final pieces like sustainability. I think that's kind of come up, but there's been a lot in the art space about like, hey, we're gonna come do this workshop with you. But again, what is next? How are you either linking up with resources in that community, providing that sustainability? And so figuring out what those backend partnerships look like. I just think it's really important to do justice to the people that we're serving. So that's me. Great, thank you. Here and back there. Go ahead, Margaret, and then we'll do back here. Margaret Lawrence, Dartmouth College. And this was just such a great conversation. Thank you so much. And I have a comment, but I also wanted to, I don't even think it's a counterpoint to what you just said about thinking about artistic quality. I really don't think about, with this kind of work, I think about, as a curator, I think about quality in a really different way, artistic quality. If I have an audience that looks like my other audiences, then I've failed for this kind of work. That's not who I wanna necessarily see in the audience. I really need a different combination of people. And tied to that is the way that I think about quality. For me, quality has to do with engagement for this kind of work. I don't think about, is somebody's turnout perfect? I don't think about, is their diction perfect? Those things help deliver the engagement, but it's the engagement that I'm really after. My question was gonna be really hearing this message about sustainability, about building trust, which really takes time about not being on that grant timeline. We all know those timelines, and I guess as more of a neophyte with the kind of, we'll talk later on a different roundtable, but the way that I engage with this work, I would say is periodically, I'm not a company that's founded primarily to do this work. So I do it as often as I can, but it's not consistent. So are we at a place with the resources that exist where there's an understanding of that long trajectory that's needed? And if not, what can we do to get there? Yes. This thing on? There we go. Yeah, I'm that guy. I rarely do this, but I'm actually gonna echo at that point. There's a lot of good practical, tangible stuff, and the only thing that I want to kind of throw on there is that the military knows that the arts have practical value. Down in Maxwell Air Force Base, there is a program where they set up one of those big, full villages and they bring military members through there in kind of cultural awareness sensitivities. They bring groups through. You're supposed to try and negotiate a first time in country situation, trying to negotiate like water rights when we did the role play scenario. Then you debrief them afterwards, break it down, tell them, look, these are the things that kind of unite us as humans on this planet. This is what you do. So like you said, building those relationships and if you need things to reference, look up, like find out what the military already uses in those ways and say, hey, we have this project or we have this program and the thing that actually creates the issue, being in the military and being kind of taken and controlled and put to do these things that normally people wouldn't want to do to each other. By that same token, you can say, hey, you should then tell people to do these good things while they're still maybe on the out processing. Go approach these things at that point when you can force them to do it because they're gonna be pains in the asses about afterwards. But yeah, there are things out there. So if you need reference points, if you need stuff like that, it sounds like a fantastic reason I'd love to touch base with the afterwards. But there's stuff out there. So point out that it's already being done and we should just do more of it. Hi, Scott Angle again. I also forgot to say earlier that the views that I express are not the views of the DOD, but they are personally my own. So I just wanna make sure that caveat is out there. I... So now I can start. No, a couple of observations. We all have such a dilemma in the art community. I'm not a non-artist, but to be able to venture into this space of trauma and do so respectfully and not open up things that are inappropriate to open up. I mean, that is a very difficult task. Some concerns, you know, in terms of listening to some of the things that we heard earlier, I think one has to be very, very careful. You are opening up the doors. You may not think you're opening the door, but that door is opening and you also are striving to get very impactful information. You wanna get stories. You wanna get that emotional experience. So it is a very difficult dilemma to navigate with those service members. I think the most recent statistics are 22 service members active or prior commit suicide a day. Is it higher than 22? It's still an obviously a very unacceptable number. So I think we have to be very mindful of the spaces that you travel with folks that are already taking great steps to come to your area because getting them out of the house and leaving the bunker so to speak is taking a great risk on their part. And so then to join a community and then sort of have certain questions delved into perhaps at a level that's maybe more clinical than it is not. I just would caution and I would ask for wise thought in terms of how you pursue digging further in your efforts to find impactful material for your representations. Hi, I'm Annie Hamburger, Unger Arts, Baystrike Live. Actually one of the great strategies that I was able to employ is sitting here right next to me, Art DeGroot who is this extraordinary human being who recognizes the value of the arts to affect social change and art is a retired lieutenant colonel from the army 20 years in the service and as a producer who's going to all these different places, it's very difficult because I don't live in a particular place where I'm bringing a performance. So how do you then help to ensure that those connections are valuable? And as a middle-aged Jewish woman, I can't be calling these military service organizations and have any kind of credibility. I wish that weren't true, but it absolutely is and so we worked very closely with Art. I mean, we went to 40 cities around the country and Art was tireless in terms of working with presenters, talking to presenters, giving them his point of view, asking presenters if they've reached out to a variety of different social service organizations, showing up at the performances wherever you can, giving guidance on who should be sitting on those panels, hoping that mental health professionals were actually sitting on those panels and were there to interact with people that opened up because he's got that cellular experience and the intellectual knowledge recently got his PhD, to be able to really be an effective advocate and partner in the best of fashions as we went to all of these places and ways that I just couldn't, no matter how much I cared. Well, thank you very much. I would just add that we talked a lot about, the artists talked a lot about their work for the purpose of healing and therapy, the work we did with Basetrack Live was more about civics literacy. There's only 0.4% of the nation's public since September 11th, 2001 served in uniform, so 99.6% of Americans have not directly involved in combat operations as a result of 9-11, so society doesn't understand the stories and the lives of their military service. It's particularly important today, since 1973, it became an all-volunteer thing. We heard the example at Civil War, everybody went to the war, every male went to the war. That's not the case now, so a very, very small minority of people of this millennial generation had made a choice to serve and they did it exceptionally well and now they're struggling to put their lives back together, find new meaning and new opportunities to become a citizen again. So Basetrack was more of enhancing the non-veterans to understand who these people are. In this case, and you're gonna see it tomorrow, you're gonna see a story, that's a story of two people that represents 4.1 million. And so I would just throw out there to the artists that are also presenting work that's not just therapy, but it's civic or social literacy. If we're gonna move past a sympathetic approach towards an apathetic approach, and we all know apathy is a better emotion to work with and learn and change than sympathy. It sucks to be you, it's not helpful to a veteran, saying, hey, I now understand to some degree what you experienced and I appreciate that and what can I do to help or make you part of my community. We need that and I think that's a calling for the artists and I know Ann and others in the room are doing it for that purpose. So thank you for me, share that. Go ahead down there. Bart Pitchford, I wanna piggyback on the tail end of that because I think one of the important things that is often left out in this conversation, when we're looking at how do you reach across the lines between artist and military because they seem so disparate and so polar and far separated from each other, is first of all that it's not, right? There is a very, very distinct commonality between the kinds of worlds that theater people live in and the kind of world that military people live in. I was theater and then I went into military and then I came out of the military and went back into theater and what drew that through line for me is the teamwork, the structure, the knowing that as part of this team you have a specific function and that you are as part of your function you're serving the greater good of that team. And so I think that there is a huge commonality within theater to draw that into the veteran community and part of why that's necessary and this is where I wanna piggyback on the tail end of this last discussion is that all too often amongst my fellow veterans what I hear is that when we do these programs it's always framed in the terms of let me help you, let me help you, let me help you. And the fact is is that most people that sign up in this all volunteer army sign up to serve, sign up because they want to fulfill a valuable function. And so when they leave the military and they go into the civilian world and they're experiencing this cognitive dissonance that I'm in this structured world where I have this specific function and I'm serving this value now suddenly I'm in a world that has no structure, a world where I'm in a way functionless and now not only do I maybe not see my value but people are telling me that I don't have that value because they have to help me. And so my question then is can we reframe this in a way where it's not about helping the veteran but rather it's about the veteran helping to teach us and helping to teach the community and helping to bridge the gap of communication between the military and the community. So that's all I have to say, thanks. Yes, did you have a comment? I thought I saw your hand up. No, oh sorry, I've got a couple. Madison and then Bill, yeah. Hi, Madison Cario. Gonna jump right on that bandwagon because what I was thinking and what I was writing, responding to you and to your note about art and healing and being careful. And one of the roles that I think that art and artists have always done is not so much with the goal to heal but is to make the invisible visible, right? Which is what you're talking about. So it's on some level so much simpler. What we do is we, and there might be other journeys but we're putting things on stage and you can see now, right? There's a face and it's not, like there's not one veteran. Like there's no veteran culture but you can go like, oh, like I tell you when I stand up and I tell people I'm a veteran, they're like, huh, I never would have thought that. Or I tell them I'm an artist. Oh yeah, I kind of can see that because of the hair, you know, but there's lots of stories, right? We all contain these invisible stories. They're gendered stories. They're all kinds of stories and we share what we want to share when we feel comfortable or we're outed or whatever that journey is. So I think making the invisible visible is what we're doing. Healing can happen because of that. Empowerment can happen. And then we start getting some real equity in the conversation. Thank you. That's great. Is this on? Yeah. So first I just want to say the NEA had nothing to do with the salty language in that poem earlier so we're clearing that. Um. So a couple things. One of the things that having worked in the art sector for 20 years or so before I spent five years really working more in the areas where you guys are, it's a really difficult thing to separate out whether what we're doing is a focus on healing or what we're doing is more focus on what I was trained to think of which is let's examine the human experience in a way that allows us all to engage in a way so that we understand ourselves better and that we don't shy away from the things that were the subject of the beginning of the Western civilization where people came back from Peloponnesian wars and wrote about it and processed it together in a big amphitheater. And I think one of the things that's really interesting for me about the platforms that exist when you do bring people to these tables and aren't used to being there together is it creates a really unusual forum for what has really become a fragmented society to actually get around something together and it doesn't matter how you voted a couple months ago, you're all in it in the local community level and that's a really healthy thing. But I do want to touch in, we'll talk more about this tomorrow but because we're really immediately after the artist conversation here, I think there's two ways to be thinking of art-making in the setting that we're talking about especially if it has to do with trauma whether you're looking at it as a society or as a person who's going through some journey. They're not really diametrically opposed but there are different rules that take place depending on who you're talking to and what the purpose is. Sometimes it is about healing and if it is make sure you know that that's what it is and if that's the case, there are certain kinds of prompts and things that you do that can lead somebody on that journey that I definitely hear Marty has picked up on and I think other people who spend time who don't wanna, in the same way that in the military I've heard a lot of people talk about how there's something very bizarre about the fact that we're trained to run towards the bullet and I think we're trained in college to run towards the Samuel Beck and Eugene O'Neill trauma in a situation and that's not always the best thing for the person that you're engaging. But at the same time, I do think and I really respond strongly to what you were talking about sitting in a writing program for the past five years I honestly do believe that there's something about the wartime experience that shakes us loose from the coma that we can walk through life in this 21st century way that we live it that rattles the cage, makes you rethink things very deeply so that I know that a lot of the special operators who come through this writing program after having worked with playwrights who had gone through Brown, which I'm sure had a different kind of PTSD instilled but they have an unfair advantage at this work that we do and they do have something to teach us and I think that puts on its head and if we can recognize this this notion of voyeuristic window into their illness which can be really patronizing and really kind of shallow but if we recognize that they actually lived something that can tell us something about what a human being is then we're all having I think a better conversation. That's great. Colleen over here, yeah. I just wanted to say two things because we've been doing this work for over 23 years and when you talk about consistency I always ask the question to look back at your mission and our mission is connecting communities and the military is one of those communities not separating it out and looking at it differently and the other thing I'd like to include in the conversation is the notion of the military dependence because you didn't go through that service alone you went through it with your partners and your children and those who in the military know what canoe means you know, your parent is there and then the canoe is stable your parent leaves, the canoe is unstable so you figure out how to ride it by yourself then the canoe gets stable again and it was an ongoing cycle so I'd like us to also include dependence in this conversation as well. That's great. Is there a final comment? We're kind of wrapping up and I want to make sure everybody, yes. Did I see a hint? I'm sorry. Yeah, oh, Liz, yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead, Liz, yeah, great. I just didn't see you back there. Thank you. I didn't hear your name, you were introducing yourself as I walked in but I want to just say during this round of working with people I started thinking a lot about what was it that people were missing when they came back and these are my words, not theirs. Risk, purpose, and love and when I thought about that, I thought well that's why I'm addicted to risk, purpose, and love. That's why we do it over and over and over again, you know, we jump in again so I really think that and we are so fortunate to have that. All three of those things in combination so the other comment I wanted to just think about is do we open too many doors? I believe the artistic process and its fullness addresses that dilemma and this is why our training is critical and why our strategy is intact in our consistency and constancy because a person may fall apart and we heard, we heard, I thought what Victoria said and also the question, the play writer with the guy scuttling and making him uncomfortable, that's another way in which we've stepped over our liners. But the artistic process, if we're practicing it, lets us go back in and go back in and go back in, try it again, say it again, try it again. In our world I often say, I put people entirely in charge of what it is that they're saying and doing and talking about. Whether it's the military or old people or children in a hospital or people are amazing at what they will choose to say when they choose to say it but if this happens, I don't know that they've gone too far, it's that sometimes we're afraid to feel it, hold it, be with it. So the last comment I just wanna say about that is someone said to me, this man whose brother was a triplet amputee, he said, so Liz, I'm not gonna come see it unless you promise me something, somebody's healed. If I don't see somebody healed in your piece, I'm not coming. Does anybody get healed? And I said, Jim, give me 24 hours, I gotta go think about this, I don't know. I don't know and then I came back with exactly this thing about artistic process. I said, if you mean, do people get over it and they're done with it? No, no one will get healed. But if you think people may be seen living with it, partnering it, coming back to it, trying this way, well yes, actually, yes. So there's somewhere in your notes this question about the evolution of these things and how we handle that evolution that I think goes to your very important question about how we're working. I just wanna thank everyone. This was a great conversation and I think it launches us. We're gonna have a lot more opportunity both to hear from specific folks and then also to talk together as a large group so tomorrow we'll be quite full of that. And so, Jamie, do you have some next steps for us? That I do. So it is 5.45, we're on time, yay. And we're gonna go have dinner together, which is really exciting. And the place we're going is a short walk from here. It's about four blocks if I had to ballpark it. And Carl and David and Jane and the folks from NIFA are going to lead that party walking.