 and say, and then you have, you know, a new opportunity to start this, you don't have to finish work together, so they're actually workshopping in a festival setting to build an audience for whatever the next phase, and we're building a preview performance, so that's going to be more during these public later in the beginning of October. Can you speak a little bit more about how you're measuring that demand and innovation, like how do you, if your first martian's doing it after years in the bait and what was your criteria and how would you sort of measure it with the demand and innovation marketing for your company? Right, it's difficult to track, but it's been getting better over the, I mean, because of a test squad, it's been becoming a little bit better with tracking numbers and tracking numbers through Facebook's new tools for social marketing, which made me a little sick and sad to them, also, I'm really interested in saying how do you know what is being addressed and boosting things and all of that. It's been on an individual project basis as far as things are so new, and I'd like to find a way to build more data. One of the things that we do at the CSPA when we go to other festivals, the USLAB Festival, which I just did last year, we issued a survey to measure the impact of that festival, and some of the survey questions were, how did you feel today to the festival? Other responses were blue, red, yellow, magenta. So trying to measure emotion and non-financial forms. Well, I'm thinking about the airport now. Do they? Yeah, when you go through, how was your security check, you know, and you can tell us how your security check went. Right, right. So it's a whole different narrative than just feedback. They were also trying to come up with topics to, did you learn something new, did you meet someone new, did you have a new idea, or are you likely to act on that idea? So to the CSPA, CSPA have been working on new ways to evaluate things that isn't totally based on numbers or ethnicity or like participation of certain groups. So that's one way, for my projects, it's still so young, so I'm really responding to just the hardest that comes to me and how those particular shows are received, and how often those shows are able to go on to another platform, another level, national and international. I'd love to get back to how you meet your artists and stuff, but on the building of a network, the building of at least a technological network, I'd like to bring in Duncan if you're still there, Duncan. Yeah, I'm still here, Brian. Yeah, so if you've heard about Miranda and the building of her sort of network, it'd be great to jump in with what you've been doing and what you're trying to do with pop-up. So, okay, well, I'm sorry to interrupt, Duncan. I'm Brian, I'm gonna have to go right now. Sorry, I'm a little bit scrunch. No, no worries, thank you very much. I wish I could stay longer. Thank you, Daniel. Sorry, I wish I could join in longer. Is there gonna be another, is there gonna be recording of this the rest of the discussion that's gonna be able to review? We hope so, we're having some technical difficulties, I think, with the live stream, but hopefully the live stream is up and running again and we'll be recording, so I will. Okay, great, great. I can watch it later. And thank you very much for letting me participate. And if there's any way to share out some of the email addresses in case we can put some more questions out to any of the participants. Sure. Okay, thanks a lot. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, everybody. So this is Duncan Jamison, and Duncan together with his partner, Delo Barzima, is creating a company called Toppac. Do you wanna just explain briefly what that is, Duncan? Sure, I'll see. Okay, I'll just talk for a couple of minutes and give a very basic overview of the various threads that we're working on and then I'll try and show a few materials and screenshots that are related to these through Google Plus, if that actually works. Great. So just to give a summary, last year my partner, Dada Kashi, and I set up TAPF, which stands for Theater and Performance Across Cultures. And that's an Anglo-Polish, non-profit organization that brings together a series of projects we were already working on for several years. And the company's core aim is essentially to support and to promote intercultural communication and exchanges of perspectives in the fields of theater drama and performance. Our company model is something that's still evolving, but at the moment it's focused around an online platform that's just about to launch. So we're not currently producing performance work, although that was our initial background, but rather we're working to create a community hub that aims to help practitioners and researchers network directly with each other, even if they work primarily in different languages. So I'll just talk a bit more about this cross-culture and multilingual networking through the length of a couple of projects that we're working on. The first is called Polish Theater Perspectives, or BTP for short. This is a project that's mainly in English, but there are some bilingual and some Polish components. And its purpose is to bring together Polish and internationally-based artists and researchers in investigating a range of theater performance practices. It's always been made for quite a while due to some general problems that are originally institutional sponsored, but it's actually launching next month. So in about three weeks in mid-October, there will be a new open-access peer-review journal, a set of companion books, audio-visual and documents collections, and they will all be published in English, and they'll be about online and in print. And so from the launch in a couple of weeks, there'll be a mix of interviews, articles, photographic essays, working notes, scripts and film documentation. And we've tried to work really closely with practitioners in Poland to produce those as well as with academics that have been translated for the first time. In the first titles cover contemporary directing, performing and devising in Poland, with a focus on practitioners like Krzysztof Alikowski, Christian Lübber and several companies from their Gerdinice advance, where those are some things we're covering in the first few issues. So all this will be online next month and you'll be able to get it at ptpjournal.org. So that's my shameless plug for that. And then the second and our main project is what Burma's referring to, and that's the Fisher Performance Across Proctors Network or the TAPAC network. That's a much broader initiative and that's really our focus in terms of development from as of about a year and a half ago, right through to 2015, because we're working through a series of online modules that kind of will bring increased functionality as after the beta version launches later this year. So this network is both an e-publishing platform for us, for B2B, and for other independent or nonprofit publishers. And it's also a multi-lingual community hub. So some of the features are that it enables users to curate personal and organizational profiles online, which are shared within the network and publicly, so they'll be visible by Google Searchers and so on. And we've got some graphic designers that we had to help with the design so that it's really easy to be produced and more enabled. And we hope that it will be like a showcase for companies working in various languages. You'll also be able to tag the profiles quite extensively. And they use a set of control book categories about very different languages so that many key elements in supporting the worker can be understood in a range of languages. And they use specialist translation rather than automated translation where people translate and so on. You can upload projects that you're working on, so details of performances and technical information about performances so that they can be essentially scouted by producers and so on. My brother works as a producer at The Barbeque and one of the things that he does is kind of use particular networks and channels to try to find new work and so on. So that's something else that I'm having. And there'll be a discussion hub where you can participate in discussions and have posts translated in context as well by the community. And you'll also be able to share resources on teaching, training and research and several other features. Basically, this project comes from, of course, a strong desire from us and from many of our colleagues that we've been working with over the last few years to be able to interact directly with colleagues from different regions. And it also comes out our experience of working on PTP's publishing series and all the specific situations of cross-cultural exchange that came up in our work and we wanted to try to find a way to practically address them. So a lot of the resources that we've been building or creating the journal with, we're gonna make available for free on the site. So things like databases of photographers and filmmakers because this one of the things that we built up was when we were working to create kind of film publications and so on. There's a huge amount of films of published data work that have been created in the last decade or so, professionally produced with English subtitles because they normally send us showcases to showcase reals to this as a board to try and get this published work abroad. But they're actually available if someone wants to make them available. So we're including a database of all these kinds of things on the site so that you can explore if you're creating an out-your-own application, you can start looking for photos and this kind of thing. The network is specifically optimized for digital performance so it's got some very advanced translation features that we believe are being made available for the first time on any platform in academia, in cultural and in humanities. So we're sure that we have a number of tech partners including some digital humanities institutes in the UK so they're quite excited about the cross-cultural aspects of it. So there'll be various different ways that users can communicate with their peers internationally. In terms of the organizations and the structure and funding, we're working with several partners and sponsors so that Richard Goff and the sense of performance research in Wales are the Grotowski Institute where we've been working on for a Rosebrook College drama store in London and the Polish National Theatre Institute in Warsaw in a kind of consortium to make available the widest range of free resources that we can. We're supporting this with individual funding programs and partnerships, but we're also supporting it through unpaved work and by making it available for purchase, certain electronic and print publications. So I guess it's what we do with a freemium model where there's as much free content and activity as we can make available. And that's supported by revenues from the premium content like certain films and so on that we need to get professional producers in. And so that will help us be less dependent on external institutions. Yeah, I'm just going to ask you a quick question. It's really an amazing model. I just want to make it clear to like one of the things that I think the key part is about, but also is a way to bring people together to get to know each other. And that's kind of what this session is about, why we're having so many kind of presentations happening. But what's really amazing about Dunkin and Adela are creating with this online version is the ways in which our access to people and to knowledge and practitioners is really developing via the web. So Miranda's talking about this kind of tension between love and hate relationship with Facebook data. And I know Kate earlier was mentioning the love and hate of Google, but Google's allowing us to work this better than Skype or others that's at the moment, yeah. And I know that for me, I was able to go to Poland and go to the Grotowski Institute because of finding out about these things online. And I think you were able to go and visit Kate because of being able to get emails from the Institute and being able to meet online. And so this core kind of global, we talk about it a lot obviously in our world now, but I just wanna remind us how much it does really influence our everyday practice today and the ways in which we're able to get together in rooms and share. And so it's quite an amazing organization that Dunkin and Adela are gonna be putting live very soon, what is it, in about six months? Yeah, the first part of it is launching in three weeks, the publishing platform, and then we've gradually, by the end of this year, the networking module will be online and then that will be bilingual, it'll be English and Polish, fully bilingual in the beta version, and then Spanish and Portuguese are gonna be added through next year. So if you keep an eye on this, if you keep an eye on itobyjournal.org and fatbacknetwork.org, then there'll be news about that kind of, has up next month. But we'll be kind of testing. And we'd like to get as much user feedback as possible, so if anyone wants to sign in and try it, then that would be great. So far we've been talking to a lot of fit practitioners and researchers and producers and so on to try and get a sense of user requirements and where those things meet. And also, like Brian said, in terms of facilitating contact, one of the key things the platform does is tries to do that directly, to facilitate animated exchanges between people. So one of the features is that when you search for, when you do a search on the site for different work or profiles or this kind of thing, you can immediately filter it by working languages. There's one of the things that we noticed when we were editing a journal is a lot of the time, but just to give an example, it was an American researcher who was trying to access and get contact with a specialist in Russian theater in Warsaw. And they thought they needed to find a translator to do that and they couldn't find anyone who's suitable. But actually it turned out, when they got speaking, they both, they had Spanish as a third language. So they would have been able to contact each other directly through that. So one of the things that the network does is, it highlights your working languages and you're immediately able to kind of filter down to what you connect. That's fantastic. I'm just gonna add in another voice here. On the notion of feedback that you brought up a couple of times and obviously that Miranda's trying to get the feedback on demand and innovation is a full spirit company from San Francisco. We have Ben Yalom and Deborah here who are gonna talk about their feedback model and that they've been working on as a very different voice with their, most recent last two performances, correct? Yeah, well, just what I would say. First of all, it's really just fascinating, fascinating conversation. What we've just talked about is really a different year and a different shift. Sure. It's interesting. Yes. We're answering things. It's all the same. So changing gears a little bit. I'm gonna provide a little bit of context for this last, most recent series and then of course I'm going to detail about what we're talking about for feedback. But just for some context, so we run full scary theater. We're on top of around 15 years basically oriented deeply rooted in few points both from the Oberks School and the Oberleys School Suzuki, I mean, Pure City Company, some Rickowski work, I mean, Chris B. Huang. And essentially what we've done is sort of a prolonged workshop model which is over the last 14 years bringing in master teachers from all these places to train us and to open up to a community. We would love to have a more centered ongoing practice and we would continually try to push that agenda forward. But one of the things we do for the field is we have a festival every two to three years called Pure Factory which is specifically focused on top of here. Based in San Francisco, series of theaters that we rent, borrow, we can switch in the theater art total complex. They're now four dendies in that space. We can get all of them for every period of time and sort of explode with stuff. So, yesterday there were people who performed there, you performed there, or they'll perform there. I was in the theater, you were in for a year. There you go. Okay. Do you want to say anything? Yeah? I performed there. Yeah, you did. You did. And we had, let's go spread it, let's go spread it. Thank you. We're going to make Nancy come this year. We decided to direct her. Actually, great story. The second festival that we had, Brian and all you just crashed the festival, basically. We had an application process. We were done. We were programing, they contacted us and we're coming to your festival. We're going to put it on our show. We can either do it in the lobby or you can put it on stage. Which was great. But one of the questions that has always been coming up through this festival is how do we textualize it to the audience? How do we engage an audience in conversation about it? And then how do we, as a whole bunch of artists who come from all around the world, how do we be in the same place for a couple of weeks, how do we actually discuss the work and give each other feedback? Because I think it's sort of endemic in the larger theater world that we sort of see things and you all have a bigger presence and say what you thought about it. And the dialogue on how the world tends to be a lot better with it, but they're still, it's a great challenge to figure out how do we have an honest dialogue about the work that's useful. One second, Ben. Can you guys virtually hear, Ben? Is he loud enough? It's a bit gobbled. Okay. Yes, it's a little bit better, yeah. Well, I list a little bit. I'll try not to. So, specifically when it came out of our festival in 2011, was there a number of questions? One thing about the festival is that we do main stage shows and we always have a lot of work in progress work, so I'm excited to talk to Miranda about that as well, but so about half of the... Miranda, Miranda, Miranda. Did you say Miranda or Miranda? Miranda, Miranda. So about half of the works that are shown or about half of the evenings are dedicated to works in progress and we'll have different companies on the same bill showing the works and having conversations about it. And over the years we found out that that's a lot of the most exciting work and a lot of the buzz around the festival comes from that. It certainly carries the same amount of weight and energy that the main stage shows too. So, 2013 this year we, one, just didn't have the funding to put on a full-scale festival and we thought what's the most important thing we can do to continue the momentum and to reach out and help the community. And Debora's been telling me, saying 30 years, would you just show me 10 minutes of great work? Show me 10 minutes of something great. So we decided what we would do was post a series, create a series that was specifically about works and progress and we called it factory parts. With the hopeful intent that some of these shows might make it into the fury factory or not but there's certainly a possible pathway there. And we just focused on works and progress. We had 10 companies over a two week period in July. And instead of just making it a, hey, we're gonna give you some space in a theater, come and show us your stuff and then we can have audience feedback session afterwards. We wanted to think about what the framework was and make it a little bit more useful. And I know that we haven't found any answer if there is an answer, but some of the components that we put in place this year, I think we're very helpful. One of the key things, we're just gonna talk about the feedback specifically. But one of the things that we required was that any participating company be committed to being engaged in the feedback process. So specifically everything you have to go see other shows and at the end, there's a round table of all the companies and you had to commit to being present at that round table for a month, which where we'll talk about the results of that. I just want to, before we jump in, just two things to add. One is the other extension of this factory parts development program is we've got a bit of grant money from a local foundation in the Oakland called the Reynon Foundation. Great. To help take some of those works and continue their development. Possibly again going towards the period of fact possibly not. But to see, so we selected the works A that we were most interested in aesthetically, questions they're asking, but also the ones that we felt the benefit most from the resources we had to provide, which are small, but some. Some of these companies already sort of had those resources in place. So just trying to think about how to take something along even if it's not one of our case-care projects. And the second thing is curing factories happening in July 2014, applications will be online at fullsphere.org next week. Please come. Same as the production. You're the host. So that contextualizes why we do curing factories at the Festival of Ensemble Theater. One of the things we've been talking about many, many of us have been talking about is being a relationship with each other as peers, being a relationship with our audience. And that's really what we, why we created the factory parts work in progress series. And what we were interested in. One is, we recognize with the recession that we were having and the funding, our belt being tightening over and over again over the last few years. The thing to do is to reach out horizontally and grab your mates and raise everybody up. John was talking about this yesterday. It really is the only way we've been surviving in San Francisco. And now we're flourishing more, but this really has affected our work. It's affected how we make work. And those of us who focus primarily as being ensemble members of a company or in a group, we have this tremendous resource of creativity and resiliency. And so the way that we responded was many ways. But one way is, as I said, working horizontally and making everyone's work better and exposing the San Francisco Bay Area audiences to more work at once so that they understand a little bit more about what we are doing. And it kind of ups the ante and the education for everyone. And that's what's so exciting about the Works in Progress series. The other thing is just people need more places to create work, as we've all been saying. That's what's happening over on this. What's happening here. So that's what we're doing. We're giving people the venue, you say, just come up with 10 minutes. We know you've got that idea and you haven't had the ability to do it. It was a co-producerial model. So that means they're putting in a little money, we're putting in a little money and hopefully nobody's gonna lose anything. So that's a pretty good place to kind of go and say, okay, we can all kind of get out of this without losing too much skin off our nose. And then we gained so much. We gave the community, we gave relationships and the network game. So the thing that I want to talk about specifically was a three tier feedback model that we created to characterize the participation in factory parts, which involve peer reviewed. So we had a peer review form and I can pass that around, actually. We created a panel of a couple of other folks who were interested in this feedback. And they're very simple, accessible questions. But one thing I want to propagate, support is that we become our own critics because we need more critics and we need, so I think that we should be our, we are our own best critics for Anselmo Theater. We know it best. And so often critics are, they don't know how to characterize what we're doing. They don't know how to define what we're doing. We want to do, we had a lot of critics involved in this process from beginning to end of our two week process of the factory parts, but then also to encourage each of us to be critics. So everybody, at least one person in every company and there were 10 from all over the nation were required to review the two other programs. There were three programs. So you literally ended up with a packet from your peers of what they thought. Okay, so that was, and why I wanted to comment on that, which is, this was a choice of what the mechanism for that feedback was. We wanted to use a different mechanism. One of the things about this mechanism, which is written feedback, was sort of borrowing from a writing workshop model, which is to say, we don't want to sit and have a conversation and you can tell me what you like and didn't like, even within the structure of like, oh, there's no more feedback on all of this. And it's like, here, you just write, tell me what you actually think. Absolutely, yeah, you know, very transparent. So I'm gonna tell you what I think, and here it is, and you don't have to respond. You can just go take it, and it's an 80 to a full day. Yeah, and I'll probably never have a conversation with you about that. It's just, here's my gift to you, you know? And with that, with that, with that, you know, humble gift being given, yeah? And so, and then it also requires everybody to see everybody's stuff, that's good, you know? And then, when we do it again, to think we will, you know, I've, and if you are interested in that, and please, for any of that, if you're interested, just let me know when I can, you know, you know, very specific stuff. But the online form was good, too. We had so much paper at, you know, it seems funny in the aftermath of it. Why didn't we just also have that online? Anyway, so that's one more recommendation if you're interested, make it accessible. And the second tier was the audience response. Normally known as the talk back, but I wanted to rename it as an audience response. I'm very interested in the audience and performer responsibility to each other. If we have one, what is it? I'm gonna have a conversation about that yesterday. I think it was very fruitful. This audience response happened on the third night. There were three nights, so the final night of your work in progress, what you felt, maybe that you had a little, had it under your belt a little better, and we're ready to, you know, face your audience. The other part about this that was so fulfilling was that we paired with the LMDA, which is the literary managers and dramaturgs association. So there was an opportunity for every work in progress in development, whether it's 10 minutes or 40 minutes or 30 minutes. And to pair with the dramaturg, come to your rehearsals, shape that conversation in any way you like, and then that dramaturg led your audience response session. And the audience response session, because we had three or four performances, was only 10 minutes. And let me tell you something, that 10 minutes was so charged, people got really excited about participating. And it was timed very clearly and because it was led by a dramaturg who was fresh into the mix, who arrives on stage, it had like a freshness and an energy that really, really invited people to participate. Because we all know what it's like when we, we just hear the, you know, pin drop and you know, we kind of, you know, it was really awkward and we went to the bathroom. So the other thing that we did is structuring it, made the time very clear, we let it by a dramaturg and then we also, the first thing we had everybody do was simply popcorn their ideas and impressions. So removing the idea of value, what's good, what's bad, anything like that, and just coming up with impressions. So people are just generated to start articulating verbally, you know, what they saw. You know, I was impressed when the lights went out at that moment and everybody screamed, whatever it was, people can start to say, say things. And then the dramaturg took it over. The, so that was the second tier of the feedback model. The third was the round table discussion which, as Ben mentioned, was required, we made it a requirement and that was great because then we had everybody represented at the end of a 2B process and we had a three hour session together with the idea of, and I'll just say our goals and actions really quickly for you, to build and engage the community, to reflect on the performance theories and give feedback for future festivals, to grow as artists through peer feedback and reflection, and our actions to share thoughts and ideas generously, to hold each other to the high standards we set for ourselves, to honor each other's work by speaking frankly, to articulate what's working and what isn't, to model and actively seek the sort of discussions that we most want to have and to take responsibility for our own experience. Now this in general, it characterized the work by opening it up this way and it really made people feel that they could share and honest and it also, other notes were added to this and it was amended even on that day. So it became a very democratic way to, we were talking about yesterday to actually agree on the process before the process begins and there's an empowerment in the room that occurs with that. And then the process, and I can email this to people later, was a process of my solo experience of factory parts, this performance series, be I only, maybe I was a dramaturg, maybe I was a director, maybe I just am a critic, maybe I was a performer. So what was my performance, my experience and we had exercises that would sort of slough the value of all that, stuff that we carried around with us and then duo communication, four person communication, eight person communication and then group communication. So the whole thing unfolds from the personal to the group which in itself is kind of a process of a model of the way we make theater and taking that, so taking models of how we make theater and translating that to how we discuss and communicate with each other as we reflect upon our process of making theater and development. So. Can I just clarify, when you're talking about reaching out horizontally to your fellows, to your colleagues, colleagues in San Francisco Bay, is it local, is it national, is it international, who are you reaching out to, who are your colleagues? Yes, is the answer. Yeah, I mean we have created in San Francisco, part of that reaching out locally is we created a San Francisco Bay area ensemble consortium which is under the auspices of the net, the network ensemble theater, so that we can do that. So we give each other tickets to our shows, we meet monthly, we talk about creative ways that we want to work together to share resources and support each other. Going far, it's actually not under the auspices of net, but the members have to do all the next, I mean the net measures, right? But point being, anyone who can do this here, I mean you kind of already knew who you are. Yeah, I've been there before. Warren said, when the email went out about tech, do you have tech information? Well, I have photos in the process, and I was like, this comes up exactly like, what word of the year is going to look like, so we're going to show it up there. Yeah, so the local, that's an example of what we're doing, the national, is really more what we've been doing for Fury Factory, and also Factory Cards, because that was a national, it's what we had people in room from all over the nation. So, who really can now connect, just in the way that we're connecting with our mates in Poland and France, and it's just a, I mean, if Ben lives in Santa Monica and I live in San Francisco and we're the directors of this company, we have to make this happen. So, valuing the online, the technical, how do we make that happen, and then also valuing the time we spend in the room together, so important. Yeah, so, if you have more interest in the specifics of the round table discussion and how that was led, and if you're exercising things, please don't hesitate to contact me under Dora Eliezer, and thank you for your attention. The one thing that I would add to this is, again, the mechanisms for any of these items are, they're not already very particularly decided in any way, but I think the thing that we found was valuable, and again, not final, but was to, in standing sort of saying, yeah, we're gonna have feedback, and that becomes this blanket thing, it's like the conversation can be with audience or with peers or what. We've really tried to say, well, what are the levels that we want feedback at? And so, create the appropriate opportunity for audiences, create the appropriate opportunity for peer artists, in the sense of, well, peers, but I just put on something and I want you to tell me about it. And then the third level around people had elements in that, and it also was sort of the meta level, like what are we doing once we're undertaking this festival of the field, et cetera, so we can have a kind of conversation with having this room last couple of days, and I think that we often get stuck on, we're gonna tell you what we thought about your show, which is helpful, but it's only one part of it. So just trying to create the structure to encourage this larger data. Brian, sorry, it's Ollie, it's down here. Just wanted to say, I'm sorry I didn't catch your names with the sound quality of the two people just speaking, but I just wanted to ask if you've come across the Bee Festival in Birmingham in the, you know, in the... The Bee Festival. No, but can we come? Right here. It's the Festival in Birmingham, the festival runs along the same lines as you were just outlying for the factory parts. It's got the Birmingham European Theater Festival, or Bee Fest, Bee E Fest, and for the last four, five years? Four years. Four years, they've been running, set up by a bunch of young theater makers in Birmingham. It's a fantastic festival. They invite applicants from all over Europe to present new work and work in development. People send their footage of their show and blah blah, but they choose four shows per night for five nights, and you have half an hour. There's a working part now, working progress, whatever you get, and the feedback system is very similar. Every audience member has a feedback card for the night. Then the next day, all the artists are required to be present to have the feedback on the shows from the night before. You receive your peer feedback and the audience feedback in a written form later on, and the festival sets itself up to be a way for new work and young companies to present their work to a public and to producers, but they'll be a very interesting panel for you to see. It's just much more of a style, but they're always looking to make things with other people. Very nice, guys. We went as a theater company two years ago and had a fantastic experience. Because we, as a theater company, were finding it difficult to find people that would support us and show our work, and they were really great. Yeah, just to say, look, they're really good guys. It's a very interesting festival, very similar principles by the sound of it, from what you say. The festival is called Factory Parts. Is that correct? Did you hear that correct thing? The performance series that we did last summer, which was just works in progress, was called Factory Parts. Our bigger festival, which is coming again in July, is called the Fury Factory Festival of Ensemble Theater. Our company is Fool's Fury, so we're trying to keep it all in a very narrow framework. Yes. Applications and information, Fool's Fury.org. We're a woman called Deborah involved in your work. Deborah? Yes? Yes, sir. I'm Deora. Oh, we've actually exchanged files in the past. We have. That's true. Yeah, thank you. I've been interested in your center for a long time. So I'm... So we're coming next month. We're going to be waiting for us. Yes, we'll be knocking on your door very soon. Yeah, so, I mean, as much as Ben preffes this sort of, his shift of gears, I mean, for me, there's a lot of really similar threads throughout all of these conversations. I'm really, really aware that this session has been about kind of discreet presentation. So I would love to hear from other voices or things that stand out to you or things that you want to speak to, if there's anything that really grabbed you from these kind of presentations or questions that you have about how your company can, or networks that you're running, can link in or resources that you have. One of the things that stands out for me is the fact that we all have resources. And sometimes we overlook them. Yeah, like John's saying, what Kate and all we are providing is this resource, this amazing land, this amazing space that they're working so hard to take care of. And that's something that can be overlooked. Although, actually, that's only palatable. Oh, but it's not just commenting on it, it's really important that we have a complex set of resources. It's not just that each one of us has a thing, that when we really look at ourselves, we realize we have an enormous complexity of things that we cannot fill. And it's not so much saying, hey, this is what I've got. It's opening, it seems to me to be opening oneself up to say, why don't you ask me for anything? And if I don't think I can offer it to you, I'll say no. Which is like what you were saying about Brisbane. Absolutely. Because Kate and all of them are doing something magnificent because they kind of say, we've got this range of stuff. How can we find various ways for people to engage with them as venue, as people who are, you know, they're in their 30s, but you have an artistic experience so younger companies are looking up to you as a company with an aesthetic. So part of that is not saying, here's my product, I sell it, whether for money or for just for the will, but also saying, I don't know what I've got. You know, you tell me what you might offer me. And if I don't think I can give it to you, I'll say no. So I think there's a real complexity of resource that moves beyond the obvious. Oh, absolutely, that's definitely it. I wanted to talk a little bit. I've got this house in San Francisco. We went, I mean, we stumbled onto this kind of amazing place in Burma, in San Francisco. When I moved in there, I was living with a few other artists and we used to often sometimes look at people, we used to look at it. And recently, maybe two years ago, I actually once these other artists had moved out and I was about to keep living with three people who weren't artists. I decided to try to revive that as a regular thing that we go on. So we had a couple of months to make up a party. And I loosely curate, which is to say, if someone wants to do something, I'll say yes. Or they might want to do some performances. Sometimes it's filmed. Sometimes someone will want to take the whole evening with the longer projects. It's usually working in projects. We encourage people to do stuff they don't have any other value for. It's weird, it felt very un-deliberate on my part and it's actually become this really interesting thing. We can have, we usually have probably 60 to 100 people there. And so you don't know where music came from. I don't know them, except that I started to see them appearing time after time. But it's kind of what you're talking about. I know we had this space, I didn't really think about it as a performance space. I also like to cook. I like wine. I mean, sure, all these things work. I'll start and then check it out. It's actually for quite a number of people who come, they really talk to me a lot about how it's turned into this really important alternate economy. I don't deal with money. I ask for 10 bucks from everyone. I mean, so would you please be like the other people? Yes. The other thing that's really interesting about it is that as it grows, I'm finding myself becoming more of a hub. Especially in terms of performance, because also people I know that come are like the Curator of Public Programming yet as a moment or someone at the Performance Art Institute. So I'm finding that it's also placing me as someone who's now becoming Curator of Performance. And without dealing with money yet, I'm now calling someone and saying, I've got this interesting artist who I'm programming up there. So I'd love to get a company with you sometime, because on one hand, the next logical step for what this is would be what you're doing. On the other hand, what I really like about this is that the scale is tiny. And it's actually having tremendous impacts on the lives of quite a small number of people, and they don't want to risk that. So it's a really interesting process. There's also, I think, maybe something really important here that speaks to a question that you as buying in the kind of original materials that went out, which is, how can a robust interfaces with the work of relationships perhaps be fostered between the bigger, more stable and institutional structures and the small, mobile changing. And I think that what Michael's speaking to is that, is something which works kind of accidentally from a certain kind of radical generosity of, hey, this house works as an interesting space, and we'll see what happens at the lobbyist. And I do remember the first time he said, I think we've got 200 people here. I don't know how many people are there. And it's really surprising the first time he filled up that much with strangers. And then that becoming that fostering relationships places like, I said, Roman, and more than maybe the performance audience to do exactly that kind of organic nurturance of these institutional, positive, and scarce. Yeah, because people, I mean, there are people who start to look to me to provide content, you know, and I haven't checked it in so far. I don't know what you're talking about. I thought that. I have a, just to, I didn't mean that this anyway, but we're talking about resources, a couple of things that I just wanted to throw out there. One is that I teach at Bob Rowe's very close to here. It's a all-world private school in New York. And I've been there for six years, and one of the very first things that I recognize when I walk up to that campus is that there is an enormous load of resources that is very much walled off in the way that owning a class, people, except to wall off their things. However, there is within that, you know, a group of artists and educators who are interested in actually sharing with the community. And the school is becoming, of course, more as they delve into 21st century learning and blah, blah, blah, extending the four walls or pushing the four walls and engaging more globally and all that sort of thing. So, which is to say that for the last year, I think it's been, and maybe even a little bit before that, there are people in the room who we've had some contact with. We've been opening up the spaces to host either workshops or rehearsals, development rehearsals, whatever, and so that's a resource that is, it takes some work on the part of basically me and my colleague in terms of trying to figure out scheduling and that sort of thing, but it's a resource that's available that I want to put out there and share. And the side of that, the other side of that, is that we would ask for some kind of bargaining, not in the sense of, I mean, no money would be exchanged, but you might have a, you might come in and teach a class, or you might, I don't know, I'll leave that open to what you might do. The other thing that is also come of that is a workshop that I presented that a number of people were at and then out of that we decided it was basically a bunch of teachers ended up being the ones who were in the room for the most part and we realized we're all teachers and teachers, teaching is a very isolating kind of activity, I think, when you're holding space for, especially for younger people, but even for, when you're the person who has some kind of knowledge and sometimes other people who don't have that knowledge can be isolated. So we decided to keep an ongoing collective of teachers and I feel like there's not really anybody in this room who's not a teacher on some level. And so we're, you know, we're just at this point, we're just meeting once a month, but I'd also like to throw that out. And the idea is really, it's a rotating leadership whoever wants to take on the leadership for that month as well to do so. And it's there for you to engage in questions you're interested in, to try out new exercises, to do as you. That's wonderful, go ahead. I don't know, I have one thing to say it's actually hard getting back to an earlier part of the conversation, but I think it's worth saying, I'm the least qualified person on the planet to talk about technology in any form. Like, don't understand it, but it keeps coming up how much things look, all the things that make us cringe, make us go. And I just felt the need to state the obvious that I've been able to take five years to develop a project in a really slow way with international collaborators because of technologies like this, but also thanks to the brilliance of things like Indiegogo, and in my case, which is sort of like a partnership for the other one, Kickstarter. And in case you guys don't know, Indiegogo has a relationship with an organization called Fractured Atlas out of New York, which is my fiscal sponsor, I found them in Pennsylvania and Ryan, recommended them. And they make it really easy to set up your own thing and do it in your own way and get people to donate money tax-aductively. And it's been a huge gift because it has allowed a lot of time to develop New York without a lot of the pressures that come with infrastructure. And also because I feel like I'm too small to get a lot of infrastructure. I mean, I'm not that prosperous now, but it's taken a long time to even get on the map and off the map, that's not an option. Can I ask you a question about this? So is it functioning kind of like the tech version of the umbrella institution? In other words, that it becomes a container through which you can make funds, you can embed it. Yeah, I mean, I think literally the umbrella, that's why people donate money to fractured apps and then they take some percentage of the cash and they make it. So for those of you who don't know, Ivana actually spent time for a summer month, right? Two weeks workshop at Kate and Ollie's place and Matt Christoper, Severson, there who has been her colleague that she's been dealing with online, virtually creating a piece for five years. He's as a sort of director, dramaturg, to her as a playwright, producer, actor. Two weeks together, two weeks or a month together, you're literally physically in the same town and the rest of it is fully embedded. But I think on what Lisa was saying, is that it's an excellent kind of place to just pause as we set up for a lunch, for those who want to go to lunch and move on into the artists and academics session for today. And I want to just thank Kate and Ollie and Duncan so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure, thank you. And we will catch up soon, for sure. Yeah, and John and Lada, nice to see you. Virtually. Hi. I'm fine. So again, as we switch gears, I'm going to be moderating the next session and I've got to make some Google Hangout calls. The sandwiches are in the front. The sandwiches are in the front. If for those of you who want to head out, if you don't remember the places to eat or you need to know where to eat, please do. Thanks. Thanks, Pran. Thank you. Hey, thanks. John and Lada. Hi. Hi. Hi, they are. Oh, Gina wants to say hi. Hey, Gina. Hi, boys. And then? Hi. I want to see you. Hi. It's me again, really fast. I just thought I should say hi to Facebook, but I didn't tell you. You can't tell me that. Yeah, okay. That's fine. You have two. Hi. I have a doctor to go to. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. So. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I love you, man. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you too. I don't cry about being single or just being pretty. Look at that, I love you. I was the most love. You are too short. I was the most love. I can't even versions. Oh, well that's the question. Hey, yeah. Just quick. I have some other things to teach. I haven't been able to make my comments. I don't know about this team. We're gonna have an annual event. We'll have a big event. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we have to go through a lot of things. He made you help. I'm going to vote again. Oh, I'm going to vote again. I'm going to vote again. I'm going to vote again. I'm going to vote again. I'm going to vote again. I'm going to vote again. Finally, What's going on? There's a website for this long. Oh. You know, I don't know where they're from. It's really great. It's a really great application. It's just a website. That's why I asked. That's why I asked. That's why I asked. That's why I asked. That's why I asked. That's why I asked. You know what you're doing? You know what you're doing? You know you're just going to go from there. Keep moving forward? You have just now been herb rover. You got a date? One of the live ones? The live ones. Who's the guy? We had some real technical problems. Oh, the sound was gone in 1999. Yeah, our sound, apparently, is broken. It's good to know that it's patched. So we're just, we're in the same room. There's a lot of people in the room. I was like, nobody's here. Oh, hello. Hello. How are you guys? I'm good. It's going, it's going very well. It's been a very successful time. We did work out five mornings. Out of the scramble and work, you know, you need to start, you got a place on top of it. Yeah. And I got there by that. It's very difficult. Let me see if I can get Chris an email or somebody at Catholic TV. I've never really contacted Chris because he's not picking up the Google Hangout. Oh, my phone? I'm walking me while, like, send me an email. Send me an email. I think it's about, I mean, I think that's so much with this conversation. I'm not going to email, but I'm going to send you an email. I'm going to send you an email. I'm going to send you an email. What does this mean? I'm going to just grab a sandwich. I'll be right back. I'll make sure you're projected on a sandwich. Central, sort of training workshop. Things that sustain. There's a lot of stuff going on. So that's a big problem. Yeah. And I realized I hadn't even mentioned that. I've been through several friends with written plays. Put on, right? And they're on their way to Broadway in this film. Like, that's quite easy to do in a way. Yes. Hard work. That's all right. That's all right. And I started sharing with Tina. Yes. I'm hoping to get my clients to help me. You're going to what? Well, I mean, so yeah. Two years ago. Last year. Last year. It was a Russian season. It was a huge kind of thing. Because it was very high quality. I'll be sure to be Russian. No. Do you want to see your $200? No. No. Wow. It's really old based on artists. I don't know if you know that. Yeah. It's not good. It's a really hard experience. But anyway. We can do. We can run a big movie. I need to do something. You have for yourself. So we can come back. Yeah. We need. We really got this. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. But. I think. if we can talk I'm going to be like. I'm going to be like. I'm going to be like. I'm going to be like. I think I'm going to be like I think. I think I'm going to be like. I think it will do that. Sorry. We don't have to think about. I think it's going to satisfy me. You have to study your website. I heard Mark have a lot of students. There's a lot there. I love your art here. See you later. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. 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I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. I think it's going to satisfy me. All right. All right. All right. I think that we've had a nice little break, I hope, given everybody a chance to get some sustenance and have a nice little back and forth in small groups, which is always important. We're going to move into about an hour-long conversation on the hyphen in between the artists and academics, which hopefully will continue some of the discussions we were just having in the organizational resource sharing, which Catherine brought up about how larger institutions can partner with smaller institutions. That may come up. We have Maya Murphy who's going to be giving a presentation. And we have Catherine who will be moderating. And we are joined by Ben Spots from New York. Ben, are you still there online? Yeah, I can hear you fine. Yeah, there you are. There we are. And so we're joined by Ben Spots, who has an urban research theater and just recently graduated with his PhD from CUNY. Correct, Ben? Yes, from CUNY. Ben, I'm just cooking down here to introduce myself really quickly. I'm Catherine. We met at APA. I'm a woman who had the big tray full of the fruit, and I gave you the plum. Down in the lobby at APA. Doesn't ring a bell? Oh, yes, yes. Yes. It's a great plum. Okay, so I know that Maya, where did you just go? Oh, there you are. I know that Maya Murphy has a presentation. I think the way that I would like to do this is I want to make this as conversational as possible. And so I want to begin with Maya and Maya's presentation. And then I want to move to some ideas that I have on the wall up there and maybe ask some pretty rapid fire questions in the hope that that will lead to a larger conversation. I think it was really important that Lisa Barr kind of raised this issue of probably nobody in here who doesn't do some kind of teaching. And so right away when we're talking about this word academics, we're getting into these territories, and I think maybe that's part of what we want to break down to in the conversation. And so, you know, and then there's a lot of people coming from all kinds of expertise about what will be back and forth between worlds of teaching, worlds of research, worlds of practice, worlds of making. You know, I think it probably touches most of us. So I really, you know, want to give people a chance to speak at some length, but I want to shift that back and forth between a lot of cross talk. And maybe also just change the energy a little bit and bring the small group talk into the bigger. So I'm going to let both Ben and Maya, I'd like you to introduce yourselves because you'll do a better job at it. Maybe talk a little bit about your backgrounds. And Maya, why don't you begin? And then maybe go right to your presentation and then we'll go to you. So I'm Maya, so nice to meet all of you this weekend or we'll see you again. I am an artist scholar. I basically have a background as a practitioner, but also for, I was involved, many of you heard from the weekend about Naropa University a master's program based in physically created new ensemble work. And I was the administrator for the inception of that program and therefore part of my role was helping the process of sort of equating studio and ensemble work into academic work, literally creating proposals saying this amount of studio work is equal to this amount of reading and paper writing, which seemed like a very absurd thing to do. And yet we all knew we had to do it. So from then on the one hand, I had this sort of administrative life and also this creative life. I began to become really interested in this idea of how do we express the value of our work. And so I just finished my PhD at UC San Diego and I'll be teaching at Spring at USC. And so, you know, I'm very interested in how they work together and really how perhaps scholarship can support the work of ensemble work and this kind of creative work that we're all doing here because I feel like there's a lot of ways that we don't talk to each other and we can. So I'd like to call this communicating the value of our embodied work, which perhaps is a philosophical project and that's one tangent of it. So the value of embodied knowledge, I believe, is implicit actually in the discussion of the value of collaborative work. So whenever we're removing or destabilizing more traditional sources of authority in the theater, so a singular director or an authoritative text, we make sure or agitate or redistribute authority within the creative process. So the body then often takes center stage in the training for and the performance of collaborative work across I believe many styles and traditions. So through re-envisioning agency in the collective work on the ensemble and locating that agency in bodies, collaborative artists are advocating for the body's ability to generate creativity and knowledge. And I think it's really hard actually to communicate this value beyond our creative communities. Practitioners are masters at doing this in our own studios. We use different techniques. We create language. We use metaphor. However, I think this value may be very difficult to communicate beyond the studio to audiences to funding sources to supporting institutions. So the issue, I believe, becomes very important and actually very practical when we're faced with what might be considered legitimate theater practices and structures and how notions of legitimacy actually affect the ability of collaborative artists to make work. And I believe that collaborative artists, we navigate this daily. And I propose that this problem at its base is actually due to a really deep anti-corporeal prejudice in Western philosophy. And so I'd like to open up this discussion about ways that we might be able to combat this at the intersection of arts and academia. And I think that good examples of this are actually emerging. I included Chris Salata's book. I'm welcome to be with us. Unfortunately, Chris isn't here to speak on this today. We seem to have lost him, but his most recent book that he came out with is The Unwritten Brutowski, which just came out from Rutledge this year. He also has chapters in both of the books on collective creation. One on the Raduta Company, which I spoke about briefly yesterday, which was one of the big models for Brutowski and a kind of intermediary piece between Stanislavsky and Brutowski and the other on the work center of Jersey Brutowski and Thomas Richards. That's Chris. Thank you very much. You're welcome. So I believe that his work is very interesting in this way, how scholarship might be able to uncover the value, help us articulate the value of our practices. I think also the emerging field of performance philosophy is very interesting and perhaps thinking is kind of worth. But first I'd like to further expose this problem, which is why is it so hard to talk about the body in Western philosophy? Can you slide, please? And you might say... You might say, Maya, we talk about the body in Western philosophy all the time, but then I would probably fumble around my words and say something very inarticulate and then just say, you know, really talk about the body. And so even Judith Butler, who has so much to say about the body in scholarship and who's written so much, she admitted that the, quote, vocational difficulty for those trained in philosophy always at some distance from corporeal matters is that they can invariably miss the body or worse, write against it, quote. So I suggest to you that it's hard to talk about the body because this dominant knowledge paradigm is so deeply rooted in language that it cannot comprehend embodiment and its value. And so I suggest that theater as an embodied practice actually has something to offer a new embodied and just a more logical knowledge and new body knowledge paradigm. Slide, please. And so I don't mean that philosophy should just kind of keep borrowing our practices and structures from metaphors, like people are like actors and life is like a stage. And I also don't mean just grafting philosophy on top of practices to show how practices are exemplifying these existing philosophical tendencies. I mean investigating our practices and excavating our philosophical principles that are founded on and born from embodiment. And I have an example from my own tradition, but first, you know, I wasn't familiar with John Ritten's workshop material, like the title of your material, Self with Others, right? And even just hearing that title to me, not only is ethical, I mean spoken to this, but to me it even points toward a real philosophical structure that's already embedded in the work that you're doing. So I'm interested in how do we excavate that to understand that as an actual philosophical structure rather than saying what kind of philosophy might apply to your work. So from my slide, please. I come from a Lococ tradition. And so, for instance, as many of you've done this kind of work, Lococ founded many of his after-training methods on the practice of identification. And so identification is when the actor takes something outside of herself. It may be a thing, a chair, an animal, or something imagined, like a blazing fire. And then she moves through a three-step process, and the steps are seeing, embodying, and applying. It's likely. So if the actor practices identification with a blazing forest fire in the studio, obviously it's not there, right? First, she would see it. She would, oh, wait, not there. First, she would see it. She would imagine what it looks like and how she may or may not be able to come into contact with it. What are the senses that are evoked from this kind of encounter? How can she approach how she limited? The second step, she would embody it. So she would take on the rhythms and the space and the dynamic of this forest fire that she sees in the studio in her imagination. And third, she would apply it. So in the case of theater, she might apply it to characterization, a fiery character. That's what we're all seeing, right? How might a scene have the same kind of rhythm of the fire she explored? So if Descartes' dictum of I think, therefore, I am enables a linguistically-based knowledge or philosophical foundation, Locox, an epistemological or knowledge-based dictum is I embody, therefore, I know. It's likely. So, man, what kind of philosophy might that enable? What are its limits? Its potentials on one level? I think this is akin to phenomenology. But how might it offer a different kind of richness by valuing not just first-person lived experience, but the possibilities of an embodied and imaginative encounter with the other as lived experience in one's own body? So this proposition, it brings the value of the body in creativity and in philosophy to the forefront. And it reconstructs this body as a generator and a conduit for value and meaning. So my publication then is how might we continue to find ways to reframe and communicate the value of our own embodied work outside of our fields? Thank you. I want to, can we bring can we bring a sort of semi-embodied bed back in? I want to just return to something later in the conversation but I don't want to forget about it so I put it on the wall which is this I think maybe implicit provocation that lies deep in what I hear Maya raising which is the very notion of having to talk about the body rather than do things through the body or the body being taught which is part of maybe the depth of the tension here. A thing which needs to be set out in front of you and analyzed being so perhaps essential to the academic project and that maybe being one of the roots of the problem so let's just kind of leave that up there. Ben, what I would really do, Ben do you tell me do you have a specific presentation that you want to make or do you want to be engaging in the flow of your conversation because there's a couple of ways I can go right now. Can you hear me? Yes. I'm wearing these big headphones I can hear you better with them. First of all, would you introduce yourself to everyone? Would you introduce yourself to everyone? Yes, I'm Ben Speck I have just finished a PhD at CUNY City University of New York and I've been teaching also there for several years and the dissertation which I'm now working on, I'm turning into a book is about embodied knowledge so that's what I would like to say something about and I also haven't been leading this project let's say called Urban Research Theatre for the last nine years starting in Poland, I've lived in Poland for two years and then back in New York City and it's been a variety of solo projects duo projects and ensemble projects I guess the one thing I would say about that already is that my scholarly project and my practical or artistic work have been largely separate there was not any frame in my doctoral program to actually explicitly introduce my own work and I ended up being grateful for that the two projects are parallel and I see a possibility for them to come together in the future but they are deeply related but actually also separate so that's something about the hyphen in my life but I have a few notes I don't have a formal presentation but I have a few notes that maybe I could begin why don't you begin with a few notes and then I think that what I'll try to do is kind of draw this back into this larger conversational frame so go ahead great yes academia the role of art and arts in academia certainly resource sharing which has been discussed and I was eavesdropping through the howl around on the previous session and listening to the discussion of resource sharing which is very important what I want to think about now and say a few things about is less about the practicalities of resource sharing it's very important of course the power and the funding and all these things that are associated with academia and how to distribute that and make that accessible and use that but what I want to think about now and kind of form my more concrete thinking is about the epistemology of academia the ways that academia deals with knowledge the systems and the techniques and the methods that the academy has developed for thinking about knowledge for producing knowledge for teaching knowledge for defining research for developing research methodologies these are all the things that I am really excited to apply to embodied practice I resonate with a lot of things that Maya said hello Maya for example the need to communicate the value of embodied practice the value of embodied knowledge and the point about the fundamental distance that philosophy has from the body even when it talks about the body and I am very much resonated with this what was just said by the moderator about having to this obligation to talk about the body as opposed to doing things through the body and that's where I want to ask my question today because I think that sometimes we think of the academic knowledge structures the epistemology of academia as being very tightly bound up with language and to some extent that's true I mean it's the circulation of essays and books it's the fundamental part of academia but academia is not just the circulation of text academia also involves as you were mentioning pedagogy which is at least for now mostly embodied and that is people are in the room together and academia now with all the video possibilities of multimedia possibilities it becomes possible that multimedia documents can also circulate almost as easily as text documents so those are two ways in which I think we shouldn't underestimate academic epistemologies by thinking that they are the same by equating them with with language and with discourse so my questions are about methodology and about pedagogy but maybe I've said enough about that we can return to those things I want to just offer a few little provocations three little provocations first provocation if we're going to talk about knowledge then I just wonder about the place of historical context for that knowledge and I think that sometimes I'm thinking about what Maya was saying about principles I'm also thinking about Robin Nelson's recent book about practices research where he basically says practices research is more about synchronic comparisons more about what's happening now than about any historical context so I want to push on that and say well what is the historical context for the knowledge that embodied practices produce or contain in terms of the value so okay that's provocation number one provocation number two is we're talking about art and academia the artist scholar and the word research is implicit there but I wonder at least for myself if sometimes the notion of art and all the associations that we have of art and art making and artistry are actually a little bit counterproductive or some of the ways that they can be counterproductive when we're trying to think about embodied knowledge about framing the value of our work in terms of knowledge I often think that we should be framing in terms of knowledge rather than making art and I think that that might be a provocative thing to say because aren't we looking for the knowledge in art but not necessarily I just think that the reason I said embodied practice before is because I think sometimes we actually are reducing what embodied practice is when we think of it only in terms of art and actually maybe knowledge and research are our intention with that idea of art particularly in terms of questions about who the audience is for the work that's being done so two good publications not three I combined two of them thank you so I want to take both what Ben's saying and what Maya's saying and some things I've been hearing and some things I know colleagues of mine are talking about and something that Scott Cragfett for those of you who were here yesterday spoke to really briefly because I think there is a web of intersections and maybe I'm creating a kind of a broad map for starting a conversation but I think there are some things that are getting excluded that are actually that at least in talking about the institution where she teaches brought up for me so we're talking about embodiment we're talking about knowledge we're throwing around the word epistemologies we're talking about writing about thinking through embodiment and what I think keeps getting excluded here are classroom practices and so that I think that as we're talking about artists in academia we are squeezing out of that framing all the many ways and many audiences for whom and with whom we teach and explore what we do and I think that this matters a historical place to take this from is again what Scott Cragfett was saying yesterday when he raised the issue of play as fundamental to collective creation and he alluded briefly back to something which is becoming central in the next book that we're working toward which was the role of women in classrooms working with children exploring play being at the roots of a lot of early collective creation and he mentioned the Semmum House Movement in the United States and the work of Neva Boyd and the Alice Fohlen coming out of that and everything that goes from there what he didn't mention was that something very similar happening in France happening with a woman named Suzanne Bing who was the lover of Jacques Coupot and actually seems to have been responsible for the pedagogies who raised your French mind and she got a lot of her ideas from working with some Montessori teachers so we're coming back to women progressive education childhood education and play and also working sometimes with impoverished or disenfranchised communities and then that becoming a source of ideas about creativity that can be taken into work with adults so I think we have a very complex network of who gets written in who gets discussed what is research what is an epistemology what language we use to talk about all of these things what the politics are where women fit into this what it means to be the person on the ground who does but doesn't write up theory and how you get written out of those histories so there's a lot in the room that comes back through the questions that Maya started with embodiment versus the written traces that we study and that become the tools of analysis but maybe you're not our only tools of analysis but are part of what sort of frames value in the academic world so that's Montessori I also put a bunch of questions up there because it comes back to the institutional stuff what are the possibilities of these interceptions between these different institutions of teaching practices we did and how do you experience that what are the obstacles in your lives what are the things you need to resist either in taking your research into a practical realm long practical research in the practical realm or the other way with your institutions how do you see the culture of those institutions or those relationships changing or not changing or what do you think we can do about it a lot of questions and I think I'd like to go around really fast and just begin to hear from you who is working inside of some kind of institution of teaching and creating artwork either outside or in that institution and finding it really rich who's liking that experience anybody can you say something to it the reason I find it rich is because of all of these questions because of the way in which they swirl around each other because of the challenge and I work at a women's institution which is primarily led by women so the challenge of languaging the work and finding a way to get it valued is both frustrating and also exciting it feels to me like something that on some really core level I've been dealing with since I was first asked to try and write my self into existence on a college level and my own feelings around isn't this kind of really patriarchal but then also how do we cast on this information all those things swirl in me so I find it rich in that way I find it easy or satisfying it's almost always the problem I just got done talking with my colleague about this constant push to go to add more as opposed to go deeper to quantify as opposed to value qualitatively those things constant so thank you who else wants to speak to something that has been positive I often work inside of a Zen center where I teach meditation and I also run bizarre theater experiments and one thing that that really affords is the ability to go really deep and work with people who don't normally do theater they open themselves in all these ways and all these things but that also means that the process of translating that outside the question of value, the value of the language how that goes outside of that into the world theater this year was the first time I worked with a lot I brought a large group of actors from Europe from the East Coast to Northern California to work with some of the practices that I've been developing from that environment and made a performance that was like actually funny and people really liked it existed in the world in a concrete way but before that I've been working in a very totally insular and not even really knowing what I was doing with bullshit to be frank but then the question of how language has died and how you communicate an experience that's very meaningful for a small group of people that has overtones and has commonalities with depth psychology and meditation practices and then you're dealing with like what's your play about so that's another way the process of translation and working more from a group where meaning is very much contained in a shared experience and then the process of translating that out into a more commercialized world which I also keep working on thank you Ben feel free to step in at any point if any of these questions are speaking to you directly who else on the positive side the beautiful things about and I happen to have the great privilege of being a tenured professor which took a long time but the positive thing about working with scholarship in academia is academic freedom and the academic freedom to follow and my degree I was an after when I was 12 I thought I was giving it up when I went to college and started studying corruption obviously I did not you know but the freedom to say okay I'm going to get a PhD in Russian and not lose my roots as an after and find a way to blend these things has been externally liberating because as you know because you know my work it goes everywhere in terms of the scholarship I'm not in a field that limits me so I've written about Stanislavski I've written about the Russian I've written about town festivals in Puerto Rico as performance events that have analogs in the illegal theater I've written about the value use I've worked with my dance background with choreography and I'm looking at acting and performance in a multi-dimensional way that's the beauty of it nobody tells me what to study however the challenge and this is speaking to my the true and frustrating challenge of working in academia is a sense even in this interdisciplinary world is wanted is not the anti-corporal aspect of it but the anti-intellectual approach to artists and a sense that even in the best of our universities there is a division between a PhD and an artist and even among the artist colleagues of mine there will be a true kind of prejudice against somebody who has a PhD and so my question always as an academic who is also an artist is how do you how do you persuade people not only to talk about the body but for people who understand the body to be able to accept the intellectual and understand that one body is really both of these things and can be both of these things with equal power at the same time so that's what I would say about you we'll come back to some of the obstacles because I think that maybe part of what I'm hoping for from this conversation is to break down some of these divisions these are fundamentally false divisions we're carrying them into this conversation and so I think there's maybe I'm seeing this as an act of dismemberment or are you measuring that? Oh on a positive level Fools Fury is in residency at the French American International High School which is kind of like a dream they have their own arts pavilion that they built in San Francisco they have four drama teachers for high school they're in residence and they have a black box theater a beautiful one we get to be there usually when the students are not and use it for our reversal space however we also participate in the training of the students and last year spilling into 2014 spring there's a two year long project that involves the students a French artist named Louise Toulet and also Francis Viet used to dance with Pina Bower they're coming from France every few months professional artists are coming in including ourselves to participate and be with the students and then there are like three different iterations of how they're going to work on Greek tragedy, education, democracy and how it relates to our society today and so we are positively like involved in the students work they're doing works they're doing site specific work they're doing a choral piece and then they're doing actual extant play they're doing Ajax 19 anyway there's many ways that we're involved and we are also making this our year long project professionally in our work creating our own professional piece so we get the best of everything we come in we get to work with the students we get to meet the teachers are all part of it as well they all train with us and the public and then we get to go make our own work and of course I have my eye on the students because I want to make it intergenerational then it's what we do so there's just a lot of intercollaboration and it's quite fertile time there's a lot of blocks I can think of but that's Ben you had it you sort of went a little while ago so you wanted to jump in there yes that was in response to the previous point about the anti-intellectual and the anti-practualist kind of tension which is not only in theater but just I was saying Sharon Marie Carnegie in case you were wondering about the name go ahead yes which is not only theater but is also another kind of practice I mean even like sports or something else where there's a kind of tension between between practice and theory I just wanted to mention specifically related to theater this question this issue of the audience and assumptions about who the audience is I think that probably we could easily come up with critiques of academia in the sense especially the research aspect in the sense of being potentially elite being very isolated the whole ivory tower idea but I think that in the tension between theater especially the M&F PhD tension and theater performance part of what's happening there is that there's also there's a need to critique the assumption that what happens in the practical work the embodied work achieves its reality in the general public sphere in the moment when it's performed for an audience of people who are not experts and I think that actually Groshowski's work which Chris's book was mentioned is one of the things that it was so provocative about and so striking about the work center the history of the work center is this idea that there might be a practical work particularly a practical research that might go on for a long time and be very valuable partly through pedagogy rather than through public performance and that I think that also speaks to the value of pedagogy when I teach acting at CUNY I try always to reframe the acting class in the way that an introductory English class is reframed that it's not so that you can become a professional writer necessarily it's because there's a body of knowledge here that will serve you in a lot of different ways but I think that's still often in the acting and the relationship the VFA MFA track is this very there's just a huge gravitational pull towards the idea of the public sphere and the validation of the work in the public sphere and it's not that I want to say there should be an elitist concept of research instead but I do think that's part of that tension is about who is the work valuable for does it achieve its value does it need to be valuable to everyone or how do we situate practices that are achieving their value through pedagogy and also through peer, through sharing with a community of people who are really caring about those little details that would actually bore a general public yeah Michael I mean that's sort of what I was Catherine and I went to grad school together and I think for both of us at least for me I want to go one of the most rewarding experiences I've had in relation to the institution to import laboratory time into institutional time and convince even on a departmental level get into people that a long process without quantifiable results in the short term was worthwhile and that this work was like laboratory projects going on at Stanford and that was very good for us and very good for students and it's me that and can I add a layer to that I also think that what was very much for me personally and I don't know to what extent it feels this way to you or it felt this way to Chris or Daniel if you are hopeful but we had to resist things we were in a program that made claims about merging the artistry and the scholarship to varying degrees and for me this was particularly intense we didn't experience it as being anything like that at all and so we had to as a cohort push back and in pushing back we articulated a whole hell of a lot about what mattered to us and what we wanted to then bring into our own teaching and bring into institutions so the very facts that we had to form a group to fight into articulate and figure it out became very productive the resistance became productive so sometimes it's in that collision and just to follow up with what Ben was saying and the work at that point had no relation to the public sphere at all and it really was the dream of the kind of work that you could do in an academic environment that's not answerable to questions of the and that being a part of the epistemology of academia it's not just the resources of academia it's like academia actually has an epistemology that supports when work might need to be not immediately judged in the public sphere for a while but how the community of knowledge operates so okay Noah you hand your hand up I want to get to you and then I'm going to make a switch tell me your name again oh um so I teach at Castle Delay and one day I got an email from a random administrator saying dear professor King Perry please send us an excel spreadsheet showing the learning outcomes of your study and I wrote back and I said administrator who I don't know I'm afraid I cannot provide you with the document you requested however I'd be happy to send one of my students to your office to perform a model off did you really? yes I did and they never bothered me and to that learning outcomes of course is one that the accreditation board to to accredit universities including community colleges and universities in state of California and all of us now are obligated on every syllabus to include your learning outcomes so it's I know that John really wants to speak to this because just because having just resigned from an academic after eight years and wanting to make it absolutely plain that I do not have a problem with the academic endeavour or the slightest concern about the integrity of people who are working within the system and I do want to make that plain because the last thing I am intending to be oppositional it felt to me that there was a battle that in my work I was no longer interested in addressing it's an important battle but it was one that I was no longer interested in trying to fight and it was this battle which comes to what you are talking about that there is a deep, profound learning that happens at the embodied level. We know that we see the transformations of ourselves and of other people in the studio space and I think Ben is talking to this a little bit as well there is a deep level at which that embodied learning is transmitted generation to generation by people going into studios who have themselves been in studios one of the things that is most important to realise that all of these great names that we talk about they are all people who went into studios and did stuff without knowing what the hell they were doing they were doing exactly what we are doing we are trying to find stuff and they are transmitting what they have learned inarticulately often and I use that word advisedly without able to articulate our knowledge body to body generation to generation we are very articulate with you the body is it what I mean by inarticulate is not being able to articulate verbal, linguistic and rationally it is an embodied knowledge and it is thought an expression until you experience it this is absolutely what I am saying there is an absolute truth and passion and intelligence there my experience of the university system and it is mine and nobody else's my experience of the university system was that it does not sit alongside learning outcomes assessment criteria whereby a student must learn a certain amount within a certain time frame maybe she is not ready to learn it yet maybe she is going to have three years of struggle and two days after graduation go hallelujah I am in body she does not understand the term in body but that is another thing they do not sit alongside each other and this for me and I was not in the end it is like trying to make things do this it is trying to change gear without putting the clutch down in the car I ended up with the sense of despair as an academic tradition about the inability to reconcile embody knowledge into an academic structure which is vulgar linguistically based I think it is entirely worth having but it did seem as if we are simply talking about parallel streams that frequently from both directions as Sharon says simply to understand each other and I think that is the most essential tension if you want to work I thought just throw something in here if I may and then I will come back to you because there is a slippage here but I think it is important that the other tension is in this idea of articulation and the provocation that I have like to throw out is that I know some brilliant doctors who when they hear an idea will create an image and I am thinking of Alexa will create an image in a second that is a synthesis of many ideas that holds in it a poetic multiplicity of interpretations and it goes in space and to understand the faults and ideas that are conveyed by actors who are articulate in their bodies in that way is a kind of literacy and that when we buy into the language I think we buy into it that articulate means your words and to learn to understand how to express ideas is to learn to read and to learn to write then we are it is not just about embodied knowledge it is about the speaking that we are not learning to understand and so I am wondering part of the work of being a performer in an academic setting is also about teaching people how to see differently other things that they should be reading etc. we keep sort of weighing this in a defensive way it is often subaction I do not offend but a forward action of there is this other speak because I am in the world it is bringing orality back up to literacy as opposed to we talk about preliterate cultures as opposed to talking about oral cultures it did not use language and worked in a completely different thought paradigm what they say is being created a story is being told the storm is happening the crack thunder that happens it is incorporated into the story it is an active way of delivering information rather than a way that is in comparison with everything that has been written and said and recorded so taking orality which I feel is what we are doing in our bodies as well we are trying to bring it from being down here below literacy to being back up here this is valuable communicating our story speaking our stories to each other not not relying purely on the written one it is happening for years in this field it is just that we can talk about it I think we are starting to talk about it I think that this is maybe shifting us to some of the bottom categories that I threw up there which is this idea of are there things we are trying to resist or is there a culture we are trying to change and I think maybe obstacles are kind of a sub-category of that writing because the obstacles are the things we are trying to change can we build up? can you tell me your name? Lizzie I very much agree with the last couple of things that are said and I want to just add that we shouldn't overestimate the level of articulateness or explicit knowing that is in other fields we have been talking about embodied knowledge and I think we are mostly using it to mean for example knowledge of acting and dance and the way that that is in the body but the other field that talks about embodied knowledge is the work on recognition and embodied knowledge in general in philosophy and in science which is not saying that dancers and actors have knowledge that is specifically embodied but it is actually saying that all knowledge is embodied and the work on the sociology of science or the philosophy of science is pointing out that the fields that we think of as extremely hard as extremely explicit and located in language are also full of tacit knowledge there are also full of oral culture and knowledge and there are also full of people going into rooms and not knowing what is going to happen or what they are going to do so I think we shouldn't exaggerate how exceptional theater is I guess that is my question for John that I think I don't know I think there are differences absolutely in terms of how and in what media but I think we shouldn't exaggerate the exceptionality of dance say as impossible to be put into words without recalling that actually much of science and history and mathematics and everything is also happening through tacit knowledge that is not articulated that is not possible to put into words that wasn't known from the beginning but was discovered through fooling around are you looking at me because you want to address that and you are waiting for approval I like approval I would agree with you entirely Ben I think it was not so much my the frustration that I increasingly encountered was not so much with the process of attempting to translate one form of knowledge to another that was always endlessly interesting in its way it was in fact trying to translate a form of pedagogy which is experiential learning into a language of assessments and learning outcomes which are not I think orientated towards experiential learning I know articulable in those terms I entirely agree Ben I thank you for clearing up the confusion because embodying knowledge is the heart of everything we do it's embodied what we do but I think also pedagogy as a practice I want to share something institutional right now that I hope will make you laugh I teach I teach a greek and roman class in the ball I've taught it for several years and I've generated a methodology that goes back and forth between sitting and working with a text in a normal way getting up and doing embodied workshops to understand how the how texts encode physical performance like the texts of music encode the sound of the music that we call music it's not the notes it's not the text that makes it and I've originated a way to do this that involves constant getting up and sitting down and getting up and sitting down well this year I've walked into my classroom and the University had bought us new chairs and the chairs without asking anybody and they're the kind they're monstrous chairs that were built by the company that spun off from Apple as this kind of new technological chair with these wheels in a place with your backpack and all you've taught in one of them and there's 40 of them in our classroom and suddenly I was absolutely enforced in an institution that is actually telling us to get away from the lecture to be unable to do anything in that room except lecture because there was no way to pile the chairs I walked and so I had to fight with my own school to get a studio space that we could actually go back and forth to so now we're like the floating crab game some days we need these chairs and some days we go to the studio but what I love about thinking about this in those terms is that even the institution can sometimes shoot itself in the foot because if this tastes our institution wants it and yet the sense of disconnect between somebody who buys a chair so I mean I feel like it just kind of makes pragmatic some of the difficulties when even somebody is trying to help me I want to because I know we're going to have to wrap and I saw some hands up I saw some hands up and I just want to give a couple of other people do you have your hand up? I'm sorry I didn't move my hand did you have your hand up? yeah please so this is I'm just going to throw this out there in a completely unformed way which I think is to my point which is I just want to also reframe this back into a larger context of the feminine and the masculine on the level of not male female whatever ideas of the masculine ideas of the feminine and that I just I mean it strikes me over and over again even in this conference which is a bunch of embodied people whose technology is their bodies that we've spent an enormous amount to be critical but that we even here we favor the sitting and the talking and I was saying this yesterday and it's just because I'm so filled with ideas and the more sensitive I become the more trained I become capable I am of actually sitting through there's a point where it's like that's what that's what happens and I think that that's actually real and I think that the numbing there's a numbing that happens in our in our culture that allows for the more so we can be more than this and I just all completely informed about learning and I'm thinking that there's also a transition where there is a really feminine way of learning and what I mean that I mean there's a reception kind of being in the not knowing being in the state of wonder that happens when we're young and often times surrounded by the feminine way of learning and then that transfers over when we get into school where it becomes codified and penetrating that happens and it becomes a little more masculine and then there's this thing it gets tight now the thing I want to say around all of that that I think is hopeful and gets me excited in why I say that it's rich this tension is then there's sex which can be fucking awesome so somewhere there's like there's a place where those two things could actually meet on equal ground and I don't see that happening any I mean I don't see that happening in too many places I see it happening in studio sometimes I don't see it happening in the academy but that's possible so that's exciting because I know that we have to move to the next thing I'm going to wrap but I think I want to end by rearticulating that I didn't know where the conversation was going to go it went to some totally other place and the big impulse I hear in it is this thing about pushback it's what do we know what are our speakings what is the moving what do we want to take back what other kinds of conversations do we have how can we speak across these ridiculous divisions between the different kinds of institutions in which we practice our work that seems to be what's coming out of this and I just have to regenerate a place to leave off then do you want to work since you're up on the big screen so thank you for joining us I would second what someone else said about sending the emails or at least I would love to know I can't even tell exactly who is in the room absolutely we're going to share around later all of that information so thanks a lot for joining us Ben thank you for kicking that off and indeed thank you Maya so we just need to do a couple of technical things and then we're going to hopefully take this conversation further into the next session but please take a few moments to get up and jump around or whatever you need to do jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in jump in I'm really delighted and I hope you have a great time in there. I look forward to meeting you there. I'll see you. I'm here. Hey, Michael. Hey, Brian. Did Brian step out of the theater? Brian stepped out of the theater because he had a lot of people. Just put him right down. You can be right in the theater. Richard, it's gone great. It's great. It should start soon. Let me go to Brian and then we'll check this about the schedule. One second. Great, Michael. Yeah. Hey, Michael. How are you? Okay, so you can write out the names of the people you're working with, and I'm going to go ahead and write out the names of the people I'm working with, and I'm going to go ahead and write out the names of the people I'm working with. I don't know if it's going to be like that. I don't know if it's going to be like that. I don't know if it's going to be like that. It's going to be readable by just... ...you make it natural as well. You can write it out. I think that's why I'm using the language. I don't think that's what I'm going to write out. I think that's why I'm using the language. I don't think that's what I'm going to write out. Okay. Because we have some virtual participants, we need to kind of move the next conversation on. We're going to begin the next session with Lizzy Watt. If you can all help me by pushing the chairs a little bit off the stage. You don't need to get rid of them. We just need to push them to the sides. So that we can do a little bit of moving. And build upon the provocation that Gleason just left us with. We can turn you guys down. You're on our speakers, so we can turn you down. But I will just quickly introduce our guests. And Nick Sly, if you're watching out there in virtual world, we're trying to contact you. But not able to. So we send you an invitation. Hopefully you'll get it to the hangout. But we do have two guests with us virtually. This is Rachel Yanchevsky on the big screen right now at the moment. And Rachel is in Minneapolis. And then next to her on the bottom is Michael Rowe. Michael is in Chicago. And Michael has to leave probably within an hour. So that's the other reason I'm just trying to keep us a little bit on schedule. First we're going to begin with Lizzy Watt. Lizzy has her own performance project. Okay, so I would like to build... Very, very quickly. We're now being joined by Nick Sly in the middle. And Nick is coming in from New Orleans. And Nick, if you didn't hear, we're just going to begin the session with Lizzy Watt. Okay, so wonderful. Hi, people. I would love to build on what we were just talking about. And get into our bodies a little bit. I have a provocational, statement-y kind of performance-y thing. But I would love people to take the floor. So you don't have to. You're welcome to stay in the chair. But if you want to lay down, sit down, fill in the space. I don't need this room. I'd like to walk around while I talk. I don't need you to look at me. You can look at me if you want. But I just want us to be able to be... Actually listen with our bodies and not with our eyeballs. We're just right here. So when we taught Psychophysical Acting there, basically pulled me under his wing. And because he was ready to be done teaching, slowly forced me in a beautiful way to become the person teaching his work. So... And slowly I started taking over his classes and assisting him on every project he did. It was a wonderful thing. I've... Since then I've been a guest faculty in Europa, and guest faculty at E.T.W. And I have a theater company in Boulder that I've recently left. I've been living here about a year. I'm a performer. And I initially thought of today that I would craft this incredible performance of some kind. Put my words into the body. And then I realized I'm reading this amazing book by a woman named Bobette Buster who writes about story. And I realized what I'd really like to do is just talk to you. Tell my story. And talk to you before I put it into kind of a performance world. And I'm going to speak today from the voice and body of a performer and a mother. Two little children. And I think many of you saw them. I felt like it was really important that a lot of you got to see, lay eyes on them today because they're not in theory. They're really real. And I wanted that to be a part of today. So I've been inventing children since I was about three. And by age nine I was determined to have seven children. I didn't think about career and money or even like following my intellectual and curiosity driven passion because living in the woods where I grew up and being allowed to guide my own education through home schooling was a purely creative setting in which I took for granted that I would always be able to live artfully. That I would always be able to cultivate beauty and use my skills towards the better in the world around me. There were no limits to my ideas of motherhood. And most of my imaginings took me wandering the woods with my imaginary packed kids trundling along behind me. The babes taking care of the littles and the eight of us singing our way through the ups and downs of finding food and shelter and adventure. Yes, Charlie Bucket and Maria Montrap greatly influenced mom. Seven years ago I made a real one. A real boy. And here's a perhaps unknown fact. The nuclear family can be a really lonely place. A terrible estrangement can happen if it's assumed that a parent no longer needs community because he or he has a spouse and child. I was in Boulder, Colorado in a theater community where in a large collection of mostly 20, 30-somethings no one had children or not. There were many. I didn't see them about much. And many didn't even have partners. A few of my friends could really relate to what was happening to me in my transformation. So, well not so. I assumed I was always going to do this. I brought him, I brought Oliver into that world. And my theater company, graciously, amazingly, beautifully took me and my child as a part and as the whole package. And that became our world. What do we do with having this other little human here? I brought him to shows. He was in the sling and dinner parties and fundraisers, performances, rehearsals. Even in physical training sessions I'm doing Suzuki with him on my chest. When he was hungry, he nursed him and he was awake and happy. I handed him off to someone. I went and was four and a half weeks old. I got a call from the William Intercenter asking me if I could come to Kansas to work on a play for a week. And I hesitated for about three seconds because I thought I'm a brand new mom. And then I just said, yeah. Here we go, yeah. I'll have my new one with me in rehearsals. Okay, okay. And off I went. So then a month ago, maybe a month and a half ago I got wind of this gathering that was going to happen. And I just felt like I have to submit something. And when I was thinking about what I should submit I read this quote that Todd London where he's discussing ensemble as a history of experiment not of form but of process. Practice and process. How we collaborate and care for one another. How we interact with the community. My position as an artist parent presents a particular opportunity to take a hand in shaping the experiment from a specific point of view. My point of view. I make a call to all of you for a collective recognition the desire for and sometimes eventuality of offspring and thus the existence of mothers and fathers in our ensembles can and should be a topic of conversation and a reality not lovingly or forcibly kept on the periphery but embraced as a part of the ensemble's practical functioning and creative zeitgeist. This is a suggestion that the inclusion of offspring in the well of our creative energies can transform the metadata from which we work. This is an enticement for solidarity. This is a proclamation in defense of Sandy. Can an artist parent and in my case a single artist parent function both as a working performance maker and as an adventuresome, engaged, creative mother of a father. How can an ensemble support and champion the parents in the group? How can we raise our children inside of the part of our performance events our studio time and seemingly necessary temporary neuroses that seems to come up at some point in the creative act? And within a culture that enjoys the idea of children that often turns up their nose at their disruptive and loud presences how can we as the open heart of champions of expression embrace the presence of our own people? I've long I've also highly invested in raising children that we like. So with that in mind I've long admired the idea of the circus family as I was first introduced to it in St. Louis with the Circus Chloro which is this beautiful long standing circus and one of the they have a family, the family Willenda who are High Wire Act and they you know the children grow up learning to walk on the wire and the idea that I witness is that children are around they watch, they learn and they edge into participation little by little the idea that their bodies and their minds can be engaged not by constantly putting them away from us in classes and giving them very focused attention but by keeping them keeping them close and alternately engaging with them one on one with the intensity that that provides and ignoring them sufficiently so that they can muck around and find their own passions. I'm also part of the Wyandotte Nation of Kansas and the way that the Wyandotte Drone Circle works is that children are welcome to join in as long as they're in rhythm with their music if not they're just gently and firmly pushed out of the circle listen says that push wait, listen your effort is good but the music is important so what do we do about what feels for some to be a biological imperative and how can that desire to decide and with an intense desire to train to work with an ensemble and make performance and how do we raise these really wonderful children that we want to be around motherhood has shaken my world to core it's left me breathless it's left me in a heap it has energized me to do things I never would have done before it has stolen every ounce of energy I have I know that now that there are love words that haven't even been invented yet because they're like flashes of lightning and what parent has enough time to lasso lightning there's the love that watches from afar and you're supposed to be closer there's the love that watches from afar and gently waves them by there's the love that thrusts the baby birds out of their comfortness there's the love that's contained in the smell of a daughter's warm neck there's the love seed that burns so hard and bright it looks like fury and can generate unbelievable, unearthly animalistic sounds out of my mouth that might even frighten the view of us there's the love that spawns deep fear and pain because with love with this kind of love is the possibility and the promise of heartbreaking loss sometimes on a daily basis and so there's this when I became a mother I landed in the most fertile arena of my life a place of such danger delicious danger in between rich power and the depths of vulnerability I feel now ready to tackle anything I'm ready to do I'm ready to play a lecture I'm ready to finish the play I'm writing I'm ready to experiment with the forms I teach I'm ready to be in the room with you guys but I cannot do my work in the way that I used to be able to work because I got these little guys this is not a complaint please don't think that this is a complaint this is my penundrum, this is my impasse and I wouldn't want it any other way every day that I choose my children and I stay at home almost there and I piece me of work together so that I can do that every day that I choose to do that and not the job that will more reliably pay the bills I'm choosing to cultivate this richly creative territory and I'm also choosing to give up my work both on a daily basis the theater is overwhelming a place of single men and women and as those men and women grow and change into couples and parents we outgrow the various structures we've helped create our innovative and creative fields that comes to the widespread American way which doesn't know how to incorporate and welcome this new entity called parent that into its fold we bracket, we draw lines between our home life and our work life, we create a world where we live in failure every day there's a certain understanding for mothers that they're going to step out and be with their infant for a while but it feels to be always expensive work it's a brief lull allowed by the system until the woman returns to work and is expected to carry on at full capacity and this is just no longer possible we don't really want it to be that they return to be the same person they were before I know there are there are super moms out there I've been called one before you know how do you do it you're able to go teach here you're able to keep working you can do it all amazing it's really not like that it's there's damage being done the sense of failure and overwhelm can be crushing getting to this weekend's events for instance was a small miracle and did not happen out of me alone, my brother is with my children, yesterday my friend was with my children there are so many amazing ideas that have been happening this past couple days when I started doing that in yesterday I was like I'm creating practical solutions I want to be doing something I'm really ready I have so much energy to start making some small shifts in our world and this woman Bobette Buster, she says instead of getting discouraged and hopeless about the system and all that seems vast and unshakable start a small shift that people will discover to be appealing and let it catch on and slowly be indispensable in the society so I've mentioned a couple of models that I've learned from a month and a half ago I started to cap wearer classes with my two kids and I discovered another one so Eunice takes class for half an hour with her little kids and then Oliver takes class with the big kids while at the same time the parents are taking class outside we're all being fed we're all in her bodies and Eunice when Oliver and I are working Eunice is just running around she's laying down taking a nap or just staring or she'll come in my arms and I'll do my best to do the jangle with her in my arms and then at the end of the kids class often the adults are in a circle they invite the kids to come out and the whole circle plays together our guides for the children the children are having a chance to work with movers who've been doing this form for years and years and years and years it's beautiful kids are stumbling and the adults are just pulling them along come on you're coming in now you're coming in no one fusses I've been amazed and I'm not lying I would tell the truth but nobody no kids fuss there complain, whine no one plays on an iPad it's amazing to me and now that I've seen it in action I'm determined that we can make our world look more like that so one last image I'm eight months and three weeks pregnant with my second baby and I'm in rehearsal for a child's me's play Big Love three hours working in a violently passionate physical fury on the final scene of play and then the rehearsal's over and we're sitting in a circle at the close of rehearsal and I feel this odd thing happening in my belly like this stretching that's going on it's happening I'm not a complete surprise but a couple hours later I wake up in the beginning of labor and six hours later I can hear to my daughter in my bedroom in the tub amazing moment and then three weeks later I'm back in rehearsal and she's on my chest and I'm working on my scenes or she's in the arms of Carol Katz who is in the show with me part of my community and Carol would march her around the space she, Carol says to me, give her to me I want you to be able to do this and she would march her out you weren't even seeing her chanting to her it was the most amazing gift to me to have my community say to me I'm on stage and I will take this part of you and keep it close so that you can do your work I've had occasion to wonder though I only asked Carol about it recently what was it like for you see I had this hunch that the act of entrusting her with my newborn daughter was its own kind of gift from the pride in her voice and the daily proclamation every time she would see and ask where is my girl I think that hunch is right the same way that we gift a partner or a friend with sharing our own vulnerability even when we may be terrified to do so we gift our community by sharing our children we talked yesterday about survival sustainability working from a place of gratitude and generosity I think part of that is speaking our stories about how these individuals are figuring it out trying to figure it out we can shift this model so that our children are not asking the same questions or not having the same battles that they're growing up inside of healthy structures that they really can believe in a lot there about this session yeah thanks I'll just be the man and follow that so thank you so much for that really this session is kind of called collectively the American landscape and I don't think you can get a better definition of landscape than all the many images you just gave us and the notions of community and network and this beautiful sharing it starts as we've been saying all weekend is it starts locally starts in this room it goes in there starts in those rooms in there those solitary people skyping into us to build networks and communities to help each other and we've been having more like round table conversations I feel this weekend and this one's a bit more I call mosaic because it really is a number of voices to try to get bits and bobs of that landscape to make some sense I also am very aware that Michael partly needs to leave because of his children so I don't know if you want to respond to that Michael or if that's not something you want to speak to at the moment I try I thought about going to the other room and bringing my daughter and for a second just to listen but that would be a disaster for what's happening in the other room so I didn't see that but if it's okay I'd love to listen for a few more minutes I have to go to 4.30 your time maybe I can just grab a few minutes right before that and share some thoughts absolutely that'd be great so yes so how am I going to pull it is it does anybody else in the mosaic feel like they want to respond with their own work to what Lizzie was just saying I'm going to just very really greatly that running an ensemble one of my so happy it totally changed the work Brian we can't hear I can't fucking speak to Brian it changed the work in ways that was just extraordinary whole things going yes there's life here that's just not being there so John was teaching a workshop in Lesbos and one of these company members gave birth while they were there and he's trying to he's expressing very succinctly but not very loudly he's feeling a lot about that please I just want to point of finger given the previous when we were talking about diversity within ensemble and the whiteness of this particular group and also being aware of the many images that that Lizzie brought to the table being from non-white culture and also my own sort of experience through my partner of other cultures being more in their body oftentimes and being more community-based and I just want to throw that out there that there's also something to be gained I think from other cultures and how they incorporate their children out of communities larger and more connected and more here and this is more acceptable and I don't have to tell you when I I'm probably going to cry because today I took my 18-year-old son to college and a beautiful, beautiful young man and my partner Rose Crookio partner in my company knows him well and helped raise him with my husband and my community and I just want to say that it's possible to have a community that embraces, you have to make that community that's ultimately what happened to me because my academic community didn't really embrace it I had to hide my pregnancy because I was up for position and I was afraid because hardly anyone at my institution at the time had children in fact about 95% of women have children because they had to make a choice between their practice and having a family or having a child and I was afraid that if they knew I was pregnant I'd be I'd be cross out the shortlist and so I hid my pregnancy and ultimately I got the job towards the end I couldn't hide the pregnancy I was interesting because at the time was a man and he was one of the few faculty that had children he actually embraced it and said you need to take time off out of his child if you need to he didn't push me to come right back into the classroom but I had already had by way of saying that I had founded a company in 1988 which is the company about productions where in my 25th year came into the company in 1992 so the company had already been created but I realized now that partially that creation was so that I could have a world, a home that my artistic family would embrace my immediate family you know everything was sort of a creation how can I make a world that is and to me it goes back to Americanism and collectivity and I want Rose to read something that we brought that came out of some research that we're working on right now but this notion that how can my work be a manifestation of how I want the world to be and how can it be a reflection of my politics of you know and I could go on and on about that but because we're talking about American and the collected that was sort of the focus of our provocations just how can our artistic the world does it reflect our politics we want the world to be a better place we think some of the structures of the world are damaged or don't respond to the needs of community or whatever but how in our world can we create a democratic space a space where people are valued where their voices are valued where creativity is shared where everyone gets credit for the work that they bring into the center of this artistic process all these wonderful utopian ideas and Rose and I have tried to build along with a bunch of other people a utopian space that fails because it is utopian but with that I only have seven minutes right but Rose and I along with some other collaborators we're an ensemble of creators we build original units in our theater works from the ground up when our point of view we're based here in LA we don't have our own theater so we have the possibility of putting ourselves in different geographies around California around the nation without having the real estate monkey on our backs which both has pluses and minuses but anyway we're working on a piece right now called the Grand Jolene that we may believe which is about, it's said in 1968 and I don't need to explain 1968 I don't think it's this great the significance of it but it's said in East LA about a young girl who's coming of age and she's a devoted daughter by day and a Hollywood go-go dancer by night so she's crossing borders she's trying to break out of her of her, in a sense that may be helping me if I'm forgetting anything you know the cultural traps of what she's supposed to become we're old enough to know what 1968 was like and what it looked like yes we are but even though I don't look like it I am I grew up in the 60s so I'm a child of the 60s I thought that everything by the time I got to be an adult that oh my god the world is going to be fixed we're fixing it now can you imagine of course by 1972 and Watergate and all the rest of it I could see that it was imploding I'm not necessarily going to be going always in a progressive direction but that said I think that that sort of heart was brought into the creation of the company how can we not in sort of the sentimental way in a real productive way how can you pick up from the dream of that period and make this work so we were making we never called it ensemble so many collaborative projects and we were always against the grain we could fit in anything I mean I could spend 20 hours on that just alone but we kept going and kept working through but anyway we found this there's a book called the strawberry statement that was written around that period by a Columbia University student and it was made into a major feature film also it's called Elliot Gould if anyone cares and it was it's almost like a diary a diary of Columbia University it was a blog before they were blogs exactly and all about what were the aims and what was going around happening in New York and Columbia with the anti-university and the NAICOM and Dow Chemical and all the things to get on and everything was going on so I'm much shorter than you it's lovely to hear your voices to the teapots it's lovely to hear a bit of inspiration for us and maybe for you there used to be a dream for America you know the American dream America was going to be different free, good, free and good of course they blew it right away as soon as the Puritans came over religious laws but at least they clung to the dream until now now no one hopes for America to be different I guess it was the dream that ruined the dream people became convinced it was true so they never made it true people think the USA a great sounding nice and formal name is special so we can do anything and it's okay an American expression to wake up and dream again Utopia and failure are as you said essential they're necessary there's a really lovely scholar tweeting about this the other day on the weekly howl about an English scholar named Ruth Levitops who writes about Utopia and she writes that failure is absolutely necessary for Utopia but Utopia is absolutely necessary for society in order to keep moving forward in a hopeful manner and to keep building new models and to keep generating that and that's what I'm hearing from everything that's been said in the last 20, 35 minutes is like raising children that you like is a Utopic adventure and I'm sure there are times where you must feel it failed and yet then you have this amazing story with Carol where that is the community raising that child and so I'm kind of wondering again if Michael or Nick want to jump in here because there's definitely themes that I would feel resonate with with your work and it can be an assuring of just Nick do you want to explain what you've been doing don't feel like it is a mosaic again don't feel like we have to connect the threads Nick I think we might not be able to see you hold on that's a shame because he's got a lovely voice Nick are you trying to speak and we can't hear you yes he is there may be a thing on Hangout where the bar above says that you were typing and so we muted you I noticed that Hangout does that sometimes so many things to come out of that beautiful head waiting can somebody read the mouse and just is there a Nick reader in the house ok well while we're waiting for Nick to figure out technical difficulties and just keep trying Nick if you can um does anybody else feel like responding of theater plastice I know you're a very new company but do you feel in some ways your work is speaking to this kind of collectivity or do you want to jump in here well we wanted to talk about being women doing this work absolutely I I really wanted to show a video video interviews you to our work do you have that video hold up ok and Michael can you hear Michelle ok yes ok so we'll just show maybe after that video if you want I can share a thought or two of Nick's now got it great cool so let me just introduce the video really quick in the work it's called Burtry Spine Saints well and then ok so we're going to show the video to give you sort of an idea of the context we're coming from and then we were going to just start a timer and have a conversation between ourselves and then hopefully we can open it up after the timer goes off ok great well why don't we watch the video and then we'll have Michael and then we'll do the timer ok ok yes but can we just introduce this just really quickly so one of Burtry Spine's life long projects was to write the sound of American spoken language so we used American music to sort of elucidate her artistic project and you know of course it's always really important for the actor to get intimate with the words but it's very hard to do with Burtry's stuff you know so what I set up was a situation where they go all music so they were all losing for this work in five days and we memorized it over Christmas break and then we came back into the stage shit so they used blues, rap just all American genres of music and the way it evolved together and brought it to the French and this is what that was there are students that probably do not live so this is my thesis show for a really long time remind us that it is a mosaic Michael if you want to just throw out some words and I know you didn't get to see the video so it's not responding to that actually I went to Michelle's site while you were showing that so I was looking at a muted version of the same trailer you were watching it looked cool it was interesting to watch it sound different than what I was watching yeah I mean I'll be really quick just the whole notion of the relationship of contemporary ensemble practice in the US and the utopic impulse is something that's been on very explicitly on my mind and a part of my work for a long time Sojourn theater was founded in 1999 just about 15 years old now and one of our one of our first projects was one of our early projects was a piece called Cities on a Hill which actually involved us driving around the United States as we moved from the east coast to the west coast as a whole company and we set up in Portland, Oregon in late 1999, early 2000 and as we made our way across the country we stopped all over we were touring a show of ours but we would ask people about the American dream and the first piece that we made in our new home of Portland, Oregon was partly based on these encounters that we had gas stations and diners and fields and factories and all kinds of places as we literally moved from one little utopic arts community back then so the question that came out of that and that's been a part of a lot of our work in these three projects I'll mention in a moment super quick was the question of who am I responsible for and for me since 1991 when I founded another organization called Hope is Vital that was doing work with men and women who were living with HIV and or AIDS and who were homeless around the United States I was a part of starting up ensembles for about 7 or 8 years made up of men who were living in that circumstance in that life condition and local young people and always the question that came at the heart of the work as we took the work out into different communities suburban and rural was always how do you engage in a democratic society with questions of communal responsibility when you're also dealing with a society that is also kind of prioritizing the market and consumption so how do those things live alongside each other and particularly if you're involved in educational contexts where you're teaching in learning communities how are you kind of reconciling the transmission of information the building of experiences and an acknowledgement of these different kinds of conditions and systems that we're all living in and I just would sort of say now this question of what is ensemble in a contemporary American landscape is super connected for me to ask him a question ok so we've got this project called how to end poverty in 90 minutes that we premiered in Chicago last year and this year there will be versions of it seen in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and then Washington DC and it's a 90 minute event where audiences basically go on stage as cash and the audience has a period of time to determine how to use that money to attack poverty in their local community and it's a mixture of performance spectacle and facilitated dialogue and the notion of poverty is partly the content and partly a Trojan force because the real issue of the performance is how do we make a decision as 200 people about how to aim our resources towards the collective good and I'm really interested in how ensemble becomes a way not just in the room where we make but also in the engagements that we create in community a way to actually embody and explore that question how do we decide together what to do with our resources and how are we going to live together should I stop there or should I mention these two other quick things I want to be a responsible part of the mosaic I'm offering two things this needs two other quick things that we're doing we're in the midst of a two and a half year ongoing artist and residency project with Catholic Charities USA which is the largest poverty fighting organization in the U.S. that is not a part of the Catholic Church although it is related to the Catholic Church like distant and constantly tense cousins and we are actually midway through working with over 20 sites around the U.S. where we give workshops on collaborative practice we host public conversations with them around polarizing issues in community that relate to poverty and economic disparity and we of course develop encounters with people and create a performance the whole company of our, almost the whole company a dozen of us were just in San Francisco last week where we shared performance we built for them at their national convening and we're about to be with them in New Orleans actually very soon and so a question for me around that work is how do we engage with ideologically diverse colleagues and partners in difficult and challenging conversations where we are making rigorous art but we are also making rigorous public conversation and that's a big part of our work at Sojourn and maybe the third thing I will just mention is we have a project called Islands of Milwaukee where we're working with homebound seniors in low income contexts and we're partnering with the Department of Public Health the Department of Public Transit Goodwill, Salvation Army University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a number of social service organizations to basically spend two years making visible beneath the surface conversations about our community elders who are living trapped in their homes and how to bring the value of them and the necessity of public conversation about them into policy discourse with local legislators so again we're looking at how our practice of ensemble extends to all the partners and all the contexts that we can develop together to be moving our work not just into the studio into performance venues but into public settings again and again where we're always exploring notions of who am I, who are we responsible for and how is our practice about art making but also about public discourse and public policy That's my that's my thing today It's incredibly inspiring stuff I think it's lovely and it's great to hear that it's out there I know you have to go yes? In a minute or two I'm going to just listen for a little bit I'm so sorry I haven't been with you the whole weekend just to tack on to this to talk about family I would say I've been on the road so much lately that this was a rare weekend when I could be home with my family and we just made a choice that I that I would be home with my family so that's why I'm here and out with you I wish I was in the conversation but it feels resonant with trying to make the decisions we're all trying to make about where our energy is Michael has been essential in helping us to organize this virtual aspect of the whole weekend and so we thank you for all of your support and honor help and we thank you for making the choice to be with your family Of course Michael can you hear me okay? This is Catherine I have a really practical question for you Do you ever take in student interns into your group because I have a student with a great hunger to understand who lives in the world and she just woke up to the notion that it's even a phenomenon but it was something she was yearning for and I'm trying to direct her toward good people doing good things Yeah we do We have summer institutes we take interns on a project specific basis I teach at Northwestern in the undergrad and the graduate directing program so sometimes our apprentices and interns come out of that I'm going to just shut up and listen to Nick and Rachel and whoever and then I'm just going to disappear in a couple minutes but thanks for including me Thank you Michael Do we want to return to your timer discussion is the only way we all get going and then we come back to Nick and Rachel Sure So we're going to start Michelle by talking a little bit specifically about when you were working on the project that we all saw that had to do with being a woman working as a director and then also working with gender specific cast Right? Yeah Okay so the project started with forcing some three acts and it was cast with all men at Carnegie Mellon so this was the first graphic this was done and it was like all about women and having answers and so you know the process it was it was hard for a lot of it because A I was called crazy like behind my back because that was like the game going around like she is crazy and when something is crazy it's kind of all over the place that doesn't have any intention so they were not acknowledging that in fact there was intention for the rehearsal room and then this other thing that happened is people were saying that they were wondering if I knew what I was doing Do you know what you're doing are you directing is this what directing is supposed to look like because if I was in my rehearsal room and I would just be at the table and people would be talking and somebody is like they are against the wall over there and just kind of like a lot of chaos and so I literally got friends and they would just leave office and and they said do you know keep your voice up okay do you know what you're doing and then I said no I don't know what I'm doing and that's the point like that is what I'm trying to tell you yes you're right I don't exactly know what I'm doing I don't exactly know where I'm going and that is what I'm doing so that's what we're doing here because I feel like in an ensemble that I should not know very much anyway like in a way like I just from this I just came in and it was kind of like your street style American music that's all I know right now and but that was strong enough to take us all the way through the project all the way down and up and down and up and down again and because if I come in somehow knowing more like what I want what is the point of us being together I feel like I'm not creating what I want from you so it's important to just not know and you know speaking about the gender cast so you know when the show was cast it's cast by a cast and director of so you know they were like would you take the seven extra men and I was like that is weird because this is where she was dying sure let's just do that and the music that they wrote that was very like it was there was always a soloist and all the little playing instruments with their mouths so like a horn player so everybody had like a part right all these men had their own special part and then after the show closed I thought well that was very nice but I like what the women do and so I brought in women doing the same singing and their music was all together so they always sing together in harmony and the woman featured as like a man that was very interesting and also just made for like a very dynamic show and the unknown is something that we talk about a lot and we talk about this I mean honestly I don't really know what it means to be a woman to be a woman working to be a woman in the world but it feels like it makes the process my interest more open and available to discovery and accepting a space that is unwritten because you don't know because I don't know and then I'm interested in what is discovered in a place where the threads aren't quite together properly that what exists in between those spaces is as a generated impulse for idea is really compelling to me and maybe because it's where I've been so much in my life I feel like it's a really rich site for work when things don't go together when I mean well I don't know see we think very differently I think pictures and she's like words I look at her and I'm like we'll do that space well okay so yeah my hands in this and what I was imagining was like a carpet that was very we used to be women and the spaces that were in this because we talk about this and something about this space that these things are not we're talking about right now so we all three were talking about this just today about being a woman and making it work and kind of in a way things not lining up exactly or like being misunderstood there's this like tear and it's like that tear and you understand me so for example this week I haven't spoken much this weekend and it's kind of scary I was thinking about this over the whole weekend I'm just so impressed as a woman you know what I mean this whole structure like this major this whole system is like creating a situation that makes it hard for me to talk and it's like to build this personality it's like kind of sharp I see this with a lot of look it's not just me, this is like this personality it's partially due to this kind of system that we're living and like but then I thought well actually yes this is a problem like in this space right here but in some of this other space this is actually a very good personality shape to like and not like seem too much and be like a little bit like what is that person doing they're a little scared of that person you know that's been a great deal in the chat with the watcher well the watcher says you know that a director is just a very skilled watcher or a skilled seeer you know and so that's been a journey of my life and I guess I need to go into this space except it doesn't work as well because I'm supposed to do other things do you know what I'm saying like if it's not working I've been forced to talk you went further and further what's that you went further and further you said well what I heard was and I think this is the gift that women bring to the rising I think this is why there are so many in the rising and I think this is why I'm rising up for the rising and I said I think if you look at the number you're sitting at women yes it's always nice to have a positive and all that I need to know actually okay to have a straight end to be oppressed etc it has a very theatrical value the time it didn't go off it's a quiet time that's perfectly fine the spirit of mosaic I think it'd be really great to bring in Nick who is doing a lot of similar work as a male but doing a lot of work that he believes is creating community through laughter and song and we were talking last night Michelle about your upcoming trip to New Orleans and I was saying you need to meet Nick so here you can meet virtually hello can y'all hear me yeah so weird how's everybody doing it's really an honor to be able to listen to the conversation so thank you Brian for helping loop me in I guess the first thing that I thought about about the family experience is that in our ensembles in our ensemble we work with a lot of people who have children and it's really really challenged and made me a better artist like our sense of time together is valued a lot more and just a sense of priority that when you start thinking about budgeting time for childcare and those sort of things it really feels multi-generational and I think we all kind of view our work in the context of our ensembles being our family but never was that more apparent to us I feel like this year I work with an organization called Mando Bizarro and we along with three other ensembles opened a space this year called Catapult and it was a really big dream to open up our own space and we thought that the process of collectively running our space and building it out together was going to be by far the easiest thing we've ever done and it turned out to be something that really really was painful for all of us in the way of I feel like taught us a lot about the fact that we were trying to do something that we didn't have a lot of models for and so we just kept running up against all kinds of different needs there's a very about five year old ensemble we're about ten years old and our spot productions is about twenty years old so the process of building out this space together doing all of the labor on it trying to come up with collective agreements about how the space can feed all of our needs it really reminded me that about this notion of collectivity that we really are a family and for better and for worse sometimes no one treats family like family treats family but ultimately I feel like it's brought us to a stronger place and our work together and now that the space is up and running it's completely changing our work and I think we said it going through the process that this struggle is going to make us stronger and I know it's cliche but it really has brought a depth of experience to our collective that's really catalyzing the work that we're doing right now and we're undertaking the largest project that we've ever done a piece called Cry You Want and it's a two mile processional out on this land that's disappearing in coastal Louisiana and we're enough for going through that experience together I don't think we would be able to be doing the amount of work that we're all doing on this project so when I think of collectivity I really think of hard-carking a little bit to what Teresa said like you know all of my elders and the people who I stand on their shoulders you know those people who thought they were solving the problems they were actually teaching us how to struggle together and I think that that value of staying in the room and struggling together is actually the thing that creates the conditions for us to do things that are impossible and to create the conditions for the type of world that we want to live in and the type of people that we want to be which is you know inventing new things in ways of communicating it's that easy work and so yeah that's what I have right now Fantastic Thank you Teresa Can I add something Please do This is a fantastic topic because it really resonates with with this space and the idea that this separation of life and art and they all know in theater world and Los Angeles it also means the real job that pays the money for the rent for the car for the fuel for the food for everything else so all these departmentalized aspects of our life that actually in some total do not add up to the whole what the whole can bring and the concept that we have for this block is that of the village meaning that we no longer split our family and our art life and our livelihood and our where we shop and what we eat and everything else it has to have more of that total understanding that it's not you jump in the car and you go work in Santa Monica and then have to gather your stuff there and then you see other companies downtown and you just happen to live in Pasadena for instance right so this split up that I think LA is the most ubiquitous place of how split up we all are and how much resources we're wasting we're wasting our life but on average we spend 2 hours a day in the car that means out of 12 months a year 6 weeks we spend in the car that's a lot that's a lot of my life would have been spent so Brian and I we returned here we determined to find a way to have new creative developments where artists also because we all have habits and interests that we also create the detail and commercial aspects of the village that we are cooperatively invested in that as well as our spaces in which we recurse and we perform and everything has to be within walking distance and I think that allows for it freed up my imagination because when we just came back here from England we've lived now around the corner from here and that for us we no longer our house and our theater are no longer separate it's one if we need to recurse or do something and something is not happening here we know we're going to be there if we need to host somebody there is great if you're working really late and people in the morning need to come back they can speak in our house if we are hosting a big festival here and we need to find places for people to sleep we know that we have a shower and two bathrooms over there so they can sleep in the theater and they have a home to come to in the morning to have breakfast everything else this is what I'm trying to this is what I feel is resonating and it's the same thing with children so we can have collective kindergarten and if we are having classes for adults we can have classes for children because I think actually children can teach us a whole lot but my dog teaches me a lot I can only imagine what a child learned to me and it's one of the reasons Brian and I we never engaged into having children because we couldn't figure out how in this crazy setup of our life possibly add a child because I know that then we would have plugged ourselves into needing to have jobs real jobs that pay money in order to support this so we want to figure out the way to change it any ideas, any thoughts any suggestions for me would be great but of course we will have a forum for this specific subject later as some of you brought up that that is such an important matter that it requires its own environment which we will host later and we're planning to go to Lawrence and visit Nick and their development we're going to be applying for the grant so we can learn from one another and maybe not make some of those dates and of course this is also just the rich history of ensembles and collective creation I mean again I'll go back to quick connotations, easy associations but collective creation often brings up 68 brings up communal communal living communal living brings up the notions of children intergenerations of all of this stuff there is a history there that is on the one hand a beautiful alternative and a beautiful parallel tradition in which to draw strength from and is also something in which it is too easy to set it up as an opposition to the society and the mainstream dominant ways of practice and I think what we're talking about here is the much more complex notions in which as Nick put it you are creating your own conditions to struggle and to live the lives we want to live as Teresa and Rose and Lizzie were bringing up in terms of how you start living the utopia shapes your politics and your politics shape your living together and that's very much what Elia is talking about is the conditions in which we want to be living, the ways in which we see politics that might not be the same for everybody else and that's why I do want to bring in other voices I know we have Asa we have Brian Sonja Wallace and Tanya who we got to see the performance in the parking lot last night so perhaps maybe this speaks a bit with Nick's doing Crying One along this two mile stretch right Nick? yeah this two mile stretch sorry I'm muted yeah this is two miles so Tanya's work is sort of psych-generated as you put it yesterday Tanya do you feel like jumping in here or no? I'm happy to can we put up some stuff in the web I don't want to explain people they can go to the website as well or however people want to do it but we can go to a website and your website is operadellespacio.org operadellespacio.org and then there's also a YouTube channel and I'll talk between both sites can you say any more Mark? Sure opera, del, o-p-e-r-a d-l-e-s-p-a-c-i-o dot-for um the title thanks if we could pull up there's a YouTube channel as well maybe we can have a little bit of it yeah we have right down here in YouTube we got all the social media going on so the title comes uh translation the Italian word for opera means work work of the space right in the yellow that's the YouTube automatically starting work thanks what was the quote that we were doing with Nancy Keystone this morning about unknowing so long unknowing till the end with no site is that what it was? no end in sight is that what it was Michael? so on unknowing till the end no end in sight kind of another thing theater of searches that we brought up yesterday Wendell Beaver's provocation about where can it be deep diving within institutions the unknowing of that you were bringing up of what it is to be a woman the unknowing of being the director in the room of actors thinking that their director is really crazy the unknowing of a mother wanting to continue in this work the unknowing of the work wanting to support a mother it's all searching and it does seem to be without like ending so I'll just fill her in I'll just go yeah I'm ready we're ready what's going to happen is there's going to be a video playing in the background while I'm talking I'll just pull the volume down a bit so you can toggle in between my voice and the images and instead of talking about what we do I'm actually interested in talking about how we do it as an ensemble one of the challenges that keeps coming up is the desire to have the communal living and that group of people are completely dedicated to each other and that's just not possible and over the many years of making work and committing, asking people to commit a great deal of themselves to the work and then me intrinsically trying to give them as everything I can people leave and move on in the beginning when I was young I got angry and I didn't respond well and I had to learn to let go of that and accept that people are going to come and go that's part of the journey and I needed to learn how to be gracious and supportive of that and allow instead that it be not a strict ensemble but a network a network of people who are really interested in this work interested in the vocabulary, interested in the community but realistically have other things they want to do as well as artists and as people and so what I've tried to do is set it up so that people who are interested will come and train initially and kind of get to know people people have been with me for a while kind of get a sense of the other person how does it feel and then I'll say okay I'm going to work on a project and it's going to be three months of your life and it's going to be really intense and you're going to have to figure out your job situation and your money situation if you want to be a part of this and I give people plenty of time in advance so everybody says I'm in, I'm not in I need a break from you I need a break from the group for a while, whatever and so then we begin and then for those three to six months whatever that project is I'm expecting a full commitment and I will give back that full commitment as well and at the end of that six months we all take a break from each other okay maybe a month or two later we'll come back and say alright we'll start some training again see if we want to open it up to more people who's in town and with us for a while we'll send me emails and say hey I want to come back and I'll say okay great we're in the midst of something it's not a good time in three or four months we'll be opening it up again and so we just came out of we did a big project last spring and over the summer we had a project that got cancelled the producers didn't have their act together so we had a new company into it that was painful but ultimately everyone in the company thanked me and so we're going to be opening it up again and I've met some people in the rooms who I know from other places and I've said you know I might want to think about maybe checking this out we have a new project coming up in January it's a new opera working with the composer and the librettist the librettist is a company member I grew my association with Cal State to become a company in residency we have a dean and a chair we're very supportive but I think the biggest thing has been how many people in your company who's there this week or how many people are in this show right now that's who it is the questions that were raised Brian gave me the book I asked to look at the book from there that we wanted to incorporate and the question of what do we mean by ensemble and whenever people ask that notion of ensemble for me really is who's in the room right now and like was being mentioned by many people it's what each person brings into the room I have a concept I have an idea of something I'm interested in and if people in the network are interested in that they'll come and join and dedicate themselves to that if they're not they're like nah that doesn't interest me sometimes things come because company members will be like you know we've only been doing this street stuff now and I'm really bored can we do a text piece sure let's do a text piece you know and then a script will appear or something will be created collectively and then after three months six months of that everyone's like yeah let's go back and do art walk again art walk's been a great discovery this is Meet Me at Metro that was done for a number of years but we started doing the art walks and we were surprised how we were surprised that there were no performers at art walk there's a lot of music, there's a lot of drinking there's a lot of galleries and there's not a lot of live performance happening and so we would just show up at street corners and perform viewpoints based site generated work and then drunk people would join us we're like this is awesome we want to join how cool is that and we figured you know there's got to be something about what we're doing that drunk people feel like it's okay to join us part of the reason we got the Meet Me at Metro is we just did some grill-less stuff on the map and we were like what are we doing what are we doing we're doing Meet Me at Metro we just did some grill-less stuff on the Metro one day and we got caught we get in trouble a lot with the police Pasadena in Colorado but we just tell them you know we're doing performance art and they just say okay please do that somewhere else but every one of these places non-performers wanted to join in and I just thought that was really lovely that happens if there's something right about what they're doing that it doesn't feel exclusive but it feels welcoming so yeah that's a little bit about what we do there's you know the social media up the wadzu but I felt it was more important to share about how how we're working through absolutely again it's that good back to what we were talking about yesterday the notions of ensemble that are encountering ensemble the very almost trite definitions that John hints at the beginning of his book where ensemble is just a long standing company of actors and you're obviously Tanya mentioning the similar issue it has nothing to do with the amount of people or the groups of people that are with you at the moment it has more to do with the work that you're sharing with each other and then trying to share with other people a community that's not out there right now in a nice black box theater and perhaps that maybe leads into you Brian if you want to share I'm under no pressure if you don't can I ask first of all that everyone just come closer where you are in this space just come up closer you can bring chairs if you like you don't have to sit on the floor I know people have been sitting on the floor for a while but just come on in closer we've been here for a couple of days there we go come on in sit or stand or whatever it may be cool thank you I tend to work a lot I'll try to speak to what everybody said hello I tend to work a lot as a theater of the oppressed practitioner or applied theater as the less scary version is called that you're allowed to do at things like colleges which Michael was kind of hinting at that work where it interacts a lot with policy interacts a lot with kind of the lived experiences and people in their lives and trying to bring theater to that and what I just did is how I go so for a while would start every workshop he would make everyone come closer he would make them make that choice to engage or not and so I don't have particular things that I'm going to say in the framework of the last project that I did which was in an affordable housing unit in Boyle Heights with a mix of sort of Mexican immigrant parents low income, Chicano kids who've grown up all of their lives in the States you know with babies nursing as they're doing scenes that kind of thing so it kind of relates to what we've been talking about and I just want to share some unknowings with you guys and it might be a response so I think it relates to the idea of family within an ensemble and this is actually going to families and saying will you be coming ensemble so that was my first kind of thought about this was what you're doing isn't saying I'm looking for actors and then we're going to form this sort of community based on the fact that we all like this thing you're going to people and you're saying hey I want to work with this community and often what I found in doing this work is you get families and you get especially within the Latino community it's cousins and grandparents and kids and you don't necessarily even know that they're related but you realize you're like oh I've been working in kind of two extended families through this entire work and I've been working with this community and really getting the whole community you know you're working with two families and that's great in a way because what you're doing is you're not coming in and saying I'm a hegemonic white dude and I'm going to come speak Spanish at you for three months and then leave you're saying look you're already a family I'm coming in and I'm bringing this thing I'm bringing this training I'm bringing something that I want to offer you maybe you're already an ensemble maybe you're already this community I don't have to make you a community I'm trying to bring some techniques and more than that just say hey what do you want to talk about and here's a framework for how we can talk about that and that's kind of interesting I talked to a friend who I did a long formal project in Ecuador that was about theater of the oppressed with oil drilling in an indigenous community and he totally rejected that he said that's bullshit and what theater of the oppressed tends to do is you go and you group people based on these sort of tertiary aspects so you're saying oh you're all the same because you're indigenous because you live in this community because you live in this housing complex and that's not really what's the most important to people that's something that we can point to very visibly and say oh yes this is your unifying factor but to say that that is a pre-existing community and they exist before they exist after isn't necessarily true and so there is an element maybe of creating that ensemble work of making a community even within what we have this preconceived notion of being existing communities and there's something in there as well what I wrote down is family within an ensemble versus the family as an ensemble as well I think it has to do with that idea of separation of life and art are we building a village are we coming into a village that's pre-existing I've done a lot of community development work and a lot of that talk is gentrification and that's something that's going on in Hollywood to a massive degree and so I think it's an important question to raise that is it a good idea for Hollywood not all of Hollywood but for this artist's village who is that displacing who are the people who are here now how are they served by the work that's going on can we serve them better with the work that's going on or is this something where we're saying well we work here so we want to live here too so you guys can go up to Pasadena you guys can go elsewhere and that's something that I think is an issue as artists that we need to not be afraid of we need to be politically engaged with how the spaces that we're in the work that we're doing are affecting the people who already live there and we have these great ideas and there's a space to invite people as well so those are some things some questions I think that it is interesting the idea of ensemble just being as someone was saying in an interviewer book you mentioned kind of almost facetiously just an issue of time it's interesting to see coming out of this work people going on and doing other theater projects people going on you know the housing complex I work with like the kids all play basketball together and that's what they did and that playing basketball we played a lot of sound ball in the work and so you see them playing sound ball and then also playing basketball and so it just kind of entered the lexicon sound ball being like when you pass the sound to them oh I started thinking so it kind of enters the lexicon of their play and isn't necessarily a thing of and now we are doing theater it becomes a thing of okay and this is this is another thing that people know about them and it's something where I think a lot of times theater would be oppressed and anytime you have sort of instructor and instructive particularly where there are class differences national differences race differences et cetera et cetera the idea of invitation is really important and also the idea of kind of a little bit what you were talking about you're sort of inviting people to join in and to respond and to give their own thing but you're not necessarily forcing something onto them and I'll say kind of one one more thing I think that's the idea that in a lot of Boal's work that kind of points in it the meat of it is that there isn't an audience and actors and that he talks about the idea of spect actors which is you present maybe a short scene that reflects the community's issues as you talk to them probably as community members performing and then you say to everyone right so this is a problem let's talk about that problem okay now how do we solve that don't tell me get up an act in this scene get up and make your own scene in response show us the solution show us the image of the problem and the image of the solution he talks in that language a lot and it's an idea that I think is something that's interesting and to be explored where we talked a lot about ensemble in the last two days but we haven't really talked about audience and how audience fits into ensemble and we have regulars and we have donors and we have supporters and we have relationships with audience members and that's something that I think you mentioned your principles and all that like we're very conscious of in some ways but it's definitely a question that I have particularly in work where you're asking you're going into a community you're separating out actors and audience but then you're asking them not to be separate and that community is something that goes on to your work and continues after and they're kind of their own ensemble so I think my question to all of you how can the audience what we think of as the audience be part of that ensemble how do you create a micro ensemble within the space of the performance again the idea of time maybe enters into that you have two hours to make an ensemble go how does that work those are my underlings thank you do you feel like responding I know we're getting to the end of a long weekend and I'm really aware of that well we're really almost done with Rachel on viral so if anybody needs to do it please do Rachel I just want to bring in your voice because you've been a lovely beautiful face there but we haven't gotten to see you speak and I just want to give you a chance to respond in any way you want or to share some of your thoughts on collaborating and maybe just identify who you are for anybody who doesn't know who you are sure hi I just have a very surreal experience watching in this way and particularly thinking about collectivity in this collection from afar and it's appropriate somehow because I'm a playwright and performance maker I work in a lot of different ways I experiment a lot with my writing I'm not part of an ensemble right now or any kind of set collective I collaborate with ensembles a lot so I gravitate towards these kinds of gatherings because I love collaborative performance making but it feels kind of meta to me in this conversation but like out of it literally miles away I'm in the ensemble but so all of this is just making me think of the word paradox and how what I gravitate towards the performance making are these sort of contradictory things of meeting like wanting to be in that practice of collaboration but also finding myself as kind of a floater for the most part geographically and otherwise but meeting both we used to be bouncing between them and not thinking too far into one only and you know the beautiful performance at the beginning I just was like I just want to throw everything I'm thinking about children and you know it's something that's on my mind a lot in terms of someone who was very much like children one day and the clock is ticking but not knowing how to not yet being able to financially sustain that in the practice that I'm pursuing so structures structures for organizations for ensemble are something very much searching for sustainable ones and I gather some of that has come up in earlier conversations I'm sorry I haven't been able to tune into everything but you know I'm very interested in what models you all are finding out there that has been sustainable for you so far or seem to be on a path towards sustainability not there yet that's the thing that's coming up for me and all of these different threads that was there absolutely but as a writer you've been working quite a lot with a number of different people throughout the country and maybe you could just talk to that or talk to the high project in Los Angeles so you could give us a model of something that's been working for you sure sure yeah two recent projects one is the high project which is coming up this week in Los Angeles tomorrow evening at Silver Lake Library and also Saturday at Silver Lake Library and then Friday evening at the Wolk downtown in a bay there's information on Facebook I can pass it around through Brian but that is that's kind of a great temporary ensemble that has emerged through Padua Playwrights I lived in Nellie for six years and actually was that all you had talking about the how much life you spend in your car yeah I couldn't tell so I think one of my cues to happiness Nellie was not owning a car I actually lived there for six years without a car for the most part and I think that was what kept me sane because I was walking a lot and taking this subway and getting by and it was a different pace because it was a healthier pace but anyway the high project Padua Playwright there's sort of been a temporary ensemble that has formed through that project and we're actually looking a lot at collectivity in the place themselves thinking about bees and the social behaviors of bees and what is happening in the bees disappearing and how humans relate to that and how collectivity of humans rely on that so these kind of interspecies interdependencies for collectivities and what happens when one starts to go away that's happening this week those are live performances they're working progress and they'll continue to grow and come back probably in the spring or summer and then my most recent kind of full length project has been with an ensemble here in Minneapolis called Supergroup they're kind of largely dance based but very movement oriented not specific threat of dance kind of exploratory movement practices and they work with text often but they never work with the collaborating playwright and I was really interested in working with them in part because as a writer I'm very curious about breaking open this idea of story and kind of looking at how else we can get that story or get deeper with the story then only sort of action based narratives I'm just curious what else is in the skin of that so working with Supergroup we were really movement and text we were very much in conversation with each other throughout the whole process and we were letting them inform each other and all the elements we were collaborating on all the elements the visual role of it and sound and everything so working with them has been awesome we've worked together about a year and we're continuing to work together in this next year to make another piece sort of building on the things we need to follow together and I can see the appeal of being in an ensemble where you do work with those same people over and over you can just keep going so that's sort of where I'm at that's lovely thank you Rachel going deeper and deeper is really the point of what we've been doing here over the weekend and it's just a little bit of a drop down into something deeper and we're going to keep going deeper and deeper throughout our lives and our journeys as human beings but I think that I'm looking around and seeing a lot of tired faces and a lot of people that have absorbed a lot of information and shared a lot and gone through some stuff and from the thing to the stuff and so I feel like there's clearly no wrapping up but around the teapot there's no sort of summation there's no sort of practical solutions it was really a chance for us to all get together and meet and experience each other through discourse and through practice as we've done over the weekend and unless somebody really feels like they want to add or do something we can just kind of slowly wrap it up I want to thank you and all of you thank you very much so I think we'll just send it here and thank Rachel for coming and Nick and Michael earlier for joining us and I do just want to thank HowlRound and HowlRoundTV and the people out there for all the work they've done in the creating of the theater commons on the web at least and allowing us to broadcast I also want to thank Katherine absolutely for inviting us to envision and organize create this experience with whom the idea was kind of germinated the whole weekend has been has been a collaborative effort for four months in the making and one that we've been generating and germinating and making richer and it's only started to come to life now with all the people in the room and all the other people that have joined us over the weekend so we're looking forward to seeing where it goes okay I've worked with a lot of people out of there before it is it is awkward to be here it's awkward to be here I know it's hard it's hard and I've friends who teach there doing the reverse commute it's like it was a hard decision for me to go to the ballet but I still have classes at home so I do like that you don't want me to do that I don't know about I'm very struck about grad school in that I think it's really critical to go into that tattooing environment and not have any distractions because it's really it's you never get to talk to time again and so when I can see that we're trying to do both I find it detrimental on both sides both sides suffer from you and because I also teach friends and you know they first come to me and they're like I have free jobs, that I'm in school at the end of the year we'll be relooking and looking at you and I watch them slowly fall apart and we have these meetings we need to not really delve into it as an institution you're really nice but on the other hand I think for yourself as a student I remember talking about the way that you are I'm not going to lie but close enough really get the point, see something come to the event that's great I think that I think red cat maybe a bit harder I think it's over now and the way that they try is that technical scenarios they put a little time as much as it's a break in so yeah that's just my feeling about red soul because I tell you, when I left New York I left my career I was just thinking you're taking off the locker you're doing would the passage you said to be there 12 or 13 years that's what makes me think but I couldn't do it even on breaks I was back in the old days and I think institutionally gave me more money than I was going to be here standing for all this shit I was going to have to I was coming out of the basement and brought it I was just thinking you're cheating you're cheating you're doing 12 you're doing 12 I was talking to the professor Sharon and we just spent the other day and we had like parallel stories about New York how we felt that the truth in any European country the struggles with like the social faux pas we both did people ask you would you like this song or and you're like oh I'm not supposed to have an opinion oh I why did you ask me there's this whole shit oh no it's where you better have an opinion you're not a citizen of an idiot if you don't have some critical thoughts yeah it's quite extraordinary you know yes doesn't mean yes but nobody ever would say no okay that's weird just say no and then I'll argue with you trying to change your mind but that's no for me and then we go on no that's the New Yorker and out here it's like yes yes yes and then they don't return your mind so you're like why are they saying yes every so long there's this great cartoon I've been working in Houston I've been working in Houston there's this great cartoon New York in LA New York New York New York New York out of the poise they said have a nice day they said have a nice day and mother would be the speaker yeah it's like this is good every time yes what would you do on Monday? oh just enjoy yay I love you so beautiful what a great recession to be the one you seem to love doing good for sessions and I like that I love scenes really just this that contact I like the energy of the people they're very managed and they're not showcased but just doing things they're like that sounds great how do you do it? well I get a review and there isn't a long just review that's good I love you so much I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you Thank you for that. Thank you for that. Thank you so much. I got to go. I got to go. I wanted to let you go. I actually really know you know. We're at each other's everywhere. Long live. What's going on? What's going on? What's going on? What's going on? You know. We'll let you know that your boat is not so tired or we don't feel at all. We wanna make this even more closer and more comfortable. Excellent. I was doing it. That's it. That's it. America. America is the best. So, that's me on my way to America. America? I love it. Love it.