 Good morning everyone. I'm Scott Stoner, Director of Programs and Resources for AAPAP. Welcome everybody virtually who's joining us this morning through HowlRoundTV. We hope you've been enjoying the conference virtually thus far. Welcome also to our second annual Five Minutes to Shine presentation. As those of you who were here last year know, last year's theme, conference theme, was shine. So we decided, well, why not do Five Minutes to Shine and extend our Bishaka Shaka approach that we do in a Saturday Plenary and bring it home to artists and members and just see who we can attract to bring in a best idea. And it was successful, we felt last year, so we're doing it again. And it also coincides with this year's theme, which is, of course, together. So it's bringing us together for that. So I'm not going to say much more because we have a moderator this morning, the lovely and talented Alicia Anstead actually who has worked very, has spent a lot of time working with the folks you're going to see with their presentations. It's not easy to do this. It's not easy to do something in Five Minutes, no matter what your idea or your message is. But she has done Yeoman's work in helping to craft these presentations with our finalists. And as you all know, the audience is going to vote at the end of these presentations on the presentation they think should go next door to the awards luncheon at noon and be presented to everybody at the awards luncheon. So Alicia Anstead is a journalist, a writer. She's a co-producer. For us here at APAP, she is one of our co-producers and technical director for the keynote plenary sessions and editor, of course, of the Inside Arts magazine. So Alicia Anstead. Thanks, Scott. Thank you, Scott. And welcome, everyone. It's so great to see so many of you here. Those of you who have your smartphones and are on Twitter and Facebook, it would be awesome if you sent something and invited more people to join us, even those of you who are watching on television. This event relies on critical mass to make decisions about who advances to the next level. So we'd be delighted if you shared that information with others who are with us in the room and beyond. This is a wonderful process. I'm not going to take too much time telling you about it, but each person today is going to speak for five minutes only and tell you a story about something brilliant in their career, something that is a shineable moment that we hope you can take home with you as an act of inspiration or something that helps you do more of a brilliant way as well. And we're going to just kick right off. Let me make sure I've told you everything that I need to tell you. The really key part for you as an audience member is to vote, and you should have a voting in the room and we'll tally them at the end and whoever advances to the next level will be giving this presentation in front of the entire membership, board of directors and others in the room when we go to the awards. So that's a really special event as well. We hope those of you in the room can join us for that. I believe there are still tickets available. Is that right, Scott, for the awards luncheon? There are. So it's going to get very quickly. So we're just going to kick off. I'm not going to do long bios for anything that will be up on the screen. You can Google them on your time and find out more about who they are. And I think you'll learn an awful lot about them in just five minutes. So we'd like to begin with Ariel Foster, a partner and design leader at each collaborative architecture. I love going first. Okay. I think we're ready to go. Oh, nope, that's not the first slide. So my name is Ariel Falstow and I like to think I have one of the better jobs in the world as an architect. I get to work with folks like you designing places for theater, music, dance and art. We focus on the intersection of arts, culture and public space, which gives us a chance to observe the world of performance from a different vantage point. For instance, dinner before the show. When I say that, I'm sure everyone here understands what I'm talking about. I'm sure everyone here has a memory connected to this phrase. It brings to mind a uniquely Broadway New York yet ubiquitous experience anywhere in the country. Have a nice dinner somewhere near the theater, skip the coffee and dessert, rush off to the theater for the first act. Dinner before the show. It's really quite a wonderful idea and it perfectly describes this unique relationship between food, performance and public space. I don't know that my slides are progressing, but ah, there you go. It's actually a very powerful idea. We know the experience of performance happens well before the curtain goes up. And when we all think about our audience, we should not only be thinking about their appetite for Shakespeare, but also their appetite for wine, cheese, Scotch, soda or even juice boxes. One of my most vivid memories of food and performance happened while I was traveling through Spain almost 20 years ago. I was a lot younger. I know I look young, but I was a lot younger. I was in Madrid trying to get to Portugal. I was tired, mostly broke and discouraged when I realized just how difficult it was to get to Lisbon from Madrid, especially when you're broke. Luck would have it that Vim Vendor's new film, Lisbon Story, was playing at this little movie theater near the hostel I was staying at. This was my consolation prize. Now, any American who has seen a movie in Europe will understand one fundamental difference about movies here versus there. Alcohol. It wasn't just the beer I was watching. I was having while in the lobby bar with a few locals. It was the beer I was enjoying while watching the movie. It confirmed one thing for me. Beer is better than soda. And for the first time, I realized that many of the cultural differences I was experiencing first began with their relationship to food. I never made it to Portugal, but I got in the great film An Elastic Memory. Today, audiences are changing and the experience of performance for those audiences is changing. Performance has become more accessible and is now reaching out to a broader demographic. Young, old, rich, poor, mainstream, avant-garde, performance has opened up for everyone. And so each of these different audiences expects a different experience. There's the dinner before the show model of Broadway, but if you're going downtown to the flea theater, it's a drink, a show, and a drink. If you're going to the Summer Film Festival at Bryan Park, it's also different. It's a picnic and a show, which is often preceded by a stampede of blanket throwers trying to get their space on the lawn. So I want everyone to think about, this happens all the time, and it's dangerous. Think about your audience and think about your lobby and public spaces. The nature of the theater lobby has come a long way since those 19th century theaters. Today, your lobby is everything to everyone. It's your first impression, your intermission space, your fundraising gala dinner space, your pre-performance or post-performance lecture space, your digital interactive space. Most importantly, it's the first opportunity you have to reveal the mission of your theater to your audience. What do you want to tell them? At LCT3, on top of the Vivien Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, this is on the roof. There is no stage door, right? So audiences and artists inevitably find their way to the same lobby, the same bar, and the same outdoor terrace overlooking Lincoln Center. This is not a bad way to start and end a performance. As architects, we see and are part of the creation and revitalization of many theaters, performance venues, and performance venues across the country. And I think we're entering a new era of performance, food, and public space. Food culture is big, and whether before, during, or after the show, food and drink will always play a huge part in that experience. Our cultural venues are now the progenitors of a new type of public space, one that has the opportunity to connect people to culture in new ways. Theaters, performing art centers, libraries, museums continue to evolve and create places for conversation and a sense of community. Our collective experience of theater, dance, or music may culminate with a performance, but it often begins with a house salad and may even end with cocktail. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next up is knitting songs with opera singer Melanie Gall. And if you want to move the stand away, that would be great. Thanks. All right, I'm ready. My sister is a crazy knitter. Now, this isn't the first time her hobby has taken over her life. There was bird watching. There was scrapbooking. And then one day, the sticker machine and the double-sided glitter tape disappeared. I started tripping over pointy sticks, balls of wool, and yes, knitting. Now, if you know a knitter, or if you're a knitter yourself, you'll know it isn't simply a matter of stitching up the occasional scarf. We're roommates in New York, and in our apartment, we have a yarn swift, a ball winder, six bags of full-sheep fleeces, and over 300 balls of yarn. I'm a freelancer, and I don't have a lot of time for extra hobbies. And at first, I was resentful about how my sister's hobby took over my entire life until I found the first knitting song. It was an accidental find. I was programming music into a music library database looking for songs, and I found this song called, and then she'd knit, knit, knit. Went like this. He'd take a hug, then he'd hug her some more, and she'd knit, knit, knit, knit. It was adorable. And just like in New York, in your apartment, when you see one mouse and you know there are probably a dozen more, I thought maybe, maybe there were more knitting songs out there just waiting for me to find them. Five years later, I have found over 100 knitting songs. 100 knitting songs from libraries, from antique stores, from private collections. So what does a girl do with a binder full of knitting music? Well, at first, I thought I'd perform them in a concert setting like a classical recital. But my sister paused and counting stitches long enough to look up and suggest this music was written to engage the knitters. So let them knit. I wrote a cabaret featuring these knitting songs. A cabaret where knitters were encouraged to knit. They get a ticket discount if they bring their knitting. We leave the house lights on halfway so they can see what they're doing. And I bring extra knitting. I bring scarves that I hand out. People stitch away at them and they're later donated to charity. The results have been interesting. I mean the knitters love it. They knit a sock. They watch a show. The scarves I've passed out have been stitched on from dozens of different hands, from hundreds of different people all over the world. Instead of strangers in a theater, there's a sense of community being built together. However, even though it usually goes well, I mean sometimes non-knitters take the wool. Once there was this hipster type guy who didn't know how to knit. He took the ball, he took the yarn and he just sort of held it in his hand and turned it around. But there have been issues, like counting stitches. So one time I was singing knit one. And you could clearly hear in the audience someone going 51, 62, 184. And then there was the incident of the mitten. In my show, I knit a mitten and I sing a song about the mitten. So there I was about to sing working on my mitten when all of a sudden in the front row a woman stood up. She said, honey, you dropped a stitch. Let me fix that. I'm not kidding. She came on stage, took my mitten, it was like the stage was like this, came up, took my mitten back to her seat, stood there and it was so awkward. But eventually I had to sing the pretty little mitten that kitty knit with no mitten. Metal knitting needles are incredibly loud when they're dropped in a theater. Especially when they roll all the way down the aisle and they're followed by a knitter trying to get them. And often knitters think they think that since they're knitting at a show and the show is about knitting, well, that they are a vocal and very, very involved, very involved part of the show. About a month ago I went up to visit my grandmother in Toronto. My grandmother, she's 93, you'll see her in a second, she's 93 and she too is a crazy knitter. And I stood there watching my grandmother, my mother and my sister knit and I started to think. Because her husband, my grandfather was a big band singer in the 1940s and growing up I was always the girl who had inherited the voice of the family. But watching all the stitching going on, I thought that actually there was another tradition being inherited. A knitting tradition, who knew, a one that brought my sister and me together. Now recently my sister made another purchase, this machine and four huge bags full of fabric. And, well, I'm on it. Thank you very much. Thanks so much Melanie. Next up, excuse me, is Carolyn Surrick, a musician and poet with, and she's a musician with ensemble galilé. Good morning, my name is Carolyn Surrick and I play the viola de gamba with ensemble galilé. A little over six years ago I started going to Walter Reed to play for wounded warriors and their families. And on the very first day that I went, I went to Malone House which is like, it's like a really nice hotel, only everyone there has visible or invisible injuries. And I sat in the corner playing the viola de gamba thinking, what was I thinking when this really nice young man rolled up in his wheelchair and started listening. And I played for him for a while and then we started to chat and then I gave him a quick viola de gamba lesson by balancing the instrument up on my toes and I put my scarf between the instrument and his wheelchair because his leg had been blown off and I taught him how to bow and how to finger and he played for a little while and then I played for him some more and I said to him, would you mind telling me what happened? And he told me about the day that he was in the back of the truck in Iraq and an improvised explosive projectile came through and blew his leg off and the thing that I will never forget is that he did not lose consciousness. From the moment it happened until he got to the aid station 11 miles later, he was awake and it was this, he's an extraordinary person. It was amazing and so then I played for him some more. He turned to go to lunch and he turned back and he looked at me with the biggest smile on his face and he said, ma'am, this was a once in a lifetime experience. So I got home, I called my friends Sue and Ginger and I'm like, we are doing this every Friday and they're like, okay, we're in. So I'm going to tell you about some of the things that you'll hear if you volunteer to work with wounded warriors and you'll hear a soldier who was first deployed in the First Gulf War and then Bosnia and then Korea and when she was sent back to the desert for the second time she suffered from severe post-traumatic stress and was met a back from Baghdad to Walter Reed and when we first saw her she would just walk by. It was like we didn't register that we were there. We're three people playing music, didn't register. After some months she would sit down and many, many, many months later she said to us that she had been a dancer before she was a soldier and that as a dancer she always had music in her head. She listened to music all the time. It was a complete part of her life and that after her injury she couldn't hear music anymore. Literally she didn't hear us as we passed by. She could not bring it to mind and what she said was that we gave music back to her and that music gave her life back and you'll hear a child say we play twinkle twinkle little star when the kids come through and I was alone one day and I finished playing twinkle twinkle and I said to the little girl are you here to see your daddy and she looked up at me and she said my daddy got dead and my granddaddy is here to take me home today and you'll hear a man say he's my brother. He was in a three truck convoy in Afghanistan. They had an IED so big that everyone was killed except my brother and he was without oxygen for seven minutes and the doc said he would never walk, he would never talk, he would never feed himself and he took his first step last week and so I said to this badly injured man in the wheelchair would you like to hear happy or sad music and he said to me quietly and clearly sad. So for the next 35 minutes we played the most beautiful sad music that we could think of as he sat tilted back in his wheelchair with his eyes closed. So I'm asking you to join me in changing the world and to send your artists into the community and if they say that they don't play background music this is what background music can do because the day after Major Nidal Hassan opened fire at Fort Hood and shot 38 people was a terrible day at Walter Reed and it was a terrible day because Nidal Hassan had been a psychiatrist at Walter Reed and my friend the sniper who had spent his entire adult life as a special forces sniper who when he was blown up in Baghdad lost the vision and hearing on his right side and the use of his three fingers on his left hand and he'd been a right-eyed left-handed shooter the day after Major Nidal Hassan opened fire was a terrible day because my friend knew that anywhere he was in the world he could be in the sights of someone else's sniper rifle. He and his three friends stayed at the Viola de Gamba and their talk was crazy, it was disturbing, it was paranoid but there was a safe place for them in the world that day and it was sitting with music. So please want to do oncology and they don't want to do pediatrics and they don't want to do wanted warriors just place them in the lobby of your community hospital and I promise you that they will change the world and the world will change them. Thank you. Thank you Carolyn, thank you very much. For those of you who are just joining us you're in the five minutes to shine session and I seem to be shining in front of that light right now myself and I want to welcome you and also encourage you to use our voting sheets which our volunteers and colleagues are handing out as you walk on to the next level later today to present his or her presentation at the awards lunch in front of our membership and board. So we look forward to seeing who your favorites are and tallying them at the end of our presentation. So now it's time for Illusionist Vitaly Beckman. Hello everyone. You can start the slide please. You know since I was a kid I wanted to turn my back because I was born in Soviet Union. That's me. And who knew that today I would look like Seinfeld or that I would sound like Borod. Okay, you know when I grew older my family moved to Israel and later I moved to Vancouver. I've always felt that the world could be a better, happier place if people could love what they do and do what they love. And I just like it but I'm truly passionate about it. I discovered that when I was 15 I saw David Copperfield show where he did a lot of grand scale magic like he made airplanes, trains disappear. He also did something small with just a couple of rubber bands and I was trying to figure it out. Now at first I couldn't but then I thought how would I do it if I had to show it to someone. So I tried and it worked. My mom was impressed. Actually my friends actually loved it too. And I started to come up with my own ideas. I realized I have the ability to create new illusions to bring imagination to reality. But my parents from Soviet Union they were very practical. They said we would like you to get a real job. So for four and a half years I studied engineering in Technion which is like MIT in the US. I don't know how I got my bachelor's degree because I skipped at least half of the lectures. And my favorite book from my first year in engineering was Stanislavsky's An Actor Prepares. Whenever I did not skip a lecture I chose to study the lectures performing skills rather than to listen to what he was teaching. One time during my job in very brief career in engineering my boss calls me and says Vitaly I heard you do magic at work. I'm like yes that's true. Could you show me some? You know finally I got the courage I quit my job and I moved to North America. At the airport you could see my weeping parents crying girlfriend but I was smiling. You know living overseas was not easy but my imagination illuminated the path because what I saw in my mind was so beautiful I was determined to make it real and share it with the world. I saw things like making drawings and pictures come to life. I wanted to put audience members inside a painting. I also wanted to amaze people in the most personal way possible. I wanted to make their faces disappear from their driver's licenses. Some of my visions were these gentlemen holding onto his driver's license. Some of my visions were not only impossible they were also illegal. But you know coming up with ideas is easy. It's making them real that took me years. And it's because there are no guides how to make them real. Usually I come up with ideas that have never been done before that are impossible to begin with. So it's simply working by trial and error whether it takes five months or five years. I don't care until it works because when I finally perform it for an audience and to them it feels like true wonder and for me all that effort is truly worth it. And you know I think you know my parents today they're my biggest fans. A lot of my colleagues mentioned to me that I inspired them with my original creations and I think you should be happy that I'm not an engineer as well. Because I think you should be happy I'm not building your bridges but instead I choose to bridge reality and imagination. Now every time you give life to an idea I feel more alive and that idea is now a part of me. And if you have an idea a dream and if you have the passion and the drive to see it through you can turn it into a picture a plan and then that plan can turn. Thanks very much. I bet Siob can't do that. Just guessing. Next up is Lynn Newman and she's going to tell us a story. Is this on? We're good to go? Let's roll guys. In 2006 I adopted an eight year old golden retriever Labrador mix named Sunny. When you have a dog you suddenly become aware of what's on the ground because their nose is always down there trying to put something in their mouth and not be in their mouth. In looking down I realized there's a lot of trash on the ground and most of it's plastic. Sunny and I used to go to Prospect Park in Brooklyn which is eight blocks from my apartment to play every morning. Because she's an older dog in several years she couldn't walk that far so we'd go to the corner which is 50 yards from my front door and counting trash. Some days there'd be six pieces now multiply that by 13,000 miles of sidewalk in New York City that is an insane amount of trash. What happens to it? Well street litter ends up going down storm which combines with your sink and toilet water on its way to a water treatment facility plant. During heavy rains which are now the norm the system overflows spewing trash and sewage into local waterways. This then follows currents and ends up either back on land or in an ocean's gyre. Now plastic doesn't biodegrade it might break into smaller bits but it doesn't ever go away. I was realizing this is a crisis and I was developing an obsession. Now I'm a choreographer so how I internalize and make sense of things is through creation so I decided to make a piece. I reached out to the Earth Institute for help with research and began collecting plastic six pack holders which would serve as the basis for the costumes. I worked with three local pizzerias and in three months we had collected 5,000 of them. I also began thinking how can I reach more people with this important message and my answer was take the work where people and trash are. So I wrote some grants to take our work outdoors several came through and the dancers and I began traipsing to Manhattan Beach and Coney Island to rehearse and in dancing on sand we began to unearth generous amounts of trash again mostly plastic. I signed up as a coastal cleanup volunteer and along with performances organized people to come and pick up litter off of the beach. The turnout for these events was amazing more than we'd ever seen in a theater. Okay we were a little trashy but it was important work. The following year we repeated the projects and thanks to a feature in the New York Times our numbers that showed up were exponentially greater. Now by 2001 I was connected with national and international organizations addressing water and plastic pollution. I even organized a trash tour of New York City for the BMW I'm left. Created a character called Polly Etheline that was performing at cabarets and symposiums around the city. And then my phone started ringing. Can artichoke dance company come and perform for National Water Dancers Day or for a benefit for the plastic pollution coalition? My volunteering my time was one thing but committing my company meant resources and I needed to make a decision about what direction we were going to take. I kept thinking about people who would stop and watch us take a picture or video engage us in questions about our work lend their hands to cleaning the beach or even join us in dancing. I realized this is where my passion is and I had to dive all in. So today artichoke dance performs a lot in highly public traffic locations. We've altered our mission and we're working with environmental agencies internationally and nationally who support our work. Rather than clamoring to get butts in seats we're performing for thousands who probably would never ever know who we are or what we do. We've engaged people in environmental activism and introduced them to dance. We've learned how to navigate crowds and draw them along. Our current challenge is to figure out who exactly that person taking a picture is and what the benefits we have are for them. But one thing is certain my work has changed and I have too and it's all because I started looking down. Sunny passed away during Hurricane Sandy. A couple days later I took her favorite toy to Prospect Park but it was barricaded so I approached a park's employee explaining my dog had passed away. I just needed to take this tennis ball and throw it around where we used to play. He explained that there were falling limbs and it was just too unsafe for me to go into the park. And then he looked at my face and said wait a minute you're that woman who does performances about trash. I saw you guys dancing at Coney Island when I was there checking out things at the park one day and saw a bunch of volunteers picking up the beach. He said go ahead but just be careful. Now he didn't know Sunny or how she had initiated that work but he did know me and what I did and the value I had and that never would have happened without Sunny or the passion she inspired in me for reaching out and picking up. Thank you. Thanks Lynn. That story always chokes me up when I see that dog. What is it about an animal right? So Lynn gave nifty bottle which is not a bottle it's not plastic and I'm sure she would like to encourage you to use similar products when you're drinking your water or in my case after this show vodka out of this. So I hope you're all voting I hope you're paying attention to who your favorite person is and the favorite story that you're hearing and that you'll let us know before you leave who that is so that person can progress to the next stage of our process with five minutes to shine. Our next speaker is John Slade. Ready John? Go. You ever doubt your next step or the next word out of your mouth? I used to do that all the time in school I used to think of the cool comeback when I was walking home not wanting to do any good. So but I was saved when I was 12 years old from terminal shyness by a drama teacher who looked like Abraham Lincoln only it was a woman. And her name was Patty Lumen and Patty Lumen said this is drama and speech so this will be about finding your voice so try on as many voices as you want until you find some that you like and that was brilliant because she knew that most of us were coming there for that not to become actors but to find our authentic voice that maybe would speak up for us in real life. And I had an actual conversion experience right there sitting on the floor listening to her talk which I wasn't getting in church or Boy Scouts or anywhere else when Miss Lumen unpacked our town for us and revealed that the stage manager might be God. And I said these people are talking about some of the same stuff I'm thinking about if that's what they talk about in drama class sign me up. So in senior year though I went to another school the teachers are way more uptight there but I got to play Henry Drummond and Inherit the Wind and Drummond gets to say some incredible things about evolution and religion and an opening night well we had a triumph but the second night the largest and most conservative church in our town closed down our production reportedly I brought this on myself because I said hell and dam and they explicitly told me not to but I knew there was a bigger reason so that evening I went to the evening service of that church I'm still wearing my big red galooses from the play and I said I'm here to see Reverend Brimley and they said alright and they led me back and I faced Reverend Brimley and I had nothing to say all I could think of were the words from the play and that didn't quite seem to fit so where was my voice and the answer is that it hadn't evolved yet it was trying to but it would take a little bit of time eventually I would become an actor I would marry an actor we'd give birth to little actors and then when I was 50 years old I often became a drama teacher and I would tell my kids this class will be about finding your voice and that by that time I had found a voice that I resonated with in Walt Whitman the bearded bard of Breaking Bad I just loved his music and his poetry and I found a way to get it across to high school kids Whitman is a very, very hard cell one girl said ew I don't like him he celebrates himself that's so conceited I'm not even kidding I said well what he's celebrating is is he just like you you know he's made of the same stardust and he's pointing his way back to the garden she said you mean he was a hippie I said no he was a rapper I am the poet of the body and she said did he sound like that I said yes he did to them and so in that instant I had found a way to teach Walt Whitman and you should just hear 30 kids rapping I hear America singing it's just glorious but in 2012 they handed me my pink slip declining enrollment but after I retired Whitman would not leave me alone in my head I kept hearing the song of the open road we must not stop here so here I am two years later with all of you I'm bringing my Whitman play with me and carrying my old delicious burdens I carry them with me wherever I go but see Walt Whitman is such an optimist that I am looking at the world now through Whitman's eyes and did you know that Whitman is a self-proclaimed evolutionist and when you take the long evolutionary view trends seem a lot more hopeful so yes I am trusting that Whitman's bigger transcendental vision and my wife Lori and I now have followed Walt out onto the open road and it is leading somewhere my passions have all flowed together and if Reverend Brimley were here right now I would find my voice and say sir your creation story is true but partial creation is a continuing miracle and I am living proof of it I lost my job it caused an evolutionary crisis but as a result of this I am happier than I ever have been in my life I'm 66 years old and I am a work in progress and aren't we all? Thank you John very much Isn't it extraordinary what you can do in five minutes and what you can learn from a story in just five minutes it's really been such a privilege for me to walk through these stories over a period of a couple months and then to hear them with you today Jay Ruby is our next and final performer presenter and just a reminder to vote you should have your ballots with you and we will collect them as you leave the room when we're done today and Jay take us out Yes I am ready red ropes between us crawling between necessity and compromise and cross-cultural collaboration I grit my teeth bite my tongue and think I hate this red rope it's useless it's not a question of our vocabulary it's a borderline cliche and as a director I want to get rid of it five performers faces full of sweat and dirt and exhausted from acrobatic stilt walking stare at me in frustration four weeks down one to go my company the carpet bag brigade is rehearsing and developing a performance with Nemcatecoa Teatro from Bogota in the small mountain town of Columbia it's the middle of a long day the sun is heating up young children pour into the courtyard as the after school program begins it's getting noisier next week we present our work for the first time and the following week we present at the Aburo Americano festival the cast is nervous especially our colleagues from Bogota me too and the performer asks can we just get rid of this red rope two weeks earlier I introduced El Guzano the caterpillar a series of synchronized movements requiring performers to crawl rhythmically on the ground on and around each other with their stilts on it was sweaty, dirty and difficult work especially on concrete and asphalt initially the performers resisted the movements are awkward it's hard to do it hurts it will take a week to get three good minutes when Fuentes the director of Nemcaracoa Teatro tells his crew we are not here to do what we know but to try what we don't know Nico is my colleague and co-director of the Dios de la Adrenalina project he introduced the red rope insisting on its inclusion because of its metaphorical meaning to the topic we are exploring the impact of contraband cocaine on each of our societies no one in his company is more than two degrees of separation from an experience of violence through narco trafficking some are closer to negate the rope is to negate their desire to express that experience it must be included so I smile probably a grimace and respond no we need to use the rope our theater companies specialize in acrobatic stilt walking exchanging the craft of our technique we develop a model of collaboration with two directors two companies a bilingual spoken word artist and three Andean musicians it's complicated and there's a lot of moving parts it's not about aesthetics and results it's about broadening and understanding diverse narratives and making time for our necessities to be discovered and space for them to coexist and evolve with time and space we connect the states into an elaborate floor dance with acrobatic stilts illuminating the path of a plant often misused for power with time and space the red rope unravels connecting us to the suffering we each inherit living in a labyrinth of misunderstanding through sustained contact we disengage the traps of habitual narratives we understand the necessities of the other it supersedes any narrative we try to tell it becomes the narrative we live bridging a cultural divide transforms our circumstances it reconfigures our personal limits allowing spectators to witness two cultures in the act of reconciliation the felt experience of how trust functions shifts perception changes habitual social narratives are uprooted making space for new ones to arise crawling on asphalt with stilts and clinging to red ropes was the gauntlet we had to run to affirm our trust in recognizing each other's narratives but the essential act in our creative process is transferrable it is the will to listen and affirm diverse narratives if creative work is to approach the cultural divides engulfing our country and our world it will serve us well to sustain engagement in which cultural reconciliation overrides aesthetic achievement in terms of value so if you're not voted please do that before you leave the room I if you know that could be part of our annual next year call for applications and join us in the same process next year we'd love to have more voices and more of you on stage thank you very much for being here we hope that the conference and that you'll vote before you leave and could you just join me in thanking our presenters again today