 They're the main question that's driving their topic and and that's it that's this is just a way for you to orient yourself because it can be a little bit different this goes really fast it can be difficult to to kind of keep track of things what I would like you to do can actually just give me this really a little seed of an idea and we're going to try to see if it works as you have their individual questions here but since we are a room full of drama chairs and we are obsessed with connections what I would like you to do as you're listening to each of these individual presentations I would like you to listen for connections between presentations so that when they finish their presentations your question has to be about a connection between two presentations you can't just ask for about one presentation you have to ask about two okay so those are your rules now I'm going to tell you what their rules are so it doesn't freak you out so they each have five minutes to present at four minutes Rahaf is going to raise her hand and let them know that they have one minute left they're going to acknowledge her so she's enough to keep her hand up for the for the next minute then at five minutes she's going to raise her hand back up let them finish their point close her fist and then this is where they remember why they never wanted to be actors or why they don't want to be actors anymore because they will they will be told thank you and they're finished okay so so all that's going to happen from here on out is that they're going to come up here they're going to tell you who they are they're going to tell you your pronoun their pronouns and then the and then the timer is going to start okay um and then I just have to say Judith uh had a you're here just to just to hear so that you're so that you're right here so so now so that's great then all I have to do is tell you that Shelley's flight got cancelled so she sent us the text of her presentation and Brian is going to read it uh after Desiree gives her presentation now if you could all pull out the newsletter that you have that's very important for Jeff's presentation yep and I would like Jeff to hold him his so on one piece of paper one one side of a piece of paper you hold in your hands the side of the photo is a reproduction of the first issue of what would become the LMDA review and you can see that someone in a great leap of faith has labeled it volume one number one January 1986 now on the other side you will see the first page of the first program for the first annual meeting of literary managers and dramaturgies of the americas august 21 to 23 1986 let's take a look at it first after opening remarks by our first founding president alexa screen we have our first panel and I like how current it sounds artistic and professional goals in the face of financial deficit with mark bligh uh dade copeland alexa screen jome patchin and richard pettengill followed immediately and appropriately by a cocktail party a cast bar of course um set ken gave us a free bar once i remember that now uh deficit and drinking that was our beginning okay so the second panel uh attended next morning on friday just like ours today is on dramaturgy for the non-linear theater with anketonio davis king and jonathan marx the third after a two-hour lunch break the dramaturg is objective voice in rehearsal with mark and oscar eustis and emily man so some of our earliest conversations confront distress grapple with new forms think about how we interact with our collaborators um the rest of that program is now available online and reminds us that despite all the work left to do we here today are part of a long rich generous conversation alexis by the way is currently working on a book about emily man so let's turn the paper over and look at the first page of the first review in the archive online and physical this issue is incomplete we only have pages one six seven and eight a gift to future scholars who can speculate about what those tantalizing missing pages contain but we do have in full an account of the first lmda conference and a transcript of des machinist keynote the conference report however is not the first annual conference we just looked at but a conference that took place about 10 months before the first uh the first uh annual before the first annual meeting now for this conference the first lmda conference of any kind the only archival record we have is this article and i love the uncontained exasperation of one sentence in particular the object of this conference was to see if there could be a demonstration of what a dramaturg does rather than once again a series of unending panels during which panelists tried to define a term which as as this afternoon demonstrated may be largely undefinable so that's a reminder that even in 1986 dramaturgs had been engaged in these sometimes maddening conversations for years with us joanna pointed out unique traditions and lineages in canada in the us now both pieces in this first review offer useful insights into relatively early moments in the field but what strikes me most about the first page of the first review is the face on its cover not so much for whose faces is although that's important canadian and u.s citizen des machinist discussing in part his work with robert blacker but for what this space suggests no two of us i know will read this in the same way with respect to its characteristics and identities we could spend all day talking about that but i have to say i really like the lips and the eyes and perhaps most of all that the kind of union shadow that divides the face almost in two we begin this story of who we are with a face with the face of a collaborator of someone looking at his full on inviting us it seems at least to me to something rather wonderful and now over 40 years later we have robert's new book on shakespearian dramaturgy based in large part on his work with des with an introduction by des as part of a whole series of books by major press dedicated to dramaturgy edited by mob the romanska so i think we may better understand the most recent writing in the field if we take a moment now and then to look back at this younger face of who we once were finally thanks to everyone who's helped to make the archive possible many in this room with special mention today to have eviva avram who sat with and did much of the initial work to my colleague sir freeman to mark line larry singly ono for a work on the online thing and finally a shout out to jeremy stoller who continues his work with the newsletter and to christen like he's going to edit the next edition that was great um hi i'm tom brian he him uh the question here is uh adaptation of history to drama what are some of the concerns and choices playwrights face the adaptation of history to drama particularly in terms of current uh cultural and political issues and i'm much more interested in all your experiences i mean i've had a lot of experiences in this area but i know we all have opinions about this that are pretty diverse here here are just some you know points to kind of take off from but i'm sure there are many many more avenues one um what are some of the issues in the period today that uh uh are are irrelevant or not as relevant in a particular period piece in other words how can you make a period piece or a historical period more relevant to today because sometimes it can be exciting in and of itself in a period but does it relate to today and so why are we dramatizing this thing itself uh two are the issues in the period events that would be judged offensive to today's politics cultural sensibilities if so you may have a historical event that's extremely important but are contained within that so so many kind of you know for instance racism or sexism or homophobia is that just the presentation of itself is kind of uh problematical that's another issue um are there appropriation issues i.e cultural elements by non-additioned as you know people uh adapting say cultural you know cultural uh either history or practices of indigenous people and you saw that i can clearly yesterday the panel with uh gilmanique spy and lindsay you know an entire panel about the sensitivity towards those issues and how that might deal with things um here's another side issue how does the background of a specific writer influence how they deal with history in other words a playwright of a given cultural race sexual orientation background often creates a unique perspective by the way i'm not presenting these all as problems but more as you know the whole process of how you adapt something so does that give a unique perspective to the thing if it's so what way um what are examples of uh shall we say the issue of faithfulness to history whatever that means i mean the entire question of whose history from what point of view immediately comes up but there's a but there's a kind of also an aesthetic issue attached to that um in other words when you depart from history in the instance of dramatizing something it often seems like sometimes there's some kind of way in which that's judged to be acceptable and other times that's judged to be completely unacceptable either revisionist or uh just untruthful where's the line there between uh fudging history in a way that makes it shall we say more dramatizable etc uh anyway those are some of the main topics in terms of this idea of adaptation of history and what dramaturgs can uh playwrights face when they're adapting history how much time do they have three minutes and four seconds okay let me give you one example i i worked with lisa lumar on row uh which is about and this was in the context of osf's uh american revolutions or as it used to be known the american history project so you had a very specific idea which was you're supposed to adapt history well the question is how do you make that relevant today because what she was dealing with was a very specific period well times of course of change so she has a unique perspective as a latina playwright that entered in very heavily one of her solutions was to introduce a character for instance at the end of the play who literally stops the show stands up and says i'm you know i'm young woman i'm pregnant what do i do you see in that way lisa's introducing a completely different perspective into what is essentially a historic piece you can picture an adaptation of row being done mainly as a courageous attorney winning a case in which case what relevance does that have to today and in fact maybe even damaging because it creates the false illusion that this has been one this has been taken care of you see uh i'm probably almost out of time anyway you get you get the idea um what are some of the experience you guys have had or what are some of the opinions you have on the adaptation history that's my question uh suny prudonia and he him his and what i'd like to talk about is broaching theoretical borders the passage of time and its impact on theatrical texts how should practitioners of theater approach the production of works as their meeting in context evolves with the passage of time and how can we as dramaturgs play a vital role in the facilitation of this process um and i'd like to discuss this kind of through the lens of my my last year in undergrad going through two particular productions one which was uh a production much ado about nothing and the second being a production of daisy pulls it off two very kind of drastically different um shows and just look you know kind of looking at how the approaches were different specifically looking at the text um when i you know the work that i done on much ado i was really excited because you know this there's this show has just been and you know analyzed and reimagined so many times there there's just there's so much that you can do with with the text in relation to the production and when we got into the room into the design like the design concept one of the things that we just kind of immediately ran into was the approach was shakespeare is timeless and it was the concept was the concept itself was very flat and everything was kind of taken at face value and for me as a dramaturg one of the things that was kind of very disheartening about that was you know how how do we get you know despite the fact that this text is hundreds of years old how do we find new ways of life into this and you know kind of reevaluate it and reanalyze it for modern audiences and that really wasn't the approach that was that was taken with our production and i think that ultimately it kind of um i think it hindered some of the things that we could do with it as far as uh development of relationships and the characters and relating that to the audience and on you know the other side of it with daisy pulls it off um from from my experience and from my perspective it was significantly more difficult than our production much ado because some of the um some of the ideas about it heading into it as far as the text one was the source material was dated the show itself was dated and it was kind of limited to community theater and amateur productions and other than occasionally being produced professionally in you know europe specifically england the approach from the designers and even um the perspective from some of the actors was this show is really dated i can't rule it i can't relate to this material i can't relate to the characters and so kind of i took it upon myself to really sit down and say well no if we really break down this text the source material the historical context social political cultural we can add so much to this production and across the experience of these two shows it kind of um kind of put me in a position to question you know how do we approach different texts different texts and you know kind of the perspectives facing them which you know with shakespeare it was very let's look at this face value let's take this for what it is even though it's hundreds of years old and with daisy it the the work was significantly newer and i was shocked that the the opinion was this material is dated you know it's it's not going to stand up to the test of time and you know that that really put me in a position to question well is that really true and how do we how do we accurately evaluate the value of a text especially um comparatively looking at you know older texts you know the classics from the greeks the romans um and then moving all the way up into more more modern day plays and i just i thought that was that was really interesting that that that had kind of arisen because i you know you always look at these um these productions as kind of a standalone separately and i think that you know in in my case i felt that there it really was the production daisy pulls it off as a whole would have been drastically different without without a drama story without someone to really kind of um imbue the text with new life and kind of uh really engage with the actors with with it even with the designers uh someone from where uh were faculty who kind of had this very limited scope and this limited approach to what they saw in the text and i think that you know we as dramaters um kind of can play a really vital role in um kind of changing changing the perspective and changing the you know the stigma that are attached with certain texts and certain productions and so i would post to all of you to kind of question how can we as dramaters uh approach every production we do and look at the the perception of that text as it stands and how does that fit what our production is doing and if it doesn't work how can we change that and update it and and make it fit without drastically shifting the the core values of the text thank you toronto from istanbul for pursuing a doctoral degree in theater i have achieved my abd status in the theater program of university of toronto wrote four plays in english translated my three turkish plays into english send my place to countless playwriting competitions reached out to many academics and theater practitioners about my works received mixed advice but mostly no response uh worked in all sorts of professional and student productions and organized fundraising activities in toronto throughout this long trial and error process of searching for a niche to work in toronto in terms that i can agree politically and artistically i ultimately and brutally failed because of institutional racism that politely masks itself through professionalism in my experience with toronto theater community professional has always been a term that hides first world supremacy and english language supremacy again and again leaving more breathing space even in the margins to make mistakes and experiment for newcomer and second language english speaker theater artists professionalism a great all-encompassing discourse with its immunity to criticism of institutional racism simultaneously has the capacity to bend its rules for the group of its in group this particular professionalism also insistently and unapologetically labels all aesthetics other than the anglo-canadian realism which is taught in theater schools across english canada as the norm as a motorist after four years of constant struggle in this realm i decided to quit trying to work in toronto altogether but since now i feel like i know what toronto theater wants from an immigrant artist i want to share my hard game to visit them with you based on the experiences of many immigrant theater artists i know including myself here is the list of what the immigrant theater practitioner needs to do to become a part of the super multicultural and all welcoming theater community in toronto don't try to speak for yourself find an available white female theater practitioner who thinks that personal empathy and state funds are the basis of theater and has no idea about political solidarity in dark times give her your authentic story so she can speak on your behalf through using your works in a verbatim play and become a successful theater practitioner remember that fiction is the field of people who are born with a western passport so never dare to talk beyond your authentic experiences and go along with the fetishization of your life on stage two if you insist to talk for yourself remember that immigrant theater practitioners work can only be about how horrible their home country was and how great canada is and how grateful how grateful they are to be in canada it is more preferable if you can tell this team as a small family drama be kitchen synchronism and the play should take place in its entirety in one or at most two domestic settings if you are going to have one domestic setting it must be the living room of the small immigrant family in canada and if you are going to have two settings one should be the living room in the horrible home country and the other should be the living room in the amazing canada if you manage to finally stage a play you should always be grateful and constantly demonstrate how grateful you are again and again but don't expect to have a second play under any condition since the diversity quota is used for you enough times already five if you ever get any success in theater you should always remember that it is not due to your hard work and agency but due to the open-heartedness and kindness of the canadian theater community six if you actually manage to stage your intergenerational family kitchen sink drama with the bright high note at the end that masks marks how amazing canada is never forget that you have to cast people with clean and ironed english with no bastard accents if there's an accent needed on the stage make sure that you cast a person who can mimic that accent but never someone that actually speaks in that accent after your amazing casting choices shamelessly become a part of the larger and endless debates in toronto theater community about what is real and authentic in theater and never feel any disgust because of the perpetuity hypocrisy actually you will have a very better chance of success if you are not aware of it completely and last but not the least seven never dare to act as if you're an artist with a remarkable past and intellectual capacity and remember that your canadian fellow artists will never have anything to learn from you even if you were a national celebrity in your home country since they are very polite and nice people let them educate you about theater and obey them unconditionally because if you don't they will collectively gas like you masking their institutional racism as professionalism and from all theater resources politely thank you she heard hers the question i'm asking is how does the search for the nexus of dramaturgy and marketing lead to a reframing and reorientation of the conversation surrounding diversity and equity inclusion especially when it comes to non-profit institutions in the united states at the beginning this is this was the essential question that i'm still asking four weeks after i turned in my master's thesis my master's thesis began as the search for the nexus between dramaturgy and marketing as it is a place where i seem to live professionally and i thought i would find that by trying to understand the conversation surrounding diversity and equity inclusion especially pertains to programming and season planning in non-profit institutions in america and as i did that and as i worked and worked to understand the conversation i found myself needing to reorient it and reframe it and so how i did that is still a mystery to me i sought to do that as i fell down this wormhole by taking a broad longitudinal survey is the conversation that i saw it broad because it went across conversations it didn't just look at the conversation of gender parity or the conversation around racial racial inclusion and equity or inclusion of people with disabilities or the needs of people with families and how to accommodate them but i tried to look at people speaking on all of these topics and the commonalities of what they had to say it was also longitudinal in that i worked to go back to the 1990s knowing that you could probably go even earlier but that's that's where i chose to kind of keep my cap on it and in doing so i ended up reorienting the conversation as i saw it for myself because in the beginning i saw it as as i said a conversation of conversations that felt very cacophonous to me and i ended up reorienting it as i looked at both what leading artistic directors and playwrights and dramaturgs had to say as well as what marketers had to say arts marketers had to say i'm looking at it more as as juana shepherd and stein would say as a continuum of arts oriented and market oriented choices um i then ended up trying to having to reframe the conversation um by looking again not at those specific conversations but looking more at what people had to say about what they thought what they thought institutions were for and who they were for and how they defined exactly who that who who therefore is and how all of that defines how institutions value work and the values that they espouse um and i did that and as i as i did that um i came up with what i found is a spectrum of perspectives that has two pretty distinct polls that you will hear sometimes but oftentimes people lie more in the middle um and as i did that um what i started seeing coalescing in terms in terms of my own making as i knew it um i started to find an artist oriented perspective and an audience oriented perspective and then an eco perspective ecosystem perspective that would tie it all together um the artist oriented perspective would be maybe the kinds of things that you've heard um with the idea that art that because art reflects artists and therefore reflects you know the identity of the art of the artistic director of the company that therefore companies companies serve artists and i know part of an artist community and therefore what especially when it comes to back into the conversation surrounding diversity and equity inclusion the people who had that perspective um would be the kind of people who were saying that the way to achieve diversity and equity inclusion would be to um to have a more to hire a more diverse staff um diverse in in all the kind of ways that you would want and those people will therefore choose more diverse programming um that way whereas the audience oriented perspective sorry one thank you uh whereas the audience oriented perspective was the kind that you might hear um where people say that theaters serve communities and that they need to reflect the communities around them in all their diversity and that in your in your programming um if you work harder to uh to reflect that community um in your programming then therefore you will need um a more a more diverse and inclusive and equitable base of artists to to do that programming well um I then found as I did that um an ecosystem perspective that's kind of in two parts um it connects these two poles because there's so much there's there's so many opinions that can kind of be in between by again looking at a continuum of arts of arts oriented and market oriented decision making that brings these two values together but what also uh a perspective that also says that companies can be one can be oriented towards one or the other and that both of those um can actually exist in our theater theater ecosystem our theater industry ecosystem and feed each other and actually having both of these kinds of companies um or a mix in between um would give you um would help you create more diversity and equity inclusion and I'm looking to see if if that's a perspective that if this is a way of looking at it that people find valid and useful and helpful and how it can go wider so thank you hello Bill she her hers I decided to collect some interviews to collect ideas on how drama terms might work with a performance artist creating non-repeatable work so my own questions include uh why would I repeat if it only serves to perpetuate colonial thinking patterns if theater is tied up with colonial gaze is there a way out how do I disrupt my own habits of perception in the creation process if artworks if artwork stores potential understanding wouldn't it be better to develop my performance making practices of rigorous attention to possibilities rather than the narrowing down of choices wouldn't this drive a dramaturg mad trying to get me to commit to things when everything that is decided is potentially the problem that needs to be identified and overcome and how uh can we imagine other people receiving the work when we haven't met these people yet uh what can a dramaturg do um if we take the situation of unpredictability as a given is the dramaturg always trying to anchor into what is known what if we intentionally do not know what to know the outcome is there a particular opportunity for the dramaturg in this situation Rick Knowles wrote me that planning process is always better than pre-envisioning results the anchor is in the doing and that collaboration across difference as much as possible ensures that all of our taken for granted will be destabilized in unpredictable ways some of the questions involved what are the component parts and how they fit together what do the relationships between components do and how will the show make folks sit differently my friend of an outside eye Fiona Griffith said you have to be someone doing something somewhere at some time for some reason even when you're improvising and it needs to be in the body Fiona suggests a daily practice of making lists about fears ecstasies things you want to see on stage actions edit those lists improvise based on each word begin to begin creating gestures and but you're always tethered to these concepts that are meaningful to you she spoke with the coach is having the body of keeping the body of the performer on track and the dramaturg is having the job of keeping the world of the performance on track but she also spoke of finding where those two circles intersect she spoke about a need for intellectual rigor to discuss concepts politics philosophy to be doing something you have to know the world you're in we are hardwired to have a world anyway sorry mix am over and to actually deal with each layer she spoke about people often hiding a performance and being in a state where they can't take responsibility for their actions sometimes in a dissociative state she talks about being in solo influence and both you have to feel and sense the audience is speaking to Amy Henderson who does not consider herself a dramaturg but she is um acted for me as an outside eye with dramaturgical thinking and she's asking questions um she's uh she's working on reading what is happening already by supporting people in a way that allows the artwork in the process to become the site of intelligence and it folds the performers into conversations that languages the work so that the site of those articulations are not in one person's domain so there isn't a binary between the people who do and the people who think for me she suggests the questions what do we need for this to be a thing what do you need to practice on the inside to trust your decisions or to know the durations of things is this a piece about deciding on the durations of things and what's the dramaturgy of your particular process which has us as main inquiry a lack of repeatability and what kind of process needs to develop between you and someone to create the dramaturgy that's appropriate for the work you want to do jacob zimmer he sees dramaturgy its relationship between individuals as a dance dramaturgy jacob has hired its curious curious outsider toward emergent practices he's noting what he's seeing what he makes him feel the associations he's having the things he's thinking about as he's watching he's interested in dramaturgy of the event more than the piece how do we create the conditions for the work to succeed succeed what is success what feelings do we want to be left with do we want the audience to walk alone in the streets and reflect or do we want everyone clapping and singing at the end of the at the end we can work on a show that does that he prefers audience focus questions and legibility what are they expecting he invites the audience in he wants to make people feel welcome he wants to feel they have an understanding of what's going on we're about to do something hard it's important for you to know that i'm not an asshole uh how do i prepare you for the hard thing we are going to do together i will break the rules for a laugh because i'm more interested in the immediacy of the relationship between audience and performer towards reciprocal hospitality regarding non-repeatable how do you make structures that you can do more than once but you still have a deciding body on stage how does a person do a thing a dramaturgy can help with that but there has to be a layer of readability how is there a layer of the show that is a clear path for that people can hook on to something familiar around which strangeness can happen what are the rules and how do we know them lukas olskam uh the dramaturg is trying to speak into existence what's already going on in the room through observation translation and deep listening he's aiming to create an unspoken flow designing the roller coaster of the show how can we make the journey do what we want it to do to structure according to how you want to affect people taking deep embodied structural experiences from his life not necessarily connected to the content but choosing structures to layer on uh that can split open the work it's not about metaphor it's to not let the dramaturgy take over the story it's a translation of structures in his point of view uh an embodied dramaturgy that creates behavioral affordances when time's up sound she her hers every four years the university of preach sound racing pedagogy institute hosts the national conference in collaboration with the university of washington doctoral student monica cortez Villarro and students from my spring projects and dramaturgy class i'm creating a performance walk for the september 2018 conference in to come the walk aims to take participants through to coma's hilltop neighborhood and remember map and imaginatively explore the civil rights activism that shaped to coma i proposed this hot topic in order to update lmda about our process engaging existing oral histories and local and campus archives and to preview the emerging form of the walk first however i have to call the names of how i got here i could never have conceived the form of this project without the examples provided to me by lmda artists and scholars i encountered the performance walk form as part of my research about alternative british theater companies but without the work of shellior dj hopkins and kim solga at lmda and astr conferences and in their publications uh i would not have such rich framing all of the work around dramaturgy in the city and the conference planning that went into conferences around those themes by say jane barnett matters i absorbed it during a period when i was not able to attend lmda conferences regularly but was still soaking in all the work shared here i noticed that the athg program uh shows the dramaturgy focus group doing an exciting set of sessions about the dramaturgy of various walks around trails in boston in august so i see that work continues and i'm going to call the name of laronica thomas and her synthesis of many conversations boring around notions of civic dramaturgy and the type of things we saw in the secret life of canada podcast plenary yesterday so all of those dramaturgical sensibilities have inspired me the update is i am at the juncture of the work where i do not know what we have i'm asking what jeff pearl taught me is the fundamental dramaturgical question the one lee devin frames in his essay for dramaturgy and american theater on conceiving the forms what are the parts of this thing and how do they go together i know the parts we have a set of existing oral history interviews from the tecoma civil rights project that happened between 2005 and 2008 we have the short documentary film created by the tcrp we have additional oral history interviews and papers from the community history program run by professors mike honey and michael sullivan at uw tecoma and we have a recording of a story circle among four african-american women that i just conducted with monica on june 3rd we have access to archival materials in the northwest reading room at the tecoma public library the tecoma historical society the washington state history museum and the university of prudence sound special collections we have the experience of walking the neighborhood and have 11 walk visions created by my projects and dramaturgy students for their finals at the end of spring semester those parts are made up of parts themes sense memories genealogical narrations news reports poems attempts to notice patterns attempts to recreate certain lived experiences attempts to preserve buildings strategies for acknowledging absences in the physical landscape the themes that repeat have to do with one the legacy of redlining juxtapositions of the past fight for fair housing with the present accelerating gentrification in tecoma two the role of churches in gathering people together for action and three the surprise of how racism works in a place that some people describe as god's country and seem to be unlike either the south or the northeast in terms of racism in the mid-century ha ha there is something going on with generations the stories of elders the absence of younger generations there is something going on with needing to figure out what concrete reforms could be made now legislatively or with other types of policy or institutions i have to be honest i have no idea how it all goes together i know we have resident material i know we have plenty of space in which to walk i know we have about an hour for the walk i know there's too much to do before september so as i update lnda now on the project of dramaturgy community history in action i would have to say it takes so much more conceiving than anything i have done before conceiving the form of a dramatic text means engaging with something already aesthetically shaped it is a truism of historians that the past does not have a form we only give it form by writing about it retelling it and turning it into narrative and art i notice as a historian i am now feeling it as an artist is that five thank you north university toronto yes i said it was a t toronto we also say it that way don't let anything tell you different friends or she her and hers the question that i want to ask today or begin with is how do you dramaturge work inspired by the playwright's life and what are the questions to ask to start the evolution of fact into interpretation no arguably that's what making theater is we take something you know it would be true and then we embroider it or we reinterpret it but i'm working on a very particular project right now i'm working with a mother and daughter both who identify as queer women and they wanted to explore their their lives but not explore their lives so my first point of departure was to ask them what if the question that we began with was what if you had made different decisions at any point in either of your lives and how would that have impacted on how your path through life progressed that gave us three sets of characters the playwright mother is lois fine who some of you may know from her play that premiered at buddies and bad times theater a couple of years ago frida and jem's best of the week it was also given a stage reading at renaissance theater in san francisco a couple of weeks ago her daughter seedy ebbstein fine is the intern artistic director at night with theater one of our most well known and longest running feminist theater companies in the country and she's also an associate artist at a theater direct canada a theater for young audiences so we started with the what if and what we discovered was lois's big what if was what if i hadn't come out what if i had led a closeted life as a gendered sexual married woman what would that have been what would my life have been and that led us down all kinds of a variety of rabbit holes not just one seedy's question was what if i did not have a secure home environment what if my life had not been uh protected what if i didn't start from a position of power and privilege what would that have done to me as a queer queer spawn which is how she identifies we started to jam on that and we came up with three sets of mothers and daughters not surprisingly one set of mother and daughter is called the lois and seedy and again not surprisingly those are the hardest ones for them to work on that there's just if there's all kinds of problems inherent in trying to write about yourself but not yourself they started calling the play beside myself the three types of questions that we've asked so far are the what if what if things have been different and you had made different choices confessions what is something that your mother character or your daughter character wants to confess to the other person and why here why now why are we looking at this particular section of the character's lives at this juncture in their life once we had a loose set of three narratives we started finding points of intersection and braiding them together what i'm interested in hearing from those of you assembled here is other types of questions that you think might be good provocations because we find ourselves now at a point where we've been working for two years and we have a script we're just not happy with it yet we will have arguably you're never going to be happy with it but it's it's such an intense labor of love that we're all and i count myself in this position as well we're in a place now where we don't have any distance anymore we're starting to run out of questions to ask each other when lois and seedy started writing i asked them to write separately and they looked at me like i was clinically insane but it worked because the characters didn't always know each other thank you now they're then they started writing monodramas now we're at the stage where they're writing scenes two-handed scenes and they're writing together so they'll take a week and go somewhere secluded and they'll just work on writing and improvising but i'd like to hear from the assembled people if you have any ideas for where to go next or how we can move this further thank you so let me start with the question which is i drive a surgical education and experience and i would say chops has to do with this like parking's back to what sarah said um how the parts fit together to make a hole and what kind of expertise do i have to notice um an incipient form like a form that's possible and to recommend ways of adjusting the parts to make different holes um adding parts tracking parts considering alternative um holes the experience the project that i've been working on uh the company i work with headlong uh from about 2012 to 2018 um invited me to consider a different way of looking at dramaturgy which is given that the form is going to evolve as it does as an organism might evolve what is my work then i my expertise in saying like ooh go this way make it this way is uh is not really welcome not really useful so here's some here's some background to see how much i can get through in five minutes also um if you wanted to those of you who are online if you wanted to go to the quiet circus dot com and it's the quiet circus dot com uh while i'm talking and look at the photographs in the gallery you'll have a better sense of what it is that's uh that's going on in the piece you could also visit that that site later um let me tell you a little bit about what the piece was uh so to our funders the quiet circus was a 15 month long community art project that included 36 weekly performances that took place on the washington avenue pier in south philadelphia which is the former site of an immigrant processing facility um and it's now sort of a public park in the new sort of highline fashion of rugged landscaping and pleasant quiet places to sit uh the quiet circus also included four events that used uh guest performances to address other sites along the Delaware river and those four events have different different ideas about dramaturgy than what i'm talking about um to the audience of these um year and a half's worth of events we were largely invisible uh we didn't publicize this work there were no like bus side that said like woohoo come see science pacific performance um we didn't want people to think of themselves as an audience um and we didn't want them coming to us expecting the sort of um virtuosic skill-based amaze amaziness um that dance often um has associated with it or the so-called magic of theater which uh to us for this purpose was mostly associated with what we thought of as what i think of as the stench of art um and we didn't want that we wanted people to just come and see um in the course of their daily lives what it is that we were up to and to notice it as perhaps different than the way that they experienced that site on other occasions but not necessarily to experience it indexed as like oh my goodness look at what the artists are doing so until the word eventually got out these weekly events were made for audiences who didn't think of themselves as audiences they thought of themselves as folks going for walks or runs or bike rides they thought of themselves as people taking their kids out of the house on saturday morning so that their spouse could sleep or people who lived in the brush or behind the big box stores that littered the neighborhood um why did we do this we did this because we wanted to step out of what i thought of as or what i talked about as this um world of virtuosity we wanted to create what we came to call a luminous world that related the everyday to something that's just a little bit different than it um and we wanted to make our work and i think this is the most important thing for me thinking about it now um in relationship to practice instead of two products right so that there was never a sense of like ah yes this is the production there was a sense of this is our practice this is what we do every week if nobody sees it that's really fine um if a hundred people come and see it that's actually okay too or a little bit sub optimal because it's it's hard to make accommodations for so many people but our practice about over um many years and and sort of culminated in this 15 month long section i'm really interested in talking to anybody or hearing questions from people or observations about folks who have worked on um pieces that treat form in similar ways thank you hi my name is morgan granbo she her hers um alongside uh luke daniel white we will be talking about um undergraduate john toji mentorship and from our specific graduate uh perspective uh we're both mfa candidates at the university of isla and these experiences have come out of two productions that we worked on there um at our university we have a unique um opportunity to collaborate with undergraduates on a regular basis which is phenomenal um and i think we have a pretty strong uh dramaturgy program but it's not necessarily reflected in the undergraduate population or taking um advantage up to its fullest uh and attempts to come back this uh we both took on assistant dramaturgs for our main stage productions myself for a production of a midsummer night stream and luke for a production of by the way neat barris stark today i'd like to share uh some possible best practices we can call them uh from mentoring in dramaturgy especially for some of the other early career dramaturges in the room that can also be doing this um so some of the things that i would like to consider musts uh schedule and commit to frequent and structured one-on-ones uh i think this is essential to the process and for their learning experience um for us this meant uh once a week for an hour or so just a touch base um this includes planning and setting goals for the following week touching base on what the major questions were in the rehearsal room and looping them into any significant developments or conversations that happened while they were absent and then creating an environment where they can bring up concerns or questions can be addressed um for our midsummer that included live music um complex doubling a full understudy cast within the company um a relatively abbreviated text this was pretty essential for our diving deep into what we found were the challenges of the piece and challenges of a a concept or director driven Shakespeare most importantly i think a significant chunk of time should be scheduled for after the process to the brief on their experience and your own um and prepare to discuss that they can continue to work on as it will be asked um another must i think is tangible contribution to at least one element of dramatic writing uh i actually think i could have done a little better with the structuring of this this requires significant planning um in discussion early in the collaboration i was able to include um my undergraduate assistant in the compilation of our rehearsal packet uh but i wish i was able to foresee including him strategically in the program note or the lobby display whether on a research level or contributing to the writing um of one of those elements i think the practice of writing that theater in our production is so critical that it must be one of the first tasks that we learn is required and begin to hone um and then moving from must but to like if at all possible i think that allowing and encouraging agency when we have assistance is really significant personally i encourage my assistant dramaturge to attend rehearsals when i have gone out of town for a festival and he would email me brief summaries of what occurred at the rehearsal while i was away it felt like a useful exercise in listening finding the kernel of a concern or revelation and then putting it down and writing um additionally i encouraged him to include any questions he up for the team and myself and that if anything felt extremely urgent that he should speak to the assistant director um this is where i assume many people may have trepidation uh but speaks to a larger point of making sure that you trust and have really open communication with the collaborators that we choose to bring on projects with us and then just like a final thought on this before i turned over to luke is i think that being open to working with an assistant vocally is very significant um i think it's important that we make ourselves available to undergraduates and early career individuals who are looking to assist or shadow or to hone some of their dramaturgical writing while many of the spaces that we inhabit are complex especially new play rooms we can use these opportunities on established plays to teach newcomers the intricacies of being a dramaturg in the rehearsal space i believe this type of openness can also translate to our friends from other disciplines who have noticed but not necessarily exercise their dramaturgically leaning brains um and just that there is more than enough space for us all including uh the groups that are very much underrepresented in our field and i feel that this should be another pathway that we actively utilize more often um i'll now pass things off to luke who's going to speak a little more chronologically and then i'm flashing thank you morgan um yes uh luke white uh he him his um i want to share my own thoughts best practices and mentoring um i took on an undergraduate assistant a dramaturg on a production of lead notages by the way meet ferris stark um as morgan mentioned uh we have quite a large undergraduate theater program at the university of iowa uh but we lack any system of recruitment in the way that auditions formally invite would be actors to participate uh my assistant for meet ferris stark came to me quite by chance um however i would argue that the first step in cultivating undergraduate dramaturgs would be to establish a stronger means of inviting interested students to participate uh one possible solution i propose something my own undergraduate theater program did is to include dramaturgy in conversations about production assignments when we assemble creative teams um curious students can then be directed to dramaturgically inclined faculty members for conversation that would marry the students interest and experience to the dramaturge dramaturgical needs of the upcoming productions and season um in considering my mode of mentorship for meet ferris stark i turned my own entry point for dramaturgy as an undergrad assisting um i do believe this to be the best approach for introducing students to our often nebulous and malleable discipline uh in this way the entry experience becomes a meaningful process of active participation and observation uh as we began our process and all throughout i find i found it useful to carefully explain the many decisions that i had to make for the production uh from what to include in our glossary what to deliver in our dramaturgical presentation to the cast went to attend rehearsals etc i made every attempt to explain my rationale uh in this way i believed i helped to clarify for my assistant a way of thinking dramaturgically uh a mode of attentive judgment grounded in the needs of the play and our fellow artists uh our communication in one-on-one meetings was positive and free-flowing uh however i made it clear that when we entered the reversal hall i would be the one to speak at the table on our behalf um i felt this was important for two reasons uh one was that i wanted my assistant first to observe the professional decorum of the reversal um before contributing to it herself and the second reason was uh the sensitive nature of our play by the way meet fair start uh a play which untangles the legacy of problematic black representation in early hollywood um i knew it would be difficult material with which to grapple especially for our artists of color in the room i knew conversations and table work would not be easy to navigate and that i especially as a white artist needed to approach my collaborators with humbleness and extreme empathy as i presented difficult history uh they would have to represent on stage um i thought it would be better to lead my assistant uh who was also white by example with the sort of care that i wanted to practice in the room um i would check in with my assistant during rehearsal breaks and at the end of rehearsals to see whether she had any questions about the process and to ask for any thoughts she had after a few days of working like this i encouraged her to pass me notes with thoughts and questions as they arose through this she demonstrated to me that she was actively observing and understanding the nature of our role in the room thus earning my trust in her emerging dramaturgical sensitivity sensibility eventually i found moments where i encouraged her to contribute to the conversation herself when we came across topics in the text that i knew she was well versed in from our research process as we moved into attending runs and tech i even gave her room to express her own observations directly to our faculty director and she began to relish the dramaturg satisfaction of having moved helped move to her fellow artists to step forward when all was said and done i was really thankful for this opportunity it struck me that even if this particular student does not go on to act as a dramaturg on another production she will inevitably bring her newfound dramaturgical sensitivity to future theatrical projects and collaborative collaborators and i believe training as many undergrads in this way can only contribute to the artistic ecology at our university in positive ways for my own i am reminded of the wisdom which says that the best way to learn something is to teach it i gained newfound clarity for my own dramaturgical process its strengths and areas i can approve a valuable moment of self-reflection that will help me move forward in my training at the university thank you my question is what is the role of the dramaturg when there's a change in direction or even when there's multiple directors in the room so this was one of my first times being a dramaturg and i didn't really know what to expect and the faculty director was very encouraging and wanted my world to be as collaborative as i wanted it to be i read a books of what dramaturgie was i read production notebooks and i was like okay i'm not really sure what to expect but here we go so i attended auditions after reading the script with the director just typical listening to the note of his experience because he was in the original production i listened to his vision for the production and his interventions i researched influences that the designers had and how that would impact the young audiences because this was a theater for young audiences piece and i annotated and decoded the script along with collaborating with others in the room including the assistant director who was an mfa student at the time due to some unforeseen health issues our faculty director had to step away from the project with all intention of coming back a couple months later and the assistant director who was the mfa student took over this role as the director the mfa was very attached to this project because this was the basis for his thesis and um i believe that he wasn't ready for the heavy responsibility because he wasn't expecting it and because he was unaware of the role and the impact of the dramaturg this led to the dramaturg being seen as superfluous in rehearsal and not contributed to the creative process this young director would sometimes act unprofessionally towards me towards our stage management team and sometimes other actors in the room after a month or two under the direction of this student the faculty decided it might be a bad idea to have a faculty director supervising the student um yes after months so the faculty member who stepped in she was the complete opposite of this mfa student of course she had years of experience under her belt she was very creative and collaborative and open-minded and took the original director's ideas and tried to streamline it through as much as she could um and she actually stepped in when this the mfa director had to leave for two weeks so as he had to leave she stepped in and once again i was the only one left in the room so in conclusion good question um so what does the changing direction mean for my role as the dramaturg during this five to six month journey as a first time dramaturg i was trying to figure out who i stood by was my role towards that playwright um who has passed was i an advocate for the original director's vision because we created trust and um i knew what he wanted at the end of the play because he had all the intention of coming back to the play but he ended up not um or was i an advocate for the new directors who came in with their own visions throughout the change of direction and unfortunate experience i realized that my role as a dramaturg for this project was imperative i was one of the only collaborators there throughout the entire rehearsal process i was a debriefer and the reminder of past conversations and decisions made by other directors i also realized that my role was also to myself there came a time in the rehearsal process towards the very end luckily before opening night that i had to take myself out of the rehearsals um to avoid any more negativity from directors or other cast members because they didn't have a permanent director there was no opportunity for trust or respect to form and grow and i was in an environment where others doubted dismiss or respected me and my contributions i'm brian moore from portia university in nebraska co-convenor he him his um presenting on behalf of shell yore fendi agle state university as the dramaturgie advisor you have it all set up the first year m a student is assigned to a show in the spring semester she can participate in the whole process beginning halfway through the fall semester after she has gotten her bearings and started to participate fully in the life of the department the faculty director is pro dramaturg and promotes a highly collaborative rehearsal process check check check that was the plan and now four moments from the reality moment one when you receive the email that your colleague the faculty director will need to have a major surgery several months earlier than planned he ends up missing the whole semester his classes have to be covered but also the production that he has been shepherding through the conceptual and design process never fear he has an assistant director an mfa student has been on board throughout and is poised and eager to take on the role of the director moment two when you meet with your student dramaturg she sits in your office and carefully explains how she has felt publicly rebuked and her input dismissed in front of the whole company by the assistant director who is now the director he has been borderline rude to several members of the company and has put a definite chill on the collaborative process moment three when you meet with the director's faculty advisors describe the problem and they seem shocked they have never seen him acting this way before in the 18 months that they have been in this probe he has been in this program this moment is followed quickly by the moment when you meet with said director and talk about the importance of fostering a collaborative spirit and the importance of treating all members of the team with respect and the importance to the success of the program that the director lead with a tone that is encouraging and that honors the contributions of everyone as he nods and claims that it is exactly what he has been doing moment four when you meet with your advisor again and make suggestions as to how she might proceed because while you are the advisor and this is part of her program of study and you are giving her a great having the students buy in on the next steps is central to the overall success or failure of this experience in which so much has already been invested surely we have all learned a lot from rehearsal processes that have been less than ideal but of course that is not what we hope for in the theatrical collaborations that we engineer as faculty so how best to advise in this case i lay out a limited number of options for the student to consider and then ask for her input on the next step i also request that the department chair provide more oversight and guidance to the assistant now director predictably predictably the chair is already well aware as other students has been in his office complaining of ill treatment i advise my students that she could one continue as she had been attending rehearsals regularly nearly daily and participating by contributing to the discussions and feedback sessions that of course may involve exposing herself to continue poor treatment from the director in front of the company i reminded her that the director is also a student who was learning to direct and he had yet to become secure enough in his authority to let some of the go i further suggested that she could too pull back on attending rehearsal and focus instead on the audience centered items like the program note and a lobby display and i offered her option three to stop attending rehearsal and to do minimal work further work on the show i felt that she needed to set her level of involvement from this point forward obviously as advisors we want our students to have wonderful theatrical experiences that help them see that collaboration is a fulfilling way to work an exciting journey best taken with a team of trusted partners but we all know that not every theatrical experience is like that but we want theatrical experiences to be positive in the laboratory environment of school as that is often considered to be a foundational working model for the students careers but as has been become even more crystal clear in recent months there are times when students are mistreated and even abused and we certainly don't want them exposed to those situations we also know that when our students come to us with a problem the situation is already pretty advanced so when do we advise a student to stick with the difficult rehearsal and when do we advise them to remove themselves there are no simple answers but clearly it is under our purview as advisors to intervene when necessary to make sure the climate of collaboration is productive and safe for all involved perhaps the lmba u caucus could explore the development of an advisor's handbook with information and resources to draw upon thank you maybe the next best thing to do would be to have all of you all the presenters grab your chair and bring it out into the stage if anybody needs help just let us know and as they are getting set up I want to remind you of your job as dramaturgs in the room to help us identify connections between the various presentations some questions these could be observations or questions is there enough room you could also sit at the front of the stage if there aren't enough all righty let's see so we have about 13 minutes profound conversation yes so this question comes mainly out of Mark Ward's presentation but it's an issue that's addressed by lots of people redefining the audience so you are specifically working on redefining your audience but there are lots of other hot topics that talked about new ways of defining an audience and new ways of understanding an audience whether that audience is going to be an audience that is able to listen to stories that you haven't heard before or whether that audience is going to be in a place that you haven't seen before and I'm really interested in your perspective on that because where I come from there are two kinds of theater audiences they're people whose hair is either whiter or less than mine who are going to be gone in the next 20 years okay or they're people who are seeing plays for the first time in public parks and places where they don't expect to see them and discovering theater as an art form that they didn't know existed that's the audience those are the two kinds of audiences that we deal with the people who want to buy season tickets and keep the repertory the same until they pass away and people who might have who might have a completely new vision of what theater could do what stories it could tell and what kind of work it could do in making connections between people and among communities so what do you see where you are and what is your work doing to build an audience not just to expand your subscriber base but to build a future who would like to respond would anybody like to respond or is that a question we let hang out in the air okay I think it's very simple and very complex at the same time but my answer would be the best way to get an audience into the theater is to show them people on stage who look like them not necessarily who think like them but who look like them if we don't make theaters comfortable and inclusive and by comfortable I don't mean comfortable subjects but if we don't make them inclusive then why would anybody come in why would anybody attend that relates to what you were saying it does it does a lot because a lot of my sources have a lot to do with audience development and the the different kind of community engagement strategies that have been used and I think it along along with that I think it also has a lot to do with with listening to communities and and seeing you know especially the people who are kind of in between or the people who could be in between you know why why they don't you know why they don't come and what they're what they're looking to see but also kind of a respect for audience audience taste and what they want to see because I think there are there's there's a lot of people who who think of thinking of what audience is wanting to see is very commercial and kind of detrimental to their art but if you if you think if you really have a respect for the people that you want to bring into your theater and what they're interested in the topics that are relevant to them and willing to listen to them and kind of bring together you know your artistic sensibilities and and the kind of things that you're interested in and the kind of things that they're interested in not only just you know passively seeing but talking about that I think there can be a definite connection between those two things I'll add that I think that when we use the kind of old circumscribed model of you know subscribers companies there are some folks in the community that know how those rules work and there are a lot of folks who don't know how those rules work and those people are inevitably going to feel unwelcome I'm really interested in partly because of my artistic concerns but also partly in terms of audience relationships in in being really radical about renegotiating those things so to just say yeah like there there is no expected relationship like you're going to need to like step into a strange place to be able to create a relationship with a work of art and and I think then anybody that's willing to take a risk can find a place one of the people who became a part of the company of our piece started out as an audience member and spoke no English didn't look like any of us and and we had to like figure out how to how to include translating for him into everything that we did which was hugely inefficient and totally worthwhile I'd like to pick up on on something that you just said because I think there is another connection worth exploring which is this feeling unwelcome because I think I think we heard from several people who felt unwelcome in different ways and I wonder if anybody would did you have a question about that okay great so I've been thinking about this it's clearly so loaded and um is it Denise I might ask for your name right um you so sort so eloquently sort of opened up to us the fact that professionalism as a concept can be this gateway to racism and oppression and repression um but then Desiree in yours you have mentioned that once the MFA students took on the role of director um he treated you your word was unprofessionally and I'm wondering um and made you feel sort of ignored and superfluous so I'm wondering like for everyone on stage but also everyone in the audience as dramaturgs how are we how do we conceive of professionalism use that word what does it mean can it actually be a good thing um and just I mean how can we how can we apply it to our work in a way that creates you know professional as in good theater as opposed to professional as in um elitist theater so I mean my speech was definitely loaded but I'm looking with a lot of experience and not just my own experience I have a lot of refugee artist friends immigrant artist friends who um uh went through some really like dramatically absurd and funny conversations because they were not professional and I do have faith in professionalism don't like don't get me wrong like I I do think that all theater practitioners uh should be treated with respect uh should be listened uh and that respect includes uh economic respect also like they should be paid uh I I'm not against those things but then there is this other side that I've seen as a newcomer that rejects the entire possibility of making theater in other ways that people in other countries actually do people don't even listen like I wrote my master's thesis in Istanbul about alternative theater field in Istanbul those people were not professional in any term that can be described here because they were actually lawyers uh medical people uh with a variety of uh professional degrees and they they were white collar workers and they made money from those things and brought that money together and granted a black box place in the middle of Istanbul and they did professional theater theater that's why I'm in theater I'm actually an urban planning my undergrad degrees in urban planning like but I have seen that and then there was an urban uprising in Istanbul those same black box spaces were used as places that protesters were healed like doctors were helping them there so like where does professionalism fit there it's a place of life it's a place of revolution actual revolution and then I came with a lot of hope to Toronto and I'm like incredibly disappointed I'm sorry I'm incredibly disappointed and part of that disappointment comes from the fact that no one wants to listen no one wants to listen any other person's experience they like I linguistically think differently I like my entire life experience is dramatically different than yours I wasn't a racialized body when I came here I was made into a racialized body after I came here I didn't define myself as a person of color in Turkey but I can't have those conversations with anyone I'm supposedly theater should be a place that we should have conversations just so I kind of came up I'm like okay I'll try otherwise I think there's a lot of looking back to having connecting with that I think looking back to as even the the histories in our own in our own countries of exclusionary practices that especially communities of color that have experienced it and people with disabilities have experienced that at this point in time may not even be people may not be able to exactly finger point and point a finger at and and explain exactly what it is but the the wounds are still lingering so much that we I think we need to also one know about and and deal with those histories even down to the way that we the way that we extend the invitation to people to you know to come to our theater spaces or to come to the spaces where we're doing theater so that people will that people will know that we're we're trying to to change those practices and actually include as well yes I have so many thoughts listening to all of you and I'm so thankful to hear all of this what's really causing into my mind is this shift between structures and models that have become standardized and a lack of openness towards breaking those structures and models and I think that dramatizes people who can see structure and respond to structure that could really be a value in shifting and making sure that I mean the the two artists of color on the stage are the two people who are also explaining his appointment with processes and I think we have to note that and you know thinking about what Tom and Schum were talking about and talking about how do you look at old material and make it new again one of the things I think we don't spend enough time thinking about is what is the lens we're putting on the art that we're making and by making something new who are we making it new for and how can we involve other structures into making new work or old work new so rather than just doing an adaptation of an older play how can we invite an artist with a completely different way of seeing the world as Denise said with a completely different background who doesn't have this in their you know upbringing DNA of artistry to create something that's fresh and new and that can recreate how we look at the world so ironically acknowledging structure I have to point out that it's 1129 there are some some announcements but before those announcements I wonder Desiree I saw you nodding and I just it seems to me that you were part of a structure that what you know that fell apart hard it's not impossible but it's hard to talk about reshaping structure when we have status in the theater especially in at least the university that I am in where the drama is not taken seriously many of times especially me coming in as a first time dramaturg already having the status of the lowest status of a role and having the lowest experience how do we as dramaturgs who are seen oftentimes at lower status depending on what theaters and what experiences you're at change structure like also because like we're in a status of dramaturgs we're in a status of like what are the dramaturgs of dramaturgs of color like how can we make that change when there's other roles way above us that is an excellent question to launch us into further conversation thank you so much