 Good day! Oh my gosh, we're almost there! Strong! So, we're really looking forward to celebrate everything. Today, the conference is past year with you tonight at the banquet, which is going to be at the Treasury Ballroom. If you have any confusion about where to find this, just grab me, grab a volunteer, we can walk you through it. But it's going to be at 326 SW Broadway, which is in your handbook. And when you get to the main door on Broadway, it's going to be the door to your left, but we'll have people directing you too, just in case. But we hope you will all join us there. Thank you. And just to add to that, if anybody could use transportation help if walking to the venue is difficult, would you let Coriana or I know, and we'll figure out how to facilitate that from wherever you are. Thank you. Thank you. So, since we only have four mics, I'm going to start the panel here. We are here to celebrate the second year of the Bly Grant recipients. And as a special treat, the folks from Spider Web Show down there on the end have brought a bunch of technology and backstage, offstage right in the green room, after the panel kind of pre-GM, they invite everybody back to come experience what it is they're going to try to explain during the panel. And I caught some of it as they were setting it up, and it's really super cool, so I encourage you to go back and see what they're doing. So, I'm going to just kind of introduce everybody by name quickly, and then we're going to jump into letting them talk about their projects and we'll hopefully do some crosstalk and some crosstalk with you. So, to my immediate left, no introduction needed is Mr. Mark Bly. Next to him is Sally Olive. Next to her is Kelly Kerwin. Next to her is Sarah Elkeshev. Next to her is Allison Bowie, Joel Adria, and Michael Wheeler from Spider Web Show. And because of the complicated technical nature of their project, we're actually going to start with them and then they're going to slip out to go prep for you guys to come. So, I'm going to turn it over to the three of you. Tell us what the heck it is we funded. Okay, hi. First of all, just thanks for having us here and thank you for this grant. It's been really instrumental in getting this started and very valuable. So, thank you very much. I'm actually going to talk mostly just about what Spider Web Show is and how we got to the Digital Creation Studio, which my colleagues will talk more about. Spider Web Show started in 2013 and it started as a website that was asking the question, what is Canadian theater? And it was brought about because we had a new artistic director at the National Arts Center in Canada, Context that's kind of like our Lincoln Center if it was in a town of 500,000 people. And Jill brought on Sarah Stanley as her associate artistic director there. And Sarah was in charge of something called the collaborations which was funding small pieces of Canadian theater across the country. And one of the things that both Jill and Sarah were interested in was how could the internet connect theater creators. And so they came to my theater company Praxis Theater and they said, how could we use the internet to answer the question, what is Canadian theater? Not definitively answered, of course, but look into answering that question. So, the website just started with Sarah and myself. We kind of had a blog and we commissioned some video projects and there were some podcasts and it really took off and we found that it was actually too much work for just two of us to do it and also we couldn't really answer the question, what is Canadian theater? Because Sarah was based out of Ottawa and I was based out of Toronto and Canada is a big country. So, we found collaborators by adding New World Theater in Vancouver, Alberta Theater Projects in Calgary and Allison joined us from Montreal and so then we kind of had nodes in the four biggest cities in the country and the project started to evolve and I guess probably the five kind of core things that Spiderweb show started to do over the course of the last three years are one is a bi-weekly magazine called CDN Cult and that's my primary job as the editor of that magazine and the way the magazine works is we commissioned three Canadian theater artists to write on a given theme every two weeks. So, that has proved to be super helpful as a framing device as opposed to just having a blog where just things are coming out as people send it to us but actually having a focus to it so we can say, what do we think about this controversy that's going on in this particular city and we can be very specific to an issue or we can have a national issue and commission three artists from across the country to get different perspectives on an issue and so that's the magazine. We have podcasts, everybody knows what podcasts are, we've had a couple of different contributors to podcasts from across the country. We also have a thing called the performance wiki which Allison will speak about more but basically wiki that's attached to a map which is a searchable database of Canadian performance and I'm missing one thing, what am I missing? Thought Residencies. I have to give Sarah a total credit for this, it's a really interesting idea where basically we all have iPhones or whatever kind of smartphones with us and you can use those to just record a thought whenever you have one and so we commission a different artist each month to just record their thoughts on their phones and then they're uploaded to SoundCloud and then you can go to our website and hear all the thoughts that a given theater artist has had over the course of a month. Some of them are interesting, some of them aren't but I actually think dramaturgically it is a really interesting question because like 10 or 20 years from now people will be able to go back and search a given artist and find out what all of their thoughts were in a month and I think as a historical digital document it's an interesting project and then the last thing that I'm quite proud of that spiderweb show has done so far is actually the curation of a hashtag. So we use CDN Cult, just like everybody here uses LMDA 16, CDN Cult kind of as a national hashtag to which to send interesting cultural conversations about what's going on in Canadian theater and you know for about the first year, year and a half Sarah and I were the only people using that hashtag and it was kind of an inside joke amongst us but I'm really proud of how much it's taken off and people across the country now when they're tweeting about Canadian theater they will end it with CDN Cult and you can really kind of check out that hashtag and get a sense of what's going on in Canadian theater through that hashtag. So that brings me to the Digital Creation Studio which we're here to talk about today and that came from, Sarah was directing a show in Canada called Helen Lawrence, really massive show, ended up going to BAM and it was very high video design and part of the video design required actors to perform without seeing their partner, just perform with the camera and the video design would transform what the audience would see and at the same time we were having weekly Google Hangouts for spiderweb show and she kind of put the two ideas together to understand that oh my goodness, maybe people could actually use all the technology now to rehearse in different locations at the same time and so that's when we were at LMDA last year basically and so we saw the Mark Bly panel last year and we thought let's pitch that as an idea. So that's what spiderweb show is and that's how we got here and now I'll turn it over to Joel, he's our technologist and he can explain the nitty gritty. Hello there, I'm not going to get too technical on all these details but so that was actually, speaking of Helen Lawrence, that was kind of how I got involved with the project and how I sort of met Sarah. I was acting as the video technologist on that show and sort of endured all the very interesting complexities of that show with her and so she sort of invited me to contribute on this project and so as Michael mentioned, we're creating a digital creation studio that we're calling CDN Studio and the goal of it is to sort of create a virtual space online to rehearse and really allow different people in different geographical locations to rehearse virtually and the best way to describe it would be sort of an advanced Skype call or video conference but instead of seeing sort of an image of each person's face, you're really getting to see a composite image of everybody who's participating in their room and I'm actually just going to show a couple pictures of our test setup that we were working on this afternoon. Here's sort of an example composite image we have a few people composited together. So we have Michael in one of the rooms and we had a very gracious volunteer participating so you can see they're all in three different rooms but they can see each other in the same virtual studio and so this is not terribly new technology we're using basically green screen technology to achieve what we're doing here just like a weatherman who might stand in front of a virtual map for TV CDN Studio composites other members of your team members into that background instead of a map of the western United States or something and so where we're at today is that this is our first time together Michael and Allison and I are from three different cities and we've never actually met in physical space before but we've been coordinating and experimenting with different software and so this is our first time together it's the first time actually testing it out we're using a prototyping software called Touch Designer that's allowing us to do this and it's really sort of an alpha test it is, we're not quite on the internet yet but we are routing it through a network and so we're sort of testing the possibilities and the limitations of that and our goal is to eventually scale this to use open standards there's something called WebRTC which is basically allowing us to do a Skype-like experience just within a web browser without the need for plugins or flash or anything like that so you'll actually be able to once we've continued to develop it you'll be able to access CDN Studio from any web browser and so our next phase will be to sort of develop this out develop the web software involved and once it's all complete you'll be able to join a studio using a high speed internet connection an inexpensive green screen kit a webcam and a set of headphones so we've set up three stations in the dressing rooms backstage and after the panel we'd really like you to come join us and test it out, see what it feels like we really want your feedback to sort of see what does it feel like to rehearse in virtual space it's not a huge area to explore you're somewhat limited to this amount of space that you can walk in but we want to get your opinions and sort of what your thoughts are and just sort of first impressions this is an early prototype so don't expect the holodeck quite yet but our goal is to continue improving it and just to make it as immersive as possible there's some really great technology coming down the pipe that involves virtual reality and Microsoft HoloLens and we certainly see that as down the road a possibility to really encourage the possibilities so I'm going to let Allison talk a little bit about the sort of dramaturgical ramifications now of what this technology might allow us to do so just to give context of how I joined Spiderweb Show in the first place I was an MFA Dramaturgy graduate from the University of Massachusetts so I'm coming back to the States for the first time actually as a dramaturg in the professional world which is kind of nice I moved back to Montreal and went what am I going to do now and I started harassing Sarah Stanley until she met with me in Ottawa and I started translating and came on as a grant writer actually writing Canada Council grant and the Mark Lye grant I worked with the team on a lot of those grants and now I'm one of the associate dramaturgs on the team so I'm really interested in this project because a lot of my work looks at digital dramaturgies and how as a production dramaturg I can continue the conversation with audience members outside of the performance space but also how digital technology within a performance can affect the story of the narrative that's being told and what can we do differently with that so that's sort of where my interest lies in this project like Joel was saying this is the first time that we've physically been in the same space but we've spent a lot of time backstage not being in the same space to make this happen which is kind of ironic one of the big questions that Spiderweb Show is asking is what is the Canadian dramaturgie that exists and right now it's very localized because it's such a big geographical country we have dramaturgies that exist in Vancouver that's very specific to there or Calgary or small towns so while we have a series of dramaturgies that exist they're very either culturally oriented or geographically located so what CDN Studio is able to do is allow us to look at what happens to the dramaturgie in Canada and what happens to the Canadian theatre identity if we take those boundaries away if we make theatre accessible and theatre creation accessible across the country how can that change what we understand Canadian theatre to be if an artist who is in Nunavut can collaborate with an artist who is in Toronto what stories can they tell what narratives can emerge out of that experience and one of the things that Michael mentioned is performance wiki I was on the team that developed the map that actually goes along with this and this allows us to track the entries that are put into the performance wiki we have different categories so we have non-profit community for-profit theatres events and festivals university and then we also have categories that are specific to First Nations creations so that's the Aboriginal peoples in Canada and we can track and look and see where stories are being created where theatre is actually being created in those different categories across the country so what CDN Studio will allow us to do is see how that map changes where are those stories going to be created or how are we going to be able to visually track when a story is being created in a multiple of locations all at the same time so those are some of the big dramaturgical questions that we are embarking on and we're so excited to be part of this so thank you so much again for the opportunity for us to get started on this we really appreciate it we're going to be there until 5 o'clock so please come and join us and explore this with us thank you so much I'm going to jump to Kelly in part because David Copeland and I were hanging out this morning and one of the things that we were talking about was that I have a slight obsession with following like big pop culture trends so whatever you know trashy book you're supposed to be too embarrassed to read I love to read because I'm like why is everybody reading Twilight which is what we were talking about why is everybody reading Fifty Shades of Grey you know when the Harry Potter books came out I loved being able to chat with a 7 year old on the subway because we were both carrying around a Harry Potter book and it was reminding me of the conversation you and I had in a more intellectual realm about you saying your interest was kind of having your finger on the pulse of what was going on in the field about the changing shapes of what theater was and clearly everything about your project is exploring that so do you want to tell us a little bit about pop and kind of how that stemmed out of that interest? Yeah absolutely thank you so much and thank you for Mark and Beth and the LMDA selection committee it's just been awesome to have the opportunity to pull the trigger on this wacky idea like I have so pop is a pop-up performance festival that's going to be taking place in Bushwick Brooklyn in September 23 to the 25th and what is a pop-up performance festival? Well that's a great question myself and so it's it's like really stemmed from this idea of just like I was in grad school you know just like indulging my senses and like all this like great stuff and also learning all this like classical shit and a lot of my peers and I were also making a bunch of weird stuff that wasn't really fitting in a box or in a black box theater or you know so a lot of people I was seeing not just coming from Yale School of Drama but from elsewhere you know had learned how to direct Chuck-Off and Shakespeare but also they have this weird idea where it's like a headphone play and you walk down the street with it and like what is that about and so it's kind of like how do we provide a home for like the island of misfit toys that like exist in like the current culture of like I have this like crazy idea that the man on a bicycle and you follow him around so pop is a series of like theater experiences that are happening in public places in venues most of those venues are bars in basements there's like a wacky basement theater I've come across on accident and it takes place the best way I've kind of learned to describe it is a theatrical pub crawl kind of where the audience has a map and they can kind of go around to whatever place they want to go to and see different things and they get tapped on a shoulder and they go to a secret place or they're walking down the street because they live there and they happen to like get asked to go into U-Haul truck and there's a drag queen and there's a dance party and so you know it's kind of two fold of like the people that are in the know kind of can go around and go see all these different experiences and be a part of that and like be really close to it and also there's maybe somebody that was just trying to go get a cup of coffee and the next thing they know they're you know in some basement watching a 20 minute piece of theater that's a movement piece about what it means to be a pop man in America you know and so that's kind of like a very like sampling platter of what pop is I'm happy to even like talk further about it but I know that's kind of like the introduction to the idea. Perfect thank you. Sarah I don't know if you were in the networking session this morning but there was a dialogue that came up about finding mentors and a young Turk spoke I thought very intelligently about saying not all every mentor has to be a theater person and in point of fact the example that was used was I love science you know maybe I should make a relationship with a doctor and I of course instantly thought of you so can we maneuver for you to talk a little bit about what you're doing? Sure thank you just to start off by saying thank you to LMDA and to Mark Bly because really without this grant the things I'm going to describe to you that I've been doing I would not be doing it would not be possible for me to be in the room so it's been a massive opportunity so just a little bit of context about the project it's called the High Z Project and it's a project to create an immersive installation based on the 2011 Nobel Prize winning discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe so in the late 90s there was this race among astrophysicists to find the rate at which the expansion of the universe was decelerating and what they actually discovered was that the expansion is accelerating and in a very simplified to simplify what they were doing they were observing really distant supernovae which are stellar explosions and finding that they were fainter than they thought they should be and that is because they were further away and so this project is occurring because it's being led by this incredible team, sister team so this comes back to your question Beth and they are Naima Crystal Phillips who is an interdisciplinary artist and a playwright and her sister Lara Ariel Phillips who is an astrophysicist she Ariel is also married to a scientist named Karnovich who is on that team that made the discovery and so together Ariel and Naima came up with this idea to explore the discovery in terms of not only the science but also what it means in human terms to make a discovery like this so the the output of the project will be an installation in a planetarium type space and it will be a real combination of digital projection but also very tangible elements that you can explore that will express anything like the work stations that you that you might sit at during a period of observation and you'll be able to explore what those stations might have looked like and felt like in the 90s when the discovery was being made I think I'll just let you know who else is on the team because that's also extremely important there's five of us in total I've talked about Naima and Ariel also on the team is Keith Davis who's also an astrophysicist he and Ariel are both based at the University of Notre Dame which has been a massive supporter of this project Naima and myself are both based in Montreal where we're supported by Playwrights Workshop Montreal which is a nationally Canadian play development and creation centre and Yale Presant who is a dramaturg who used to be at the University of Notre Dame and is now based in Italy which was a move that happened after she was working on the project so not unlike the scientists who were based all over the world collaboratively while they were making this discovery we are also mainly in three international locations Keith also at the University runs the DVT which is the Digital Visualization Centre which is a kind of planetarium so together we are all have embarked on creating this installation and we are in what we're calling Phase 2 of the project which is really the creation of the blueprint the narrative the story and some of those pieces Keith has been working on creating digital animations of in particular all the supernovae discovered in the last two to three hundred years Naima and Ariel have been all over the world interviewing almost all twenty of the scientists on the team to date about everything from the discovery to their childhoods what inspired them to become scientists in the first place which is figuring out that intersection between science and the imagination is one of the big themes that we're exploring Naima and I we also have access to about three thousand emails that pass between members of the team during the course of the seven years of the discovery which we've been using as text and story elements and rituals that go into the process of observation so the two parts of this project that have been made possible by LMDA are in June Naima and I were able to go on a professional observation run to the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope just outside of Tucson I say just outside but it's actually at ten thousand feet and I really got a sense of what it is like to go on that process to stay up all night the how mundane it is and also how exhilarating it is when things line up and you might have found a piece of science that goes into one step closer to proving this your theory or your unknowable outcome of the road that you've sort of set yourself out on and it was an incredible experience and we really feel that actually part of our job in the installation is to be able to convey to our audience something of what the experience of observing is like at least that was the entry point for me in terms of the thing that I was most curious about and most excited about that would give me access to scientific understanding that I don't actually have access to. In this case I really am the most ignorant person in the room and it's if you are looking for a consultant on this subject to create this I would be at the bottom of that list I think it's really about the dramaturgical work here is really about the storytelling and actually in a lot of ways it's an asset to have nothing but questions and then the second thing that this grant is enabling us to do is to meet in residency for the first time all five of us in the same room in the Digital Visualization Centre at the University of Notre Dame so that's going to happen in August we'll actually be able to get in the room and start the blueprint experiment actually be under the dome see some of the things that have been created and to start setting up pieces of the installation so we can start figuring out how they work and continuing to design that audience experience. That's great thank you Sarah So Sally I kind of saved you for last because in a really delightful way you combine a lot of the kind of story that we're unpacking here both and that you're dealing with a non-traditional form but you're also dealing with international points of connection in the really old fashioned way you're getting on an airplane and traveling to them so tell us a little bit about what it is that you're doing Great so first of all hello Thank you So I work in Cabaret and it is very difficult to talk about Cabaret at 3pm in the afternoon when you're all sober So would you please for a moment you're all dramaturgs so I know you have powerful imaginations if we can just move the clock forward to about 11pm if you can imagine that you have a drink in your hand or a vice of your choice alongside you like no I'm actually being serious please do this For those of you who are underage that's it thank you can you imagine you have an imaginary fake ID thank you and then don't tell me about it because I don't want to know Can we also take our imaginary drinks for a minute if you wouldn't mind indulging me in this to raise a glass and thank the Bly Committee and LMDA for providing these amazing I mean it's been amazing to hear about everything else that's happening and it's certainly been really powerful for me to have this opportunity because Cabaret is an art form that is often we call it an underground art form it's a little bit about being in the know is how you find it because you've heard about it or you know someone who's like let's go see this weird thing and that way I think it's sort of a lot like what Kelly is talking about people tend to stumble into it which is how I found Cabaret as well I am the associate artistic director and resident dramaturg of the Philadelphia based company called The Bearded Ladies Cabaret anyone here know us Thank you Philadelphia Excellent and I met them about four years ago they had been working in Cabaret and we call ourselves a queer experimental cabaret company and those are terms that we interrogate constantly so if you want to know what they mean come find me later and I'll tell you what they mean what they mean to me today but what I want to focus on I think is sort of interrogating the idea of what Cabaret is because when we started and when I first met this company I didn't know very much and they were learning by doing and so we we stumbled together into this form and started defining it for ourselves using our base knowledge of what we thought the form was about and the mentorship of some Philadelphians if any of you are familiar with Martha Graham Cracker yay yes and if you've never seen Martha Graham Cracker she's at Joe's Pub a lot and I highly recommend checking her out she's the alter ego of Dito van Rijkersburg for folks who know Dito so through mentorship of people like Dito we started to figure out for ourselves but we also learned that that process was very difficult because I think we've talked a lot about how theater communities can feel very isolated and it is even more isolating I think for Cabaret artists because they're in this underground form that is so much about being in the know to find them and so embedding in a community we can find out slowly who our fellow Cabaret artists are in the city but if I transplant to Portland it is very difficult for me to locate people like Carla Rossi for those who heard Anthony speak yesterday and most importantly while there has been a lot of scholarship on historical Cabaret and not even a lot actually I'm going to say there's been some scholarship on historical Cabaret focusing on the century of France and Weimar Germany there's not been a lot of writing on Cabaret in contemporary performance by practitioners and in fact a lot of those practitioners don't even know that others like them exist outside of New York City I would say is the exception and so what I my company and my research partner John Jarbaugh who is the artistic director of the Beaudel ladies are trying to do is we're trying to create a digital space for people to find each other and then we're going to try to turn that digital space into an immersive performance and so what that involves for us first is doing extensive research by actually going to these cities and trying to meet artists we're interested locally so if any of you have Cabaret connections I would love to talk to you in your own cities but we are also interested in reaching back to the ancestors of our form which means going to Paris and going to Berlin and figuring out not only what the history there is but also how that history has led to the contemporary performance in those places and then hopefully sharing that information with the practitioners that we've discovered and also hopefully the larger theater community so that we can become a voice to talk about what is truly exciting about this form that is really having a moment right now I think and has been for about the past five to ten years in America and what we can share from what we've learned as Cabaret artists with the larger theater community so that's part one of my projects and that's the part that I'm embedded in right now I'd say is doing that kind of research the second part is that I am a Cabaret dramaturg and I have been investigating for the past year or so I'd say I've been in this free fall questioning of what that means because so much about being a Cabaret artist is a lot about performer being a performer and I do not perform have you started as actors oh my gosh I knew there'd be a lot of you but that is a way that's much higher percentage than I was expecting I did not I have never wanted to be a performer which is not a knock against performers I think they're amazing it's just not part of my DNA and yet I've become aware in the past year and a half of how much performance goes into my role as a dramaturg how often I am performing I've heard you I know that it's pop I know I do this and I would imagine some of you do as well to use metaphors to explain like what you do anyone want to shout out some of their favorites favorite metaphors so I might say like I'm somebody's sometimes I'm a personal Wikipedia consultant great midwife that's one of my favorites Sherpa I've never right hand man right hand man what was that hand holder play whisper I love all of ladies great so I think we could obviously we could keep going and I want to hear the more as we get more drunk on our fake drinks I want to hear more anyway but and I think that depending on the project we all know that different things are demanded of us at different times depending on who we're working with how we're working which contract we're using and and so I became aware of how that started to impact my presence in the room how I was entering rooms how I was behaving within those rooms I wear a lot of different hats as a freelance artist and even the different personas that I take on with different companies that I'm in and so I started deconstructing my performance as a cabaret dramaturge and then I read the call for fly applications and then I wrote this grant and so in addition to exploring the research part of cabaret I am using the vocabulary of cabaret to explore myself as a dramaturge what it means to be a non-performing cabaret artist what it means to be a cabaret dramaturge what it means for me to be a dramaturge in this moment and in December I'm going to embark on a two week workshop that uses some of the techniques that I've discovered in this cabaret research to explore performative dramaturgy and I'm still not really I have to be honest I'm not really sure what I mean by performative dramaturgy that's what the workshop is for and that's what some of the funding is helping me figure out and what I have determined is that I can't do it by myself and so there's we're going to do a two week workshop where I invite a number of different kinds of artists to spend some time with me exploring that question from my fellow company members who are performers and designers to playwrights to voice people to choreographers to costume designers and also I'm going to spend some time with some dramaturges thinking about what that means and asking them to perform performance dramaturgy how these two things will eventually hopefully resolve and fit together is that so we're doing this project that we called the poison cookie project which comes from reaching down to get this quote comes from this beautiful quote by a Weimar era cabaret composer named Friedrich Hollander who wrote in an article that cabaret like nothing else suddenly dispenses a poison cookie suggestively administered and hastily swallowed its effect reaches far beyond the harmless evening to make otherwise placid blood boil and inspire a sluggish brain to think I'll just let that quote sit because it's amazing and so one thing that we're trying to do when we gather these different cabaret artists that hopefully will be meeting is we're hoping to bring them to Philadelphia to work on an immersive performance together in which they perform their current existing cabaret work but are also invited to perform historical cabaret works or pieces that are inspired by historical cabaret work so perhaps somebody like just an example because if we could get this person that would be so somebody like Taylor Mack who's writing a Weimar Berlin for example in addition to performing Taylor's own and part of that process will incorporate performative dramaturgy in some way to help audience navigate the historical research and the contemporary performance so I hope that wasn't too confusing but that's it. That was great, thank you Sally Thank you so Mr. Bly two years ago when you and Cindy Sorrell hatched this project and I'm sure a dark and smoky bar somewhere or maybe not so smoky one of the phrases that the two of you lit on that we've shared with the membership a lot is that you wanted to breathe fresh air into dramaturgy and one of the things that excites me having been on the selection committee is that every single project we've talked about is about different forms of what it is to make theater it's about different forms of what it is to be a dramaturge it's frequently reaching audience members and non-traditional places and so I'm just wondering having kind of had a couple months to sit with some of these projects and now to have met everybody and to have heard them talk what's rumbling through your head? One of the things that excites me about this is that there's something about the physics of dramaturgy that somehow is rumbling through this a couple of them are obvious I suppose that somehow I mean we started off with one group that literally has decided to transgress the boundaries of time and space and I love that just said the hell with it we're going to use some mechanisms to transgress the boundaries of time and space and dramaturgy is going to lead the way well that's exactly the point of what I wanted and early on when I assembled a group of people old friends in many cases but more than friends people I would trust my life with you know beyond volunteers these are people I'd trust my life with in case of Liz Engelman I did as we drove through the mountains of Mexico through a rainstorm once it was worse than romancing the stone if you've ever seen that film but seriously I mean that's exactly what I meant when people said well aren't you going to give examples and with great love for these people I said no that will limit what people will come up with and this is a perfect example of it this is a perfect example of it I did not want cookie cutter ideas these are not cookie cutter ideas and I just I'm thrilled by this as I was thrilled with the first year group and perhaps later on if people have questions about what's happened to that first year group so the liaisons who are in the audience here can talk about that like Jeff Prohl two of those four have resulted in books not bad not bad but back to this notion of the physics of it I mean this is really exciting for me that this is helped to generate some things and back to that notion this is thrilling here but at the same time this morning I don't want to sound like I forget who it is through the looking glass some character says everybody's a winner everybody gets prizes Nora Elgis was talking from the point of view of the umbrella project and she said I was really to say I was touched was beyond the statement she said that she had applied for this and she didn't get it but it didn't matter she somehow in filling out the application realized this is what she wanted to do anyway and she went forward with it and somehow I realized sitting there this morning I sat there and I went that was exactly in a way it was part of a conversation that early on Cindy Sorrell and I had had actually I wish it had been in the smoky bar it was long distance phone calls I realized early on that was part of our conversations where I had said something like yes we were using phrases like breaking boundaries all of these phrases which have meaning of course they have meaning but we always think about those in terms of the outward boundaries you know pioneering boundaries all of those things and I realized that Nora was speaking about something else which is actually just as important that we all have these interior boundaries that we have to break too and Nora as a mature artist broke an interior boundary that was equally important than getting some award some check she said nevertheless I'm going to still achieve something and for those who in the audience didn't get a check you know you can achieve something too and I think that's the big lesson and I just want to make sure in the midst of a celebration in quotation marks that you take that away today I think it's really really important it's so important to remember that I just want everybody not to diminish everybody smiles up here but I think it's so important to remember there are boundaries out there and there are boundaries in here that we all have to break really important does that answer your question I did have some other things I wanted to share though as well and this sort of goes with the future can I move into that so that we can also have plenty of time to go back there and also have you guys have questions we were talking a little bit about the past we're in the present but there's a big future coming up we've got some surprises I need to share some things how to say this well I'll go back to physics a lot of times with my playwriting students but with playwrights that I work with who will always come to me and say oh somebody is asking me what the play is about someone is asking me what the scene is about an actor is asking me whatever and I'll say you're in the midst of the act of creation and I'll share with them a cosmological metaphor a cosmological paradigm and that is you'll appreciate this Sarah that that at least today at this point in time God knows in 10 years the idea will change as science advances or moves forward there's the belief from the moment of Big Bang the Big Bang theory that within a factor of a few nanon nanon nanoseconds of time moments of time that as matter expanded or what we would call particle matter expanded whatever you want to call that outward that matter of the creative matter actually expanded faster than light and I always say to the playwright you know sometimes it's more important that matter the density of that matter expands faster than the illumination so don't worry about explaining the illumination or the light on that matter it's taken us two years to get to this point and it took us a while there were seven of us to create this black creative capacity grant and it was hard as Beth can tell you we didn't have a plan that was instantaneous it was not fully formed there was a lot of struggles and the seven people that helped me put it together oh my god the long hours that they worked were endless Jeff Prole Cindy Surrell Beth Blakers Brian Quirt Liz Engelman Cindy Surrell and myself that's seven to say that they worked a couple hundred hours is an underestimation no people who worked on a committee have ever worked so hard as those people can we give that group of people a applause no NEA committee ever worked so hard and I've been on plenty of them I'm bringing that up because at this moment in time and I've met with all these people I've talked with Ken our incoming president you'll always be a president you'll always please I've shared all this information with Ken Ken I've had several meetings we've had wonderful meetings talking about all of this Jeff, Cindy, Vicki and Beth are formally rotating off my creative capacity grant so that they don't die in early death if nothing else coming on Brian I, Liz Engelman are staying on Ken is coming on of course as the new president I'm bringing on two new people perhaps you know them Yvette Nolan yes extraordinary person a couple years ago I had the extraordinary privilege of being part of the howl round interview conversation that we had my remembrance of that was one of the most special remembrances to the point that I don't even remember the audience I just remember sitting with her and having a conversation it was so special also an extraordinarily gifted playwright dramaturge TCG blogger artist Jacqueline Lawton I don't know if you know her or not she too is also going to be coming on the committee so we're adding two more people as well to that group selection committee starting for the in effect the third application group now having said that hold that in your brain because we're now going to shift gears into warp nine Ken has kept this all in his brain he's been amazing you're going to love him as a president he's kept this all in his brain I don't believe in discarding people I just don't believe in that a couple months ago I was sitting in best office and we were having a great conversation and I just said so I've got some ideas four years for this Bly creative capacity grant is not enough I think we need to do a year five and six and we talked about the idea Beth I have a lot of friends a lot of former students of mine who've gone on to do exceedingly well in television who have promised they will do anything for me and they can and what I've asked Beth to do as part of her rotating off and having all presidents have some task as they leave well she really does I'm putting together a list of about X number of people former playwriting students of mine at Yale and other friends people who taught for me at Yale for many years who've also done exceedingly well that she's going to become and here's a new title Bly creative capacity grant ambassador at large in fundraising again I share this with Ken and we've had great conversations about this and so she is going to be doing that she because she is nationally internationally known even among all of these playwrights and the agents is quite capable of being the pitch person to these agents and to these playwrights for me representing me so that I don't have to go and do that and they are targeted to go forth and raise more money in the name of the Bly creative capacity grant for years five and six so that's part one of this so we're not discarding this person she's too valuable part two Cindy Sorrell again so invaluable about the work that she did in helping to create this created another position called the Bly creative capacity grant ambassador at large in publishing and having discussions and again in deciding this I want to make sure you also know that Brian and Liz had a great deal of input in this I also shared with Ken and Brian and Liz the notion of I want another position Bly creative capacity grant ambassador at large in publishing and again Cindy because of all the work she's done I said I think Ken and I had some really great discussions about this transparency issues this harkens back to my metaphor that I started with about the playwright that sometimes matter is created and the matter expands faster than the illumination the transparency if you will the light not everybody knows about everything we're doing well now you will Cindy is going to create a Bly creative capacity grant guidebook an A through Z of it that will be online for everybody to know the A through Z of how we've created this the application everything the history of it and it's going to be online for you and also for funders so that this will be there she's also going to be in charge of a creative capacity grant in effect chronicle a history of this so all of this stuff is going to be chronicle so we're not going to lose the history of this and she's going to be tapping individual people young and old members to do articles interviews that will be in the LMDA review newsletters and outside publications it's about god damn time American theater theater forum maybe funding type publications as well so the message gets out about this this is not just about fucking me this is about LMDA and the kind of work that's being done the kind of work that's being done that's the point it's always been the point it's always been the point oxygen it's always been the point it's always been the point I think I think that was all I had to say it was too damn much anyway but thank you Mark so we just have time for a couple of questions from the audience if you have anything that you want to ask Kelly or Sally or Sarah or thoughts you want to share in terms of non-traditional art forms traditional dramaturgical forms we invite stories from your own life adventures as Mark said if people who are here who are the spokespeople to the first year recipients want to throw in an update from the group they're reporting to we would be delighted to hear from all of you so we've got some volunteers running around with mics anyone want to throw their hand in the air raise hands high please thanks I'm really excited about all the projects hearing about I'm curious with pot because I think I might be in New York so I'd love to hear the dates again and I'm also curious about how you're ticketing it and since people can encounter it by chance how those logistics are working for that style of festival totally the dates are September 23rd to the 25th and it's free so you can happen upon it if you're there except for one which is I really hope it works out it's a puppet dinner party so you get food and drink so because of that we're going to charge tickets because it's like a restaurant you get some stuff with it and it's a capacity issue so but otherwise it's also I'll give you one of these I brought a lot of them this is like how I'm kind of like getting the word out this is it's a zine I made and it's kind of been like the best way I've learned to like tell people about it because I'm like hitting up bartenders talking about and I'm like here read this so this kind of is how I've been kind of getting the word out it's like here's the dates, here's some like extra details here's some like big picture stuff and here's like the website you can check out and then eventually this kind of idea is going to become the map and this kind of came out of I didn't want to spend any of the buy money on just like a glossy postcard because I'd rather buy something weird like a weather balloon or something I'm just like no so I just like went to the Yale school drama in the night and like used their color copier for free so yeah so anyway but yeah so I've made a bunch of these while watching Orange is the New Black so I'm happy to like just burst them around as well but if you can't see them because you're way over there they're gorgeous and you definitely want one it's us on Hi Sarah, it sounds like a fascinating project I'm just really interested in what narratives have come out and how you are working with science and the science is working with you really great question I think one of the things that I've really been wrestling with is what is the meeting point between the science and the imagination so how how do we because the science might see if you're not familiar with the science it might not necessarily seem to affect your everyday life although it affects has affected everything that we have believed to be true about the universe how do we express the significance of the discovery in those terms and so one of the things that we've really been thinking about and talking about is actually how how the science affects the imagination and what is the connection of the elements of the night sky that we become familiar with and sing about as children how does that connect to the science which connects up to the stories of how the scientists became scientists or astrophysicists in the first place and actually what they tell their children and what their relationship is with the sky and the imagination as well as with the science so figuring out how that might be translated is something I've been thinking about a lot well I'm just wondering if I need to be worried that the universe is expanding only in good ways dramaturgically okay great they are expanding the universe so can we say congratulations and thank you and we look forward to hearing from them in the coming years as these projects come to fruition I'm going to end this section a little early because I don't know that every single person who's going to want to check it out backstage is going to be able to fit there in one round so we may have to cycle through in a couple of groups so the AGM starts at 4.15 Coriana I believe that's accurate I'd love for you all to be here so go ahead and go backstage right oh actually there's going to be volunteers out in the hallway there's going to be volunteers they will lead you to the green room go have your mind blown on the holodeck and then come on back and hear from your board and exec thanks all