 I wanted to acknowledge that this being the final portion of the Tempe part of the event and a lot of this event focusing on the decolonizing of our practices and work around racial equity and justice Liz and I wanted to acknowledge the irony of having two white East Coast Jews be the closing conversation and just sort of note that both of us both before being here and being here an analysis and actions around whiteness and white supremacy and white nationalism are part of what we think about in our practices and just to sort of acknowledge that had we both been available together at another time during these couple days it would feel more appropriate than being a beginning or ending to the conversation and centering whiteness the way it sort of represents so just to say that aloud. And hi everybody and I'm so glad to see you to the extent that I can see you in this room but I'm trying. I also just want to say as part of starting that I'm very grateful to the people who've been on this land that sustained this place for us to be here through their dances through their creativity through the rituals and it does feel like a spiritual place and it is a place in which my own Jewishness and our Jewishness lives in a particular thread through the life here. Partly being a desert people it's been interesting to be in a place where people have visions which I hope you've had and if not here maybe in Tucson you'll get some. And being a people who come with a difficult history and relationship to land. And so I just offer this one prayer which when I was a child I just like the sound of the Hebrew it wasn't till much later because I never really understood Hebrew but the meaning of the prayer it's a praise prayer it's a praise of thanks and basically it says it thanks whatever larger presence you decide to think for breath for structure. I just love that there's a prayer that thanks something for structure and then for the capacity to actually arrive at this moment. So for me I changed it into isn't it amazing given our histories that we would actually be gathered here today again on this land that has been saved for us in the Hebrew Goshi Hecchan of the Keaman of Higianu last month and with that Michael let's move on shall we. So yeah I get I have one I get to start so one of the great joys and privileges in my life the last couple years has been like a lot of you I've known Liz Lerman as a force and artist a leader a thinker a choreographer and a master artist and now because we both live in the same place and got the invitation to come here and work together I now know her as one of my dearest friends so I feel very fortunate to get to sit here and be in conversation and I'm gonna start by asking you a question that I feel like people don't ask you enough they ask you about feedback they ask you about ideas they ask you about facilitation but they don't just say Liz Lerman what are you working on creatively right now as an artist that you're really excited about and how does that connect to the notion of ensemble practice which is what gathers all of us in this community here together. Well thank you for that question Michael. You're welcome. Somebody once asked me who I was most like and I surprised them by saying John Cage and they said what not anything like John Cage I said well you know people like John Cage's ideas they didn't always like his art but but he wouldn't have the ideas if he didn't make the art and that's sort of how I feel a little bit you can't have this you have to like get in that thick of it again and again and again so that's the place where all the sort of raw stuff happens I'm a few years ago I happened to be in Scotland actually teaching critical response they're very eager over there it was the puppet community that brought me which I just love the puppets doing critical response but it's pretty great. Step one. Step one. You got it but but I went to a museum the big museum there and they had me zip it up called Wicked Bodies which turned out to be 500 years of drawings of witches and I have to say I wasn't that interested in witches before I walked in but by the time I walked out I was completely and totally enthralled astonished and amazed and thought I need to work on this and that the funny thought I had at the time was if I just bring to life a few of these drawings it'll be the most pornographic piece I've ever made you cannot believe and it's like the other thought I had on leaving the exhibit is every time in history every culture has its witches and what is that about and began to think sort of the underlying premise I suppose the sort of the one of the engines is why is some knowledge celebrated some knowledge erased and some knowledge criminalized what is that process and of course we just observed a few weeks ago a woman become a witch right in front of us over the two years we saw two weeks we saw where she began the beginning even where she was at the end of I was going to say the trial and then how she was perceived after that and who became the victim in the next week so I've started working on it and it's it's really interesting I'll just say as quickly as I can I because that you know I'm at that point right now where everything is possible you know all the ideas are good everything's interesting we haven't sort of flipped and started saying well it can't be this it can't be that it's and to be honest this is one of these pieces where I know I'm going to make something and it's going to be in some kind of theatrical place and it will probably tour and that the structure of that remember grateful for structure it's a good thing but this time a lot of the stuff I'm putting on the cutting room floor I don't really like keeping there it feels too powerful too important too interesting and therefore requiring some additional beyond the usual things where we would tour and there'd be you know you'd have panel discussions or you know you do workshops this time I feel like I've got to figure out way more activities sooner because it's just so pertinent I will say though that three three there are three realms in the piece one is the realms of the witches themselves and there's we're having a great time with the major and minor witches the witch of forgiveness the witch of ambiguity the witch of the tiniest things the witch of old libraries the witch of I mean anything going on for you right now just put the witch in front of it you'll have a great time it's really incredibly generative we start every rehearsal in a circle what witch are you today and it's just amazing what could you take a second and say who's the we so yes because I don't have a company anymore you know I left the beautiful dance exchange which is doing great great work they're a wonderful ensemble in their 40th year and they're doing just fine without me which is fantastic but I've gathered some artists together people that I've known over time maybe it's been an interesting question because as I said every culture has its witches and is this a time and a place to bring different cultures together in a space and kind of white person do that as a leader you mean yeah there's a witch of whiteness and one thing she does is collect other people's cultures but it's also been proposed that perhaps I'm that person although and there's a certain way in which that could be true so so trying to work through that but one of the ways I've decided to so I have some amazing partners from my own history and people I've known including Nia Love some of you may know Nia Love's work she's extraordinary and her daughter Makada is also in the piece Nia and I knew each other when she was very small because I knew her father had love so there's like a a sensation of love in our relationship but I think makes it possible but I will say the world of the witches there's the world of the trials and this is like the fifth time I've done a piece where the the fact that as I like to when if you think about the historic period when the witches were all burned and drowned the church riled everybody up but it was the state that did the killing it was legal and this is the thing that I want to do with this piece is to make it clear that even though their laws they're not legal I mean they're not right and what how do we address that and then the third world and this is what is I think for the moment given me permission to try to get at some of this is there's two scientists here on campus who heard me speak and we got together and they're working on something called productive ambiguity is that great no they got NSF money and they think ambiguity is actually leads to efficiency we don't have time to go into it all right now but but they they there's somebody is collecting witches in this piece I think they're going extinct and I think that the collector is collecting them in order either to own their beauty or to save their knowledge for the future or to figure out what they know or to try to categorize the knowledge and how that all works so I think there's room in there to try to pull these these misunderstandings into the present somehow so anyway have you read neo gamons american gods no I haven't am I am I awful might there be something interesting that I mean it's different but this notion of historical figures and legends and how they get pulled into the world and intersect with morality and politics oh I love that one last thing we just had a rehearsal period and just because we're going to get into creative tools in a little bit I pulled out a really old tool that I haven't used in a long time and I realized even though I was working with this incredibly group of amazing professionals they probably didn't know this tool either so when I just say you you all use this tool in some way or another in my case when my mother died and I was so young the only thing I knew how to do when I was making this dance about her was you know dance my feelings because that's what I knew how to do but one day I went into rehearsal and I wasn't sad anymore and I just didn't know what to do and I just I didn't know what to do and so I put myself in a sad shape and I said okay what's going on oh look my back is curved my focus is down my my digits are splayed oh and I made a little score for sadness and then I messed around how many ways could I curve my spine how many ways could I change how many ways could I stretch my you know my joints and came up with this material that I would never have made if I had to be sad or pretend to be sad so that I went into rehearsal this week I'm in a rage so many of the people I know are in a rage I knew I you know we were going to go in and pretend to be rageful so we we built us we did rage seething and that angry person over there we put ourselves in those positions we figured out what's the what's the score in the body what's the body saying and then everybody went around the room and made these you cannot believe the material that people made it's utterly different and fantastic and then we broke it up because I wanted to edit it we broke it up into the letters of the alphabet so a bc and then they began to do spells with with this stuff so anyway stay tuned can I can I ask you one other question about that because there's so many folks in the room here I mean there's how many folks in here sort of say that dance is the primary discipline that brings you into this conversation hi guys and then theater a lot yeah and then and then who doesn't wouldn't go either but would say a different kind of cross-disciplinary or connected yeah others okay so so I I want to ask when you talk about you know this material was made and then you had to decide how you wanted to edit it things a lot of folks in here explore different forms of collaboration and authorship and what happens in the room what's your work with this kind of pickup company that's become more than that like how do you talk about and and operate authorship around material that happens in the space so this is a big part of what happens when people enter into the relationship with me I've said in this particular piece even though 30 or 40 years ago when I would write in the program kind of choreographed by Liz Lerman in collaboration with the performers which 30 35 years ago was something people hadn't seen and then we would list everybody in this piece I don't actually think that's enough it might be that conceived and organized by or shepherded by but then the term shepherd isn't quite right either but what is the role of all the makers in the room I also have agreements with everybody that anything they make they can take back for themselves to use them whatever they wish acknowledging the origin point even the editing though I'm not always the editor we pass all that stuff around constantly but the naming of that activity feels really important to me and I don't know if it all fits on the front cover of a playbill you know and I don't know if it's actually a description inside or even the way we characterize ourselves so with this particular group which includes some people from the city company and I'm Leah Cox who some of you may know I'm just extraordinary I don't know how that's going to go but it feels very contributed contributory however I am raising the money I'm organizing rehearsals I'm paying people I am probably a synthesizer so maybe there's that hard to say thank you that feels like a complexity that a lot of folks in here think yeah yeah thank you for that so how about you Michael what are you working on what's your craves and I would say the same intro right people ask you how do you facilitate how do you what are you working on um yeah um I am uh one of the things I'm part of a theater company called Sojourn Theater we're just about 20 years old there's 15 of us uh we live in seven different cities and are constantly so unlike a lot of companies here we are no longer place-based we are uh company-based and we work in lots of different places on projects so like this year we have have had projects going on in Cleveland and here in Arizona and in the Twin Cities and in Chicago different combos of us work one of the projects that we have going on now is a piece called um Don't Go that um I think a lot of my um creative brain is on these days uh Don't Go is an evolution of a piece we started about three years ago which was called Work With Me and Work With Me was going to look at collaboration in communities between unlikely suspects across ideological divides and it kind of had a it had a sort of narrative kind of storyish flow and uh and then the election happened in 2016 and um it felt soft uh it felt soft in terms of the way that it got into the challenges of the divides and the way that we uh stay and go so we um sort of thought about how to remake the idea something I've been really interested in for a long time especially the last decade is um not just making things that happen up here and folks sit out there in the dark and watch I've become far more interested and I've practiced much more lately in uh events that are aimed at encounters amidst the folks out here as opposed to an encounter between this and this so whatever this is which might actually be out there is about making encounters happen that might not happen otherwise with that goes in a layer of audience design that's not so interesting that stranger encounter if you've got a lot of folks coming from really similar perspectives and backgrounds so we take on as part of our creative practice uh who's in the room not just what we're making but who we're making it for and with um so this piece uh basically started with the the simple concept of let's make a piece where the performers actually exist to bring strangers into dialogue with each other um across uh unlikely spaces and moments so uh we two things happened we got some commission support here at ASU Gammage which uh Liz also has for wicked bodies both of us have a bit of support here uh and that's allowed me to bring some sojourn artists in and out the last year and that'll happen again this year but we also got invited to USC last spring in Los Angeles and we did a six week residency where four company artists were there and built a prototype of act one of the piece with undergrads not theater majors actually it turned out that the students who were most interested in this were not the theater students it actually turned out to be an incredibly interesting and really diverse group of students from all over campus who came together and where the the core ensemble and uh this piece act one was uh seven people meeting seven strangers and the 80 minutes of the show was simultaneously seven pairs of human beings who'd never met building relationships through tasks and conversations and then using lighting and amplification and architecture choosing which pair the audience would witness at which points and then giving the audience the opportunity to sort of focus in on the pair they were most interested in and the the strangers were curated we call them a stranger chorus and USC had committed to helping us find the stranger chorus we worked for half a year sort of mentoring them into doing that and uh and they couldn't um because they didn't have experience at engaging beyond their campus uh and the theater department themselves it turned out who were wonderful to us and great to work with did not necessarily have the skills to build those relationships in the context of a performance event or what we were trying to curate so we ended up hiring two organizers in Los Angeles who one of our artists was deep friends with and those organizers in three weeks put together a stranger chorus of 49 people for us and those strangers were multi-generational uh diverse identity wise in many ways uh and the show then became seven strangers walking out on stage in the beginning to meet the seven performers and then this 80 minute event would happen and it was really exciting and great and at the end of it um the lead artists on this project are Rebecca Martinez, Niki Zaleski and myself and John O Island as well and at the end of it we went that was great that's not the thing where we got them to at the end that's not at all satisfying and we realized it's actually a larger three act event and we are um can I just ask you how did you know it wasn't I mean what disappoint what was it that made you feel that wasn't the place to be? The aspiration of the piece that iteration was to get two strangers to a moment of conversation around a topic that they absolutely disagreed on and to invite them to the moment of do you want to stay in this conversation or do you want to go and the piece got them to the moment of I want to stay or go and then a little bit beyond and it was so clear that that we hadn't actually we hadn't done the work to go as deep into that relationship as we wanted and it just sort of kept feeling topical and not not human beneath the topical so it didn't feel emotionally resonant and in this moment it felt like a little bit a little bit replicative of what you can catch on a better version of a punditry show on television you know different points of view even though was more personal and human it didn't it didn't feel satisfying and what we realized we hadn't done was although the audience had witnessed the theatrical event was watching these pairs go through a dramaturgy but these human beings had not gone through creative experience together the creative experience was structured around them and the audience had an experience of aesthetics but the people had an experience on stage of getting to know someone amidst urgency and it was really exciting and they loved doing it but what we realized was they need to create together so I literally the next to last performance we were driving back to where people were staying and I looked at Jono and I said oh the second act is those those strangers need to go through a 40 minute version of Antigone or whatever the classic play is and they need to be the performers and they need to be instruction shepherded through it by the performers so at the end of act two you have watched these strangers and these sojourn performers tell the story of a classic struggling dramatic conflict and reconciliation and then the third act returns to the end of the first act which is literally at the end of act one these two people are in a moment and it's do you want to stay or go and then before they can answer they are whisked into Antigone or whatever it is and those two people become the protagonists and then at the end of act two they are returned to the same architectural space and orientation and they're asked again after having gone through that tale do you want to stay or go and then act three begins and act three then continues on into a dialogue between these two human beings so we're now we're working on that iteration um and we're going to work on it here this year some of you might know uh LaGuardia Performing Arts Center and Steven and Queens we're going to do a little bit of work with him probably on that this year we're going to be in Nashville for two weeks on it next fall and then it's hopefully seems like maybe going to happen at a festival a year and a half from now and then it will be back here two years from now at ASU Gamma. So Michael I sort of hope started with this idea that um you know John Cage makes his work but it's the the ideas come from that so given what you just told us about this piece that you're in the middle of it that you had already a session where wait it's not this it's going to go here is that forcing you to have to reconceive any of your own thinking um how you're thinking or what it's you know what edge is that putting you on for for me making stuff making theater uh is never like a I know what I want to express and I will spend a year working to express it like and there are certainly directors I deeply admire whose job for them is to interrogate the play figure out a vision and then work to express it I have very little interest in that which is why I only generally make original work because I'm interested in a question or an inquiry or a subject and going on a journey and then finding out what form that journey leads to in terms of an expressive experience and an encounter amidst the people in the room and that might look like a play it might look like participation it might look like a tour it might look like all kinds of things so it hasn't changed my thoughts about like the aesthetics of it what it what it has done is this project going parallel to the deep shit we're in um in the world which let's also acknowledge is not different from a lot of deep shit we've been in for a very long time but there's a particular manifestation of the shit right now that's that's pretty intensely present I'm trying to figure out how the show doesn't become beholden to that narrative but how the project contributes something to how human beings encounter each other that is useful given that shit so that's probably what's been iterating idea-wise and trying to wrestle with which gives me a chance to come to a different question for you does that sound right yeah and we just want you guys to know in a little bit we're gonna stop for whatever's on your minds what's brewing might be questions it might be pictures in your head it might be whatever but we will be there soon okay is this okay that we just talked to each other for a couple minutes all right all right uh okay so um we're both at a ginormous institution right now ASU but both both Liz and I um although sort of different generations have both started organizations uh because we couldn't find what we were interested in in the sectors or fields that our discipline would seem to take us into there are other people in the room for whom that is the case um and we are now working in by far uh kind of the most gargantuan institution in the state of Arizona uh and the largest institution either of us have been this deeply engaged in and paid by before so like it's super complex to be here and I know some of that's already come up in conversations over the couple days the challenges of that and also the magic of that so I thought we wouldn't spend a ton of time on the challenges but you can grab any of us and talk about that but there's a particular thing that you are really leading on and that we are both working on in relation to um how lived experience and skills and tools and approaches make their way out excessively into the world beyond rooms that we are together in and I wonder if you want to talk about that yeah um yeah we won't go into the whole thing at the university now except um I'll just say being an older person coming to the university there is a certain magic to it I mean they give you a computer they give you an office the bathrooms work you get a you get a paycheck every two weeks when we first got here raised the bathroom can't get over can we just say the bathroom when we first got here as I was moving here a couple months after her she called me and said there is a bathroom here that I don't have to clean up or put toilet paper in it is here amazing that was a big deal really so there's a certain just amazement of the kinds of things that resources that you know and yeah so I'm grateful for all that um I think I'm kind of an obsessive tool maker probably more than anything I've been that and I'm not sure if that's the nature of the relationship between teaching and making and how that keeps sites spiraling around you figure out you start sharing what you know oh you don't really know it oh how can I make this more experiential than it is no I don't want to tell you I want to build an experience I think a lot of it has to do with the magnificent way in which I was able to spend time with not just trained professional dancers who I love but actually to be in hospitals and schools and prisons and things like that made me have to re conceive the molecules of the idea it's the same idea it's like ice water you know fog rain I mean it's all the same stuff but you know it changes its thing when you're in different place and and because of that I think I began to grasp these essential elements um and hang on to them and notice that if I had figured out what that was I actually could put it aside and go find something else new that if I hadn't done that I just repeated myself there's something counterintuitive there that the more you name the thing the more you're actually able to step away and so over the years I've attempted all these different manifestations of how to get these tools into the hands of people because it turns out they're really useful and they might be useful for making art they are but they're also useful for all kinds of other things having meetings or you know making dinner or having a congregation whatever so trying to make something better how to listen how are you sure wait a minute how do you handle the mistakes you've made all that stuff so when I was recruited here I was in the midst of trying to sort out if I could put this into a digital framework and I believe when I last talked at NET that was where I left the ending of the talk was I was just starting to I'm still just trying to figure it out I have been given some support here to build a team and because the way you get things done here is to teach a course this thing called the Atlas of Creative Tools has had its first hybrid meaning I see them once a week but they do a lot of work online I'm heading into a full semester will be fully online and trying to develop so this is what what I think right now is I think the digital space is incredibly creative full of possibility it is not the same as being in the presence of somebody but there is stuff you can do there that's pretty fantastic and oddly enough some of the stuff that people like is the way I teach is you know people will I'll say you know we'll do something and then I'll say to people what'd you find out and then they'll say something and because they say that thing then that's what I'll talk about I don't have it planned in advance but all that stuff goes into the ether they can go back and find it because it's sort of all there you know you can look up what was that 30-second lecture on comfort zone what was that you know stuff like that so I like that part I missed trying to sort out how to find out what people are actually experiencing is problematic but anyway we're experimenting with this my hope is that eventually the Atlas of Creative Tools will live as a as a place for artists to have their own neighborhoods that you could you could put your tools into these particular maybe templates it's not quite a template really that the tools could live in a sequence but they could also migrate so if somebody typed in say they wanted to get listening tools you know yours would migrate as well as mine I think there's actually a financial possibility and how this could work like Spotify or something or you know you don't get a penny a tool or something like that because you know I know that for a lot of us this is this is the heart of our knowledge it's like I keep saying to artists I I sell my knowledge not my dances I sell this what people want is the way we think and act and behave and I only come to that through making my work and I love it when people come and see these dances but the rest of this is just as real and just as powerful and just as critical and I think this again historically there are times where you have to retreat to the caves and keep this thing private because that's the only way to save it for the next generation but we're not in that time right now we're in a time where this stuff needs to be in the hands of people and I'm hoping this would work and the second reason I hope artists would eventually want to put put their things in there too is because you'd be able to see who's using them you'd be able to say look this many people checked in on the way that I'm working on this right now and I think as we seek ways of how to acknowledge our own work and the role that acknowledgement plays for us I think there's something in there that's way beyond social media likes way beyond that that we don't understand so that's what I'm working on here and there are lots of issues with it lots of problems but I will go into all that but you and Michaels join me in this now yeah um how many are there are there some of the students from my civic practice class here yeah so uh I'm teaching a course right now on civic practice I have about 20 students mostly grad students a few undergrads as well um and that's a course looking at artists and designers culture makers and heritage holders collaborating in and with communities and particularly looking at sort of the idea that I've been working on for a while around civic practice and a kind of portion of the spectrum of how artists engage that looks at artists deploying their assets in collaboration with community self-defined aspirations and visions and challenges and that course is kind of looking at what what are the ethics of partnership what are the muscles of listening what capacity building is required for artists and what sort of preparation and relationship building happens in communities with residents and organizations and that course is going to be a hybrid course next fall meaning folks are going to take it live and they're going to take it online and there'll be a number of some live interactions but more virtual interactions and then the goal is eventually for that to move online but I'll tell you the thing that I feel like Liz and I are working most heartily on is something that that hasn't been solved here or pretty much anywhere I don't think yet and there's the opportunity here because of all the brilliant folks around here doing the technology and AR and VR and XR and all that kind of work there is there are very few examples maybe outside of the medical profession right now where digital technology is being used to explore the learning that happens in embodied practices how does knowledge that is about bodies in space get communicated most of the online work happening is helping someone figure out how to translate knowledge into videos assignments discussion boards lectures and that stuff and that really can be very useful in in knowledge areas if you're working ultimately with Liz Lerman on dance making facilitation group process ultimately the standards of hear her speak and get some written discussion going is not going to necessarily approximate that experience and I feel the same way for work that's around relational kind of artist community practice and I'll tell you an example that you may or may not have heard of to give you where we're trying to raise money to go in Kansas a couple years ago the School of Education University of Kansas explored a course that was for principles of public high schools around the United States they could take it virtually and the nature of the course was to help them build just and collaborative school environments the way the course worked was they created an avatar a fictional identity and they entered a simulated world of a public high school in an unnamed American city and the instructor the teacher acted as the dungeon master so to speak and basically game ran an immersive eight-week experience and the plot was the school had lost its federal funding because of a civil rights violation and this school had to rebuild its relationships in the building and outside the building with the community to re-achieve federal funding status and these principles went through in character having to negotiate relationships and get feedback and get challenged some of the relationships were you know in animated video game world some were sort of live chats where avatars kind of took over their identities but they were actually doing the interactions the feedback they got on this course in terms of the learnings and how the learnings were then implemented in the school buildings was astronomically high and I am sitting in a room with a group of people who like build experiences and encounters and work with dramaturgy and narrative and understand relationship and dynamics and there are people who aren't us who are the pioneers of building out that field and that's a sore miss on our part and it's a sore lack on the part of those things getting built so you know how how how is nudra how are the playwrights you know not contributing the scenarios and the dramaturgies how are the divisors not contributing the way that generative space gets occupied and led in these moments so we're pushing for the folks here who work on gamification and immersive worlds and multi-platform simulations how can we work with them on taking online education to a place beyond knowledge dissemination towards transformative experience in the virtual world which in terms of access and equity is massively important because there will just never be the resources time or space for everyone to be in the room with everyone who could share a useful transformative knowledge with them the same way that surgeons around the world are now being trained by like three trauma doctors based in chicago and detroit you know how how do we how do we engage that so i'm that's the thing i'm really thinking about and doing some pushing on here and since michael since you started also with this word ethics i just want to add that for me there's some troubling considerations around thinking about all of these creative tools without also thinking about i'll use the term ethics but it has to do with for example our president for me one of the one of a creative principle might be this multiple words for the same thing and when you get when you can give people ideas about how that works you can see all kinds of ways that uh you can mediate problems but we have a we have a president for multiple words for the same thing or multiple things for the same word where uh you know he changes it every single day and i'm beginning to think that um putting these incredibly powerful tools out without also thinking about how they are applied and in what way they are used and by whom and how is actually really scary or for example ambiguity or multiple truths uh truth and reconciliation commission for definitions of truth in order for them to do their work it's brilliant it's fantastic and when i was living in baltimore during the uprising you could see how those four definition of truth worked every single day to help people through that but that's not what we mean by the kind of truth we're living in now so i i uh i think in addition to all the things you just named about what kind of immersive worlds can we create is how are we going to bring to bear these kinds of ideas too so um do you want to just move to that then we want to talk a little bit about the social justice inequity work yeah and then i'll think about yeah why don't you go um well one of the things i i was talking about with the lives i i imagine a lot of folks in here spend a lot of energy thinking about process yeah um yeah and and you know so do so do we um and i i feel like if i'm having to sort of define the thing that i that i want to be thinking about and and writing about and working on a lot and jerry and i've talked a lot about process over the years i'm just gonna keep name checking you because everybody name checks you so why not add more to the beautiful jerry um but process conversation uh feels really um crucial and i had an experience a couple weeks ago um that connects this for me to the to the the conversations around social justice that we're also engaged in and the work of it so my my sojourn's almost 20 years old but i'm also part of a center that's seven years old and we're in a transition moment right now the center i've been the artistic director and senilla nankani who's been my collaborator for years and years has been the managing director and the organization has just promoted her to executive director so we're in a leadership transition uh my title has shifted to lead artist for civic imagination um which i get to make up and i like um but senilla is now the executive director and in that transition she is taking on that role because she is absolutely the best candidate for that job her skills her experience her excellence um she is the candidate for that job we would be we couldn't find a more ideal candidate and she's a woman of color and so in a transition an organization going from what is the dominant model in our arts and culture sector of a white guy right who's a founder also to a woman of color becoming leader there are assumptions that we sort of made internally a little bit about the ease with which we would do that given that a lot of our work externally focuses on racial equity and social justice and gender and that's a lot of the work we do as facilitators uh but actually it turns out there's lots of moments in the ways that we interact that are pretty coded visibly and invisibly in terms of those very dynamics and so in the last month in particular um we've been in this process of um holding each other and certainly holding me accountable for moments around those dynamics moments around gender moments around race moments around age uh and process wise what we find ourselves talking about is um we feel really lucky because we have two things that we're starting to feel like are very necessary for healthy process around some of the really challenging and necessary conversations of this moment we have love and we have tools love without tools means there's effort but maybe not necessarily the capacity capacity without love maybe means that one grows tired of the effort and is it really worthwhile so we have felt but fortunate as we move through it and as I sometimes get called out and then called back in and as we kind of work together that love and tools are present and then we start thinking what about all the spaces that we work in all the spaces that we work in where there's the desire and the knowledge that change needs to happen but there's maybe not love and tools simultaneously how do we help build capacity for love and tools in our ensembles and in the spaces that we are welcome within and I'm I'm learning a lot about that from my colleagues and really trying to do the work of uh figuring that out um from my angle I haven't heard you say that that's really really uh a beautiful way of putting it um Michael will tell you when I came here I wanted them to uh let me have a lab called the lab for risk purpose and love um and I was told that actually love wouldn't work here on the campus but could I use empathy I said no um and uh but there's some reconsidering going on right now about the use of that word so um uh in relationship to this idea about love and tools I'll add my own personal way of thinking seeing the world divided right now and I think I think some of you may have heard me say this before um but it's uh it's the reworking of the heisenberg uncertainty principle where where uh you know um this is not truly what it is this is my version of it reworked many times but in the in that principle heisenberg says you know if you measure the shape of something you will miss the momentum or the velocity and if you go for the velocity you will miss the shape I find this really interesting because I actually think artistic practice rehearsals dance in particular is one of those few places where actually shape and momentum is a fairly consistent thing back and forth back and forth and you get skilled at moving between them which you have to do most of our institutions including this one are shape conscious they're in a shape and you can't feel the urgency and the momentum of the times in that shape you have to you have to let it um decompose and then find its new shape but not too sharp a shape because it's going to have to decompose again and and the thing you know for a while I was saying it's easy it's like water ice you know it's just like that except you know that takes out it takes effort it takes effort to move between water and ice it takes effort takes energy like actual physical energy energy and no science and heat so I'm I find myself often when I think about change looking quickly in the room what's happening where are the shapes being held where is the momentum what's you know understanding you need both you can't live only in momentum no one will see it they won't know what you're talking about you need the shape to see it um the other thing I just wanted to bring to process and then and maybe we'll see where this goes but I um I just got back from Utrecht the university there which is the arts university in Utrecht where they they're interested in applying the critical response process what nation is Utrecht in in the in the Netherlands thank you thank you um I had met some of these folks at another conference and they're they're wild researchers and wonderful artists and doing it's a really interesting climate over there um and so we were working on the critical response process which they have decided they want to put throughout the entire university I'm not going to go into the whole process now some of you know it some of you may not but it's undergoing a lot of change right now and partly as people use it for so many different things like you may know the original idea was critical response was a way to get feedback and good feedback was defined as I can't wait to go back to work well actually I can't wait to go back to work in the studio but what came up in Utrecht is well wait a minute what's the work you're going back to it might not be what you're doing in the studio it might be how you are as a white man in a particular room that's the work right now what is the work of it so in the second step of critical response the artist asks questions that's the plan and if you know the system you know and the answer when an artist asks a question the responders can answer however they want as long as they stay on topic you cannot change the subject right so I could say to you what do you think about my ending of my dance you could say to me it's terrible you could say it's fine but you couldn't say Liz the ending's fine but your hair is stupid you can't change the subject which is at the heart of feedback in academia change the subject that's like the way it goes so honestly same in families child asks you into your into his or her room for help with their homework does not give you permission to tell them to clean up the room it is not the contract of which that invitation was made so listen listen listen Liz told my daughter that remember yeah it's fantastic for parents too it's you'll be very grateful Michael that I told that I told her that um but what what what we got into and the reason I'm bringing it up here is that you know when you say what they really wanted to work on how artists ask questions and I said to them you know it doesn't always come in the form of a question the problem doesn't come already made as a question it comes as a worry we're losing going to school I think you just upset a lot of people no they have to go to class goodbye you guys thank you for being here thanks for coming yeah I'm gonna think that every time people leave the theater oh they're freshmen they got a class to go to it's an angry white 69 year old male freshman should we turn out to them and yeah I just I'll finish this just to say the inquiry doesn't come always as a question it comes as a worry an obsession a doubt a hope a dream and that our capacity to turn those things into inquiry is really this beautiful little space because you know the students will ask art school questions they won't ask what's really in there until we allow that to merge and I thought that might be going on here too so we're we're opening it out now for questions but in case you've got worries doubts obsessions hopes dreams we're happy for those two as you raise what you want to raise with us and I think we're doing good that's great well I know I actually want to start by saying the transition you made at dance exchange is sort of a very visible exemplary kind of moment of a founder helping an organization move on and survive and thrive so maybe you might want to talk about that for a moment and I do just want to say it's not just intergenerational I mean the nature of what people the way people hold knowledge learn discover we used to joke at the dance exchange we were old white game straight married widow divorced Jewish Christian I mean we were just such an amazing array of people but what gave us the most trouble and would cause incredible anger is if a bug came into the rehearsal whether we killed it or not unbelievable distress it would end the rehearsal or the speed with which people learned something or when in the process they needed to know when we were going to the airport I mean people would just lose it over these things so I just want to say that yes some of its generational but there's so much else that goes on that causes what and and being able to pay attention and enjoy ourselves we just did because we used to really once we figured out about the bugs we just we just loved it we would line people up on both sides of the studio it's like oh but the bugs live it depends yeah oh my goodness but in terms of actual if part of the question is how do we transition leadership it's maybe useful to think about you know fractals how do you exchange leadership in a meeting how do you change leadership in a rehearsal how do you exchange leadership when you're when you're co-leading something how do you that's all relevant to what happens when you change leadership in an institution as in my case where a founder left we took a good five years to do that part of it was my figuring out there was time to go figure out a lot of that was internal when we began then there was a whole nother set of things we had to do when it was external the number of rituals that we made and kept I think one of the things we did that I liked the most which is continued it fed back down into the fractals into the small things is what is what's the nature of the compact we had a comp light a compact that we checked in on every time they had certain rules about the transition for example everyone would have a job when I left was in the compact not necessarily the job they held at the moment I was leaving but that's why I went to president crow about and said how about tenure promise everybody a job just don't tell them they can keep the job they have I think actually it's true right because people want it's the security but they they can't otherwise the shape gets stuck you're stuck in the shape and you need that flexibility so those kinds of things where you understand what's the underlying thing put that there and let the rest of it start to so those are those are my first thoughts on that but you like I'll be I'll be short so you can get to another question but Carol you spoke yesterday about it was an amazing conversation the three of you it was really beautiful and privileged to hear but you spoke about listening and how important it was that folks just know that their voice is welcome and needed in the room and that anything that whiffs of dismissal is is the end of not just leadership transition but the end of positive exchange and respect and the possibility of a future together and I certainly try to think about that in terms of the work we do as an organization with younger artists and older artists and I think about it as a teacher frankly thinking about like how everything that's said in the room you know is of potential value in the room and to treat it that way and not as if it's in the way but I'll just say that I think like a really strong practice of listening and respect is is central to to that conversation so I think it's an important point I have pretty two specific thoughts on it their brief one is I think that for as many places where that is true and the straw you're talking about there are many places where there is that access and that it seems to me important to be building the excellent tools for both the places that can access them right now and do the activism to try to make sure that broadband access is a part of any platform of equity right now in our country so that needs to be as important to me and forces working online as making the content but I to me the answer is not don't make don't push that way because it's not there yet I think the point is broadband access needs to be there and it is in many places and we need the content and the tools to be there so that's that's a tip on that I would I'd also just say you know in Baltimore the lead art arts funder the Deutsch Foundation is also the lead funder on net neutrality go find out where the people that are working on this partner them partner them partner and fund the libraries fund the libraries get arts pro get in the libraries because that's where people if some of these places don't have libraries anymore and which is just heartbreaking yeah it's a great question it's one that we've dealt with for years because a lot of our work has been participatory and experience-based so we're always trying to figure out what's the invitation that is honest and ethical and also leave space for discovery in the process of the experience so at USC we got to explore with those 49 folks sometimes telling them too much and then sometimes telling them a little less and always getting to debrief and get feedback after each time which was really necessary so my answer is we are thinking about that we think it's in the invite that stranger chorus is curated not with an email and then sign up but through meetings phone calls coffees going to them usually through partner organizations not just sort of random mall surveys which I heard about another thing doing which is another story so I say like yeah that's a really crucial question and we are working on that you know we for me it's saying every single time I teach anything you are in charge of your body over I used to say it at dance it doesn't matter if you say it said it today they won't remember say it again the next day say it again say it again people don't believe it so people are in charge of their bodies and whatever else you want to add to that and secondly I would say critical response process is a consent-based process it it teaches it says you cannot say whatever you want whenever you want however you want to me no you can't here's some ways to work though I want I am interested in what you have to say so I think and actually we're putting a lot of attention right now in that fourth step where I have an opinion about do you want to hear it helping people actually practice saying no and you I mean we did it recently we just did around the practice of saying no and there was one of the professors in the room started crying she said I cannot imagine my students ever being able to do this so we just have a lot of work to do in giving people that power yeah open to talking more with you about that in specifics too if you want another time that's Elizabeth from Independent Eye thank you Elizabeth can I just uh that's the second time now we've heard a comment where the getting us to make sure to check into our imagination that we're picturing white people when we talk about poorly resourced people or in this case this rural place I approach some neuroscientists as I was interested at the time I was working with Jaleh Zahler on a piece about the impact of poverty and wealth on the body and I was interested in the fact that the statistics are such that when you talk about poor people in America you should not just picture people of color actually I wanted to I wanted the neuroscientist to tell me how many how could I change people's picture that comes to their mind like what would they need to see I said like what if you told me they needed to see a thousand pictures of poor white people would that bring them the capacity to change their mind that change the picture because I'm sure that our imaginations are personalizing data every single second if we would pay attention to that so what does it take what does it take what does it take they're particularly uncertain disturbed me quite a bit they said that they thought imagination and experience were just about the same and that what you brought to mind was what your experience was and which discounts them everything we're doing unless we can get people to say that being with us is an experience that counts as an experience and they see a new picture as opposed to embodying it themselves so it gives us pause but that is true interesting we have three more minutes questions or thoughts ptp progressive technology project in minneapolis thank you that's a great resource thank you so we were each gonna we thought we'd close just by telling you a little bit about the southwest and what its impact has been on us would you like to go want me to start i'll start I as I mentioned at the beginning I've been I've surprisingly moved by the environment and by being in the desert and by the mix of people who live here and I've been very much influenced by some of the artists coming out of Latinx and indigenous communities here one a one person Cristobal Martinez who's who's part of post commodity who was here last year who hasn't been here this year and I have sustained this relationship we talk a lot but Cristobal was pretty much always on my case to slow down like he used to come to my office he'd make his meetings at the end of the day knowing that I'd have to make light rail and then he'd say I'll walk you a light rail he walks really slow there's no way I could catch my train and but I've really been thinking a lot about the nature of time and how it how it lives in us I heard recently of an indigenous group in Australia that considers when they think about the past they put it in front because they already know what it was they think about what's behind us I just love that totally uprooting for me personally but I was in the car listen I you know I listen to the radio lab occasionally and it's so weird because I always just catch a fragment of radio lab I never hear the whole radio lab but this and I like it better that way because they're kind of annoying but the but the information is so interesting so this one was about the fact that the earth used to spin faster and then we got a moon and we slowed down like by about a second or something I mean it's some tiny infinitesimal that we did slow down and so I I told Cristobal the other day that I'm I'm working on having a moon and just carrying a moon with me and it's little so I when people are going really fast I might go like this get a moon and I encourage everybody to take one with you and that's part of this dreamy kind of space that I feel we've been given by being here it's fun to see her do that in meanings I'm going to be super super quick because Alicia needs the space and I'll just say I moved here after 10 years in Chicago which was after almost 10 years in Portland Oregon and this is a pretty amazing place to get to live and I the natural landscape I probably think about more because I have two little kids so I get to take them outside all year in a way that I didn't get to so much in Chicago and the natural beauty here is incredible but I'm more I'm more registered change of place in terms of people than landscape just personally and it's really different than living in Chicago it's it's Chicago's a really complicated place Phoenix is in my experience 10 times more complicated this region for many reasons and the artist community and the organizer and activist community and the justice community all of those of course are threaded together and around each other there is a deep deep set of commitments and purposes at play a deep and appropriate wariness of outsiders any a really intense dialogue about the pace that change needs to occur at and in the spaces where change is really happening here particularly in the last year it is not a patient space should it be a patient space it is not a patient space and that is powerful to be around and be challenged by and think about and try to support that's great slow down and speed up that's perfect place thank you guys good night thank you