 that you have from wherever you are in the system and to share that with each other, and other than that, just settle in and enjoy the day. My name is Afdab Erfan. I'm actually coming from Vancouver. I'm part of Context Insulting, and I'm also quite involved with this competition in Vancouver, so I feel like I'm kind of making a little connection to the rest of us. I think there are a few other people that we should note in this moment. As I said, this day has been very much anticipated. A lot of planning, and Rebecca Burton, and Lane Siegmund Newman, and Jenny Egerde at the back have been working very closely with us to make this day happen, and I suppose that if you have any questions or anything you need, they are very much your go-to people for the day. Afdab mentioned that what we're really trying to get a sense of today is of what the system you're in needs in terms of more equity in theater, and we thought that by way of you initially introducing yourselves, we would just try and get a glimpse of the different parts of the system that are in the room, and I think what we'll do is just name off, I'll list off what we have a good sense of that there are playwrights, directors, actors, administrators, producers, educators, activists, and audience members in the room, but I imagine that in that we've missed some aspect of the system, and I wonder if we could just have a shout out if there's anything that you feel it's important we get a glimpse of in terms of perspective. Publisher, designers, thank you, technicians, dramaturgs, journalists, musicians, funders. So diverse roles, diverse perspectives of the system and a richness that you can bring to the conversation today. One of the things we always like to offer at the beginning of these days is a set of guidelines for contributing, and we like to keep it very simple, and you'll see that they're posted up in every room that you travel to today, but we find that when we have such diversity of perspective coming to the conversation, if we can give ourselves a foundation, a few simple principles, it really does help us to open up to difference, to hear differently, and to be able to come out the other side of a day like today with very powerful outcomes. And so what we would suggest is that the first thing to bring into every conversation that you go into today is an open mind that listen to and really respect all the points of you that are coming. To bring your curiosity, seek to understand rather than persuade. The more generative we are with ideas today, the more richness the strategies will have. Another one is discovery. Speak from your personal experience, but discover and examine your own assumptions and what might be shifting for you throughout the day. And finally bring brevity to the conversation. We have a lot to do, of course, in a short day, and in some ways the ambition is high, the stakes are high, this conversation needs to make a difference, and so go for honesty and depth, but don't go on and on. Yeah, so are there other guidelines or how we've got space? Is there anything that anybody feels that we need to add to these guidelines before we move on? Yes, in every one of these environments, you'll have the opportunity to really support equal participation, to draw every voice in, thank you. Okay, and with that we're moving into the next segment which is the research findings and the panel conversation. Great, perfect. We are only seven minutes behind schedule. So can I ask the panel? The panel to please come up, and Michelle, if you don't mind. So what we're going to do now in the next about 10 minutes or so, we are first going to ask, I keep wanting to call you Dr. Michelle, Dr. Michelle MacArthur, to tell us a little bit about research report that we are coming into this event with, and I believe we all have an executive summary of it. Okay, great. And then we'll hear from the panelists and the panelists have been asked to respond to the report and they give them this question of, tell us what you see as possibilities and for who's sake. So we'll see what they do with that question, if anything. And then we'll have some time for question and answer. So we'll hear from all of them and then we'll have question and answer. Does that sound okay? Okay, so let's just see. Michelle has completed her PhD at the Center for Drama, Theater, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. She wrote her dissertation on criticism of feminist theater in Montreal and Toronto and its consequences. She's been twice awarded the Canadian Association of Theater Research Award for Theater, Drama, and Performance in French. She's a published author, a session instructor at U of T and the book review editor for theater research in Canada. Oh, and I should say, I have a magic bell that will ring when your time is up and it will magically make you stop talking. So that's just so you know, that's where that is. I think we should because it's being broadcasted and livestreamed or something. You just start talking to it, don't worry about the point. This one on yet. Hi, thank you. So I'm going to respect brevity and be watching my watch. First of all, I just wanted to say that this project has really been an honor and a privilege to work on as a researcher. Gender has always been a central focus to my own research. So to be able to work on something that will really have an impact on the theater community has been really meaningful to me. And I think there's also a need to continue this research moving forward. So as we move on and create action plans to really be tracking those plans and the results and successes of our initiatives that we develop. I'd also like to quickly thank the EIT chairs, Lane and Rebecca for all of their support with this research as well as Jenny and Playwright, Skilled of Canada's administrative coordinator, Catherine Vidal, who were very instrumental in putting this report together as well as the steering committee for EIT. Everyone who provided feedback on the drafts and finally everyone who shared research with us. So before kind of going into some of the, I'll walk you through some of the study highlights. I just wanted to talk a little bit about how we gathered the information for this report. So this is in Canada, as a lot of you know, kind of the third kind of major report on gender equity I would say in theater. So the first one was 1982 by Rina Fratticelli, the status of women in Canadian theater. The following one was authored by Rebecca Burton in 2006 adding it up the status of women in Canadian theater. And so this follows up on that and each of those reports had kind of a different approach to collecting data. So what we did for this report is really first of all, gathered information from some major organizations in Canadian theater. So those included the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Actors Equity Association, associated designers of Canada, literary managers and dramaturgs of the Americas, the Canadian branch, playwrights Guild of Canada and the professional association of Canadian theaters. So these associations have been tracking gender equity statistics on their own and they were very generous to share it with us. So a lot of what I referenced in the report comes from them but in addition to that, we reached out to arts councils and theater organizations in each province and territory. We spoke to individuals, to theater companies and then I also looked at scholarly research that was available and then additionally kind of other research online and through networking and speaking to individuals. So it's really, what the report provides is really a composite picture, I think. Something, a research that was very collaborative and research that comes directly from the community. So I think that's a strength of what we see. There are gaps in the research and I talk about that in the report and one of the real gaps is information about minoritized groups. So we know that it's clear that these groups are underrepresented in Canadian theater but there really since Rebecca Burton's report in 2006 there is not a lot of research available so this is a place where we need to do more research I would say, so I'll flag that. So the structure of the report, there are three sections for those of you who've made it through. So the first section is research on Canadian theater and looking at what the kind of landscape looks like now in terms of equity so I'll walk you through some of that. I also did some international comparisons looking primarily at the US, the UK and Australia. So the reason that those places were chosen is that there were three other English language theater centers. Those are places where there's been a lot of recent research and activity in terms of equity in theater. So the comparisons are interesting to look at. The second part looks at initiatives that have been undertaken internationally to redress inequity in theater. And then the third section looks at research on equity initiatives in other industries and talks about how we might be able to apply them in theater. So I looked at law and engineering which are areas where they have historically had some real gender inequity but areas that are also starting to change and undertake more action as well as film and television because of its nearness to theater. So to quickly go over some of the results, if we look at the findings from 1982 to 2006 to some of PACS findings, 2010 and 11, so this is on page two if you have the highlights in front of you. And then if we look at PGC's findings, we see there's a bit of improvement since the 1980s but then we see some regressions in areas and the real drop, the greatest disparity is in the playwright category. So since Rebecca Burton's findings in 2006, if we look at the most recent findings we have from PGC, we see a 5% drop. So 22% of the plays that were staged in 2013, 2014 were written by women. So again, that's a regression. And the drop-off is interesting because women actually are the majority of theater school attendees. So I quote, I looked at the National Theater School as representative of that where this current year there were 50, 58% of enrollment were women. So when they then come into the professional world there's a real drop that happens in all categories. And while women are represented on stage, they also constitute the majority of theater audiences. So if we look at Stats Canada from the year 2010, 55% of theater audiences were women. Women have the best representation in theaters that tend to be smaller or lower budgets. So theaters in the categories, theater for young audiences, development theaters. If we look at comparatively the data from the UK, from the US and Australia we see that it's similar. So in those regions women are on average 30% or less of artistic directors, directors and playwrights. And I guess a couple final things I'll say about those findings before quickly going through some of the recommendations are that, so in addition to the systemic barriers that we understand that kind of prevent women often stand in their way from achieving equity, what we found in the report is that discrimination and bias play a big role. And I cite a couple different studies in the report that talk about that. And particularly a study done in the US by Emily Glassberg Sands in 2008, 2009, where she kind of did some studies with literary managers and artistic directors and identified bias in terms of looking at scripts by men and women. And people choosing when sent in identical scripts, one labeled with a man's name and one with a woman's name, people choosing more often the script by the man. So there's other research as well that supports this kind of gender bias. But to end on a positive note in terms of that research, there is a link between women artistic directors and women directors. So when women artistic directors tend to hire more women directors as well as women playwrights tend to write more roles and more substantial roles for women. So the more we hire women in those positions of power, it will, the greater the positive effect it will have. So then I'll just, being mindful of time, I'll just quickly walk you through the four areas that I've identified in terms of action. So the first is education. And this is, these are kind of pages three and four in the handout that you have. The second is mentorship, networking and extended training. The third is theater administration. And the fourth is advocacy and awareness. So these are kind of four broad themes that I identified in the research of looking at, again, other equity initiatives. And I think that they're helpful because they kind of cover women's career cycles from the times they're in theater school and the time they're being educated to later career in theater. How much time do I have left? I have 30 seconds. 30 seconds, oh no. I had so many exciting things highlighted. Okay, so I know today we'll be focusing on those actions. So that's very exciting. And I guess to close what I would say is that, what I found in this report is that inequity is really, of course, a complex issue. And that in order to kind of develop actions, we need multiple stakeholders to be collaborating. And there's really a need for continued partnership. So I think that's why today is so exciting. And I am available. I'm here to answer questions later on. And I'm happy to provide my email if anyone has questions or things they feel could be added to this kind of research. So I would love to continue the conversation. So thank you. Great, thanks very much. Perfect. All right, I'm now pleased to introduce the all women cast of this panel. And I should say this production has also been put on almost entirely by women directors, producers, designers, everybody. So we are, we are reversing the pattern. Maybe in some way we'll see. So we'll start with the next Michelle, if that's okay. Is that, yeah? So not start with Michelle. No problem. How about we start with Kira? Can we start with you? Okay, Kira Loughran, an actor, director, dramaturg, award-winning playwright and producer. She's the past artistic producer at Summerworks Theater Festival and founding artistic director of Nell Theater. Kira is now in her fifth season as an associate producer and member of the senior management team at Stratford Theater Festival, while also being a mother of two and a black belt in Aikido whenever you're ready. Thank you. And it's a real pleasure to be here. I'll try to be brief. So in terms of reviewing the findings, I remember in 2006 when Rebecca's study came out, it was great to have this follow-up. It was interesting to read about the key creative roles in Canadian theater and women being below 35% or in that 70 to 30 male-female ratio and sort of not sure where I am within that because I wasn't sure if producers or general managers were included in the study and thinking that that's a group of people that also need to be included. It's one of the things that in my current position and also working at Summerworks that I think did make a difference where you are the power that those positions carry within theater organizations. But on an objective level, I would say I've been very fortunate in my career to be able to be working where I am and to have had the positions and responsibilities that I've had and I kind of went, how did that happen? Looking at the difference between bias and discrimination was a key point for me that popped out. To me, I think that bias is what I encounter more often than discrimination and I think that's important. It goes in with an open mind that people aren't out to get yet but that we all carry our own biases and that's part of the strength of our profession. It makes our world more complex and I think complexity as theater makers and storytellers is what we're all aiming for. So then the question becomes about discovering our own biases and having the courage to challenge people on the biases that they might have that might be stopping things from moving forward. In terms of the difference in the dip between the 2006 study and the 2010 study, I'm not great with numbers and I don't personally believe in quotas. I think it's a really tricky business that we're in. So I wasn't as concerned about those percentages though I think that the study was very important to have and continued studies are important to have because it really is a longer term thing that needs to be tracked consistently. While I wasn't as concerned about the dip in this particular study, I do think that gender is the front that is often thought of as being dealt with and I think that's far from true. That was evident to me this year. We were working on some grants and I noticed within target groups of the OAC particular and specifically that they were looking to do some fantastic work on diverse culturally gender first nations and other marginalized groups that really needed attention but women wasn't on there and that surprised me. And I know at the 2006 study, I think Kelly had said that people forget about women, that it's not balanced yet and while great strides have been made, it continues to be in my experience something that still needs to be advocated for and something that still needs to be put forward as a marginalized group. The idea, the knowledge that women, our majority stakeholders in theater and yet are still continued to be underrepresented and our work confounds me and I don't understand why our patrons don't demand more, why we don't demand more, why I don't demand more. I think what I'm coming to now in my career is recognition that to some degree we have been conditioned to see ourselves through men's eyes and I think that this is problematic. I think within that recognition for myself, there's been a lot of work that I've read about within Africa of the idea of decolonization that needs to happen when it's so ingrained and I think that might be a useful concept for us to look at in terms of deep patriarchizing ourselves if I may in terms of what are some of the beliefs that I hold and are they true or not and how are they serving me and what is my actual experience. In terms of women earning less than men, it surprises me less. One of the things I thought might be interesting would be if women demand less, then just hire us and save on your budgets. I do think that it's about, not necessarily about women demanding more but about men accepting less. I don't know, that just was my thought. The finding that I thought was most true for me that resonated the most was the link between women artistic directors, hiring more women directors and using more women playwrights and having more rules for women. That increased representation of women in one area having a positive effect on others. That is my story and that's key for me and that's actually it. And unfortunately the barriers to making that happen is what still needs to be tackled but it's what I think is our responsibility whatever point in our careers we're at. When I first started out, it was Alison Seely Smith, another brown woman who literally got me in the door by letting me drop her name to crash an audition that got me my first job. It was Jean Yoon who looked and knew me when I was coming out of theater school, another brown woman who said, you should have a place in this community and I'm gonna hire you and I'm gonna teach you stuff if you want to learn. It was people like Maya Ardell who was an artistic director at Young People's Theater at the time gave me a lot of my first work. And not in a way that is happening as much now if I'm looking back on it. When I graduated which was in 96, there was a lot more non-traditional casting was what it was called at the time that allowed me to play rules like Alice in Wonderland or William Lyon Mackenzie King in main stage theaters in Toronto and what I see has happened is as playwrights have been encouraged, playwrights of color particularly being encouraged to write their own work which is absolutely important. The other thing has gotten less. So brown people get to work on brown plays and brown directors get to work on brown shows and women get to work on women's shows but that cross-pollination I don't see happening as much and it was really important for me in my own work. It allowed me to work with people like David Fox and established actors when I got to Stratford of being able to work with Stephen Wumat and Tom McCammons and Tron and McKenna. These are experiences that everybody should have. It makes you better. Jackie Maxwell gave me one of my first jobs. Kelly Thornton was a huge mentor. And that's my five minutes. So I guess I'll shut up. Thank you. Great, thanks very much. And we'll go right to Marilo if that's okay. Marilo Nunez, director, playwright, actor and producer. She is the founding artistic director of Alameda Theater Company dedicated to developing the new work of Latino-Canadian playwrights. Marilo is known as a huge proponent for creating equitable strides for culturally diverse slash specific companies in Canadian theater. Maybe we can figure out what that means. She currently splits her time between her writing directing and working as a general manager for the Hamilton Fringe Festival. You're five to seven minutes. Thank you to the playwrights guild for having us here and I feel very privileged to be on this panel with such great women. So I tried to read the whole report but I didn't get through the whole thing. But one of the things, for me personally the most important aspect of the report that affected me or hit me the most was I'm coming at it both from the perspective of a woman and also the perspective of an artist of color. To me, the two are equal. And a lot of the inequities that women face are double-fold for artists of color. And so a lot of the stuff that I reacted to was mostly artists of color. So I just closed my company down, I guess six months ago. And a big reason for that was because there's no sustainability for a company run by one person. And so I felt a lot of the things that were discussed in this report, I felt there's a lack of financial resources, there's a lack of human resources. And also a lack of support from the greater community because what I found is I started this company to be able to create opportunities for Latino artists in Canada because there were none or few. But what I found in my eight years of running my company was that we started to kind of get a wise ourselves. And what did I write here? So in closing down my company I've been thinking a lot about did I do good by starting a company specifically for a targeted group? Or did I do more harm? Because now what I started to find was that people would see me as the Latin artist, not as the artist. And at the beginning I totally fought that and I said, look, there are no opportunities, I have to create opportunities for my community. What am I supposed to do? We have to create our own opportunities. We have to produce our own shows, we have to start up our own companies. And there are many of those companies here in Toronto, Fujian, Obsidian, Kahootz, we're all working towards trying to make things better for our specific communities. But the problem is not going away. And also the onus is on us to make the change, not on the companies that have more power and more resources to do so. So basically what's happening is the bigger companies are saying, well, that company's working on making opportunities for Latin artists or for black artists or for Asian artists. So I'm off the hook in a way. And that's what I found is that they will produce one show or give one playwright the opportunity, but things aren't changing. Because there's companies like ours that are trying to create opportunities for our communities. So my question is, I don't know the answer, are we doing more harm than good by starting specific, culturally specific, or gender specific companies? And this is from eight years of experience. Trust me, the community that I worked with gained so much by the work that we did. There are artists that would never have worked had this company not been started. But my question after eight years and after having to close down my company is that, did I do more harm than good? And I mean that for women as well. There was a mention in the report that said we have to remove indicators of gender and race and age. Let me find the page. Remove all indicators of gender, race and rage from decision making contexts. I completely disagree with this. Because I am a woman, I am a Latina woman, and I am 40. Those things are part of who I am as a person. They are my identity. So when I apply for a job, I don't want those things to be erased at all. And so I think the issue has to be from the other side, right? Why do I need to be invisible and not a statistic and not a specific thing for you to feel comfortable in making decisions? Why can't I be a woman and a Latin American and 40 and you hire me? One of the things that got me excited was the program History Matters Back to the Future which was an educational program that started in the States, I think, where basically they're hiring people to, or they're giving teachers the tools to teach a female playwright's work to students and then those students have to write plays based on that playwright's work. And I think this is amazing. I think the same should be done for playwrights of color in universities, in high schools. It's incredible. So basically, I think I'm saying it right, is that there's a company that gives tools to schools and basically they have a list of female playwrights and so these teachers teach this program, the playwright's work to their students and then there's a contest in which the students have to write plays based on the work of this female playwright. So basically they're delving into the themes and the, anyway, it's a great program. And now I'm gonna talk, one final thing. I've always been a big vocal person about Shakespeare in Canadian theater. I think, and I know that you work at Stratford. I think Shakespeare holds us back because it is colonizing our artists. Like it comes from a very colonial perspective and a patriarchal perspective and it was mentioned in the report that a lot of women don't get roles in Shakespeare because only 16% of the characters in Shakespeare are female. And I know that then you can talk about colorblind casting and, but I have comments on that but I won't get into that now. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. All right, we're gonna move right along to Janet Sears, if that's all right. An award-winning director, playwright and producer has several acting nominations to her credit for both stage and screen. She's a co-founder of Obsidian Theater dedicated to presenting African and Caribbean Canadian theater and to the exploration, development and production of the black voice. Her own work explores the passionately complex spaces where race and gender intersect. Janet. Hi everyone. I wanna start by saying I was introduced to Rina Fratticelli in the late 1980s by my really good friend, Kate Lushington, who would be here. She's a former artistic director of Nightwood Theater and she would be here, but she's out of country. She had invited me. We were at the time colleagues and she had invited me to be on the board of Nightwood Theater. And what's interesting is that, that was the late 1980s and now as then the statistics speak for themselves. Gender and racial bias are alive and well and living right here in Canada. What struck me the most about Rina Fratticelli's extraordinary seminal study was the systemic nature of the bias. How implicit or unconscious some of this bias was. So, for example, in my own paraphrasing of her study, so an artistic board made up mostly of men who are open, open-minded, would be in search of an artistic director and they would interview a number of artistic directors of both genders and of various races and ethnicities. But there'd be one guy or two guys that would stand out who actually reflected their own perspective, who maybe well grew up like them, had a similar political point of view and just in their gut they said that person would run the theater in the way that I see it. And so, this artistic director, who they eventually hire, would be reading plays. This artistic director is a very open man and he reads plays by women and by men. But there are some plays by some men that really reflect something in his experience. He can feel it in his gut. And he programs those plays in his seasons. And these plays are more likely than not written by men. And these playwrights, these male playwrights who've written these plays have stories populated by male characters. And so, an industry that begins by training more women than men ends up with women as a minority. No artistic director will admit that he or she has a bias against women playwrights. No artistic director will admit that she or he has a bias against playwrights of different races or ethnicities. The difficulty is that this assertion, in this assertion, they would be giving a genuine response. These artistic directors will in fact only admit to a bias towards excellence. And in so doing, implying that works written by women playwrights are less excellent than works written by their male counterparts. As Michelle referred to the Emily Glasberg Sands study where a researcher sent plays, the same play with different names, male names and female names. And the response was more negative to the plays written by the female playwright. Moreover, Emily Glasberg Sands noted that a lot of these negative responses were generated by women, literary managers and artistic directors. This is a blind spot, a cultural and social blind spot. Implicit association is a concept I came across when I was doing research on one of my plays and it forms the basis of the play I'm working on right now. Social psychologists, Anthony Greenwald and Mazarin Banerjee have come up with a test which shows that our automatic response towards people are influenced by attitudes we may not be aware of. Blind spots. For instance, while it seems like it seems impossible to imagine that you have beliefs you are not aware of. However, like for instance, can anyone tell me their current blood pressure? There are systems within our own bodies that we are not aware of. So anyway, the IAT, the Implicit Association Test is now available online. It's available at implicit.harvard.edu. This online test looks at automatic and unconscious responses around gender, sexual preference, ageism, weight, and race. It is extraordinarily enlightening. I would encourage everybody to attempt to take this anonymous test. The address, implicit.harvard.edu. Again, it is anonymous. They don't keep personal information. You don't even put personal information in. So because the time is short and I was gonna speak a little more about the Implicit Association Test, I just wanna say about it. It, in fact, tells us why. The reason why I was interested in it is that I was looking at a black character who did not, in fact, was not enamored with black culture or anything black. And one of the reports from the study suggested that in the early part of this test, more black people preferred white culture than black culture, had a preference for whiteness than blackness. And I found this fascinating. And as it was the basis for one of my plays, Harlem Duet, I want to just go a little bit to what one of the facilitators spoke to. What are we gonna do next? I think that, or at least for me, I've identified, and it's repeated in the report and elsewhere, I've identified four aspects of social change. Awareness and education, advocacy, activism, and artistic expression. Awareness is the most difficult part. How can we become aware of something we cannot see? But there are ways. As drivers, we know there's a blind spot. We know that our rear view mirror and our side view mirror will not show something in a certain position beside us, and that we have to turn our heads before we change lanes. So there must be other strategies. I'm just going to go quickly to advocacy. I just want you to note and look at the names, Art Davis, an African-American double bass player who is credited with starting blind auditions in music and Abbey, Konaught, Activism. I just want to stress that again, and I won't talk about it because I'm rushing to finish, but artistic expression is the most important of all these four aspects. You have to keep writing, you have to keep directing, you have to keep producing. Thank you. We come back to you, Michelle. Michelle, the cotton name. Multiple award-winning presenter, producer, director, designer, playwright. I have to speak faster to Flail Filmmaker, one of the best-known activists and advocates for equity and diversity in the arts. She's a founder-artistic director of Stage Left Productions. Her artistic practice weaves together feminism, queer and disability arts into intercultural, intersectional, original productions that reveal the lived reality of oppression and affirm the value of diversity. Thank you, everybody. I'm very, very thrilled to be here, but I flew in from... So ask him, please don't ding the bell at me. I'm not asking for extra time. I'm just... I have a profound learning disability, so the more pressured I feel, the less coherent this is gonna be for all of you. So I might have to beg for six minutes, six point five minutes, or six point two five minutes, but I just need my brain to relax enough to get over my fatigue, my illnesses, and my fear of speaking in front of a room full of people I don't know. Having said all that, I am absolutely thrilled to be here. And I'm here because of three people who are in the room today and I want to name them. First of all, it's Mario. Who's that? Maria. We're at the Equity Sounding from the County Council for the Arts together a year and a half ago, and me, I'm so all about this because I'm a lesbian. But that's a big part of it. So I'm at the Equity Sounding. I'm fighting. I separate it into hell with this shit. Okay, please be open-minded. I'm talking about, no, we need to be over here. We need to create our own companies. We need to fix the deficiencies, and she's like, no bloody way. We need to be at these tables. So here I am at this table. Donna Michelle from B.O.A. Equity Theater. Oh, another one of these things gonna emulate the same old crap. And she's like, yeah, I don't think so. Get your ass at these tables. Put your politics where your practice is. So here I am. And Rebecca, thank you for allowing me to insert my way into this panel. Just send an email saying, hey, congratulations. I have some things I could share. And she's like, okay, come on down. So thank you, here I am. I'm not going to repeat anything that's been said because it's profound on its own. I'm not going to repeat that. I'm going to talk a little bit about what my response to the report was. And it went rapidly from hope. I've never read something yet. And don't forget, I'm based in Calgary. So that's where my context comes from. I don't often get to sit in a room and see a majority of faces of color. That just doesn't happen in Calgary. And it's what I value. So I'm thrilled to be here for that reason too. And the report gave me hope because for the first time ever, everything I usually have to make scribbles about was already in the report. I didn't actually, what about women of color? What about lesbian women? What about disabled women? What about, what about, what about? It was all there. And then I went, holy crap. Look at how many people have contributed to this conversation. There are thousands of us that I don't know about because I'm stuck in freaking Calgary, Alberta. And we're all working on this issue and we're doing it together across this vast country of ours. But we're making a difference until I read the second half of the report. And then I went rapidly from feeling very hopeful to a once again feeling whole-blissed. And I started thinking, look at the excellence that's in the report. Like congratulations. Look at the models of excellence. Look at the best practices. We're all doing all this stuff. So why the freak, isn't it working? Why isn't it working? So yes, it's because of bias and yes, it's because of discrimination. But for me, what was fundamentally missing, there's no valuing of women's work anymore. Statistics aren't enough. They motivate us, but we only have a certain amount of power. They're not motivating those people in power. So yes, it's really important that we get into what Rena called significant roles. We have to become artistic directors. It's the only place we're gonna get the power that we have to do the work that needs to happen. But for a person like me who's working class who has spent my entire childhood in hospitals because of multiple disabilities, I'm also a lesbian. So I'm on the outside in many ways, many ways, many, many ways. I don't know why I have other things going on, but that's not the point. The point isn't oppression Olympics. The point is for me, where are things working? Because I can't tolerate inequity. I grew up as a working class person watching women help women. I grew up in hospitals watching women doctors try to help me while male doctors try to send social workers into my home and have me stolen away from my mom because they thought she wasn't taking care of me. When really I had an illness that nobody had seen ever. Until last year. I got a diagnosis, I'm officially a mutant. So I'll give. My point is I learned to value women and I learned to value women's work. And when I climbed my way up the artistic food chain, I managed to become a director and I won't name any of the companies because I've critiqued them here. I managed to become an artistic director. I managed to become a director, a designer, a playwright and I lost my soul. I lost my confidence in myself. So I had all the power and I had no ability to do anything good with it because the value wasn't there. The environment I worked in, the system, the core of the mainstream arts community does not value diversity. And I cannot survive inequity. I have a mental illness that is a direct result of social alienation. It puts me in a psychosis. I don't wanna spend my life trying to fight my way into a system that relentlessly devalues me as a human being and the people I care about as human beings. And that's not just women, men too. Men are suffering the system. White women like me are suffering the system. Lesbian women like me, we're suffering the core. So some of us choose to go over here. Not because we can't make it, because we can't tolerate it. So when I thought, why isn't it working? I looked at what is working. So I did a spot check, disability arts domain. Does something I've contributed a lot to? I'm not taking credit for this in any way though. But in the disability arts domain, 100% of the companies that produce disability arts work in Canada are led by women. 100% of the companies that produce disability arts work in Canada are led by disabled women. 70% of us are queer women, queer identified. 40 something percent, dyslexia and mouth don't go together. I have stats that are coming. A large percentage of us are women of color and an even larger percentage of us are indigenous women. So why is it working over here when it's not working over here? And in my company's stage left, I created a company that airs on the side of others. When we talk about for who's benefit, I don't care about those of us who made it. No, sorry, that was a dyslexic moment. I very much care about all of us who have made it. I'm getting your backs from down here. I'm constantly getting your backs, writing letters, I'm an artistic director, I manage somehow to get funding. I use my company's leverage and influence for anybody who want to commission a residency, come talk to me, I'll write you any letter, let's disrupt the system as much as we can. But let's not forget that those of us who choose to be on the margins, we're not clamoring to get into the system and we're not over here because we're not good enough to be over here. We are models of excellence in equity and diversity. So my call, when you talk about make more demands, I demand that we start looking at which one quantitative, is that the vote of value? Quantitative, thank you. This qualitative analysis is freaking fantastic and it lights a fire under our butts because we're the ones suffering the inequities but it doesn't motivate the masses. What motivates the masses is commitment to diversity. Let's start selling the value of diversity again. Let's start doing qualitative research. Let's look at company and let's look at what the female artistic directors who are also indigenous in some cases, queer and disabled identified, what are we doing differently over here that's working, that's allowing us to achieve equity and diversity at such far different rates than we see in and what can we share? What knowledge can we bring to the bigger conversation? Because I see in the report often, we have the rest of us get into the system but for those of us who are falling off the system, jumping off the ladder because we don't want to be there, there are soft places to land and there's no dearth of knowledge about how to do this better. So I want us to also remember not just to push for inclusion into the core, that's absolutely, we need to have all of us here saying, yes, I'm going to get this power and I'm going to use it for all of us but we also need to know that those of us on the margins shouldn't have to be shutting our company. Just want to also challenge us today because it's about the next part of this conversation, we have become far too contrite. If there is any, and I live in Alberta, right? This is the headquarter of the oligarchy. So if any, any of the oil companies in Alberta had a 70, 30 split, they'd be facing a discrimination lawsuit. So why are we sitting here in a room like this and this is incredibly important but why are we saying I'm sorry Canada Council, I'm not good enough. This is not good enough. You are breaking the law. You are a crown corporation. Discrimination in this country is illegal. We're going, we need to start demanding our fair share instead of begging for it. Instead of trying to consistently prove our worth. We need to say we are valuable and if you don't believe that, then quit your job and put somebody in that position who does. I think we need to start making demands. We need to shift from advocacy to activism. I'm not willing to wait another 40 years. I've never supposed to live this long in the first place. I'm 46 now that I finally know I'm going to live for a lot longer. I want to do what I bloody well qualified for and it's not just to keep fighting. I want to be creating. I want to be supporting the rest of us to be creating and I'm going to keep fighting because I value women. I value women of color. I value lesbian women a lot. I value working class women and I've learned from, I'm not that I haven't learned from men, but sorry, no offense, but what I've mostly learned from men is how not to do it. What I've learned from other women is how to do it better. So I want to see, not as educating each other, we need to educate the other people in power to value diversity because you can put all the equity policies in place you want, but if somebody doesn't care about enacting them, it's never going to happen. So let's start selling the value of equity and the value of diversity. Let's start remembering that we count because we're not making it over there, doesn't mean we're not good enough. And let's start looking to the margin to find out what's over there. Let's start celebrating the margins so that we don't have a center and a margin. We have an equality in the whole ecology as well because I'm never ever going to try. I lasted six hours at ATP. That was it, that was my last official job. I climbed all the way up to the top of the food chain and at two o'clock in the afternoon was a lunch break. I walked out the door and I never went back. That was 15 years ago and I have made my living only full-time in the arts with my integrity, my artistic, personal, political and professional integrity by doing it over here, by providing a bridge for so people who want to come to stage left. Here's the safety, your political safety, cultural safety, training, funding, everything we need that we're not getting over here and here's strength. Here's the community behind you. Here's value systems. When you go over there and get shh, to hurt, we will, we're here to get you back too. This is feminism 101. So I just want to leave with the sick person who grew up with a radical working class community of babysitting co-ops, all this stuff that we're going to defeat ourselves. Now you have to have a permit to do it for heaven's sake. The point is I learned that the personal is the political and in my company stage left I also say the political is personal and if we can find that balance then there's going to be no stopping us. Awesome. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you. So we are right into it. We are like in the deep end now and we're going to kind of push the break back a little bit and have a little bit of Q and A. And Mary and Rebecca and Lane are going to run these mics. We're still going to speak into them for the live streaming. So whoever, and we will have a chance to really have conversation about this together in small groups. At this point, any questions for the panel? Anything that you would like to hear more about? Hi, my name is Terry Hawks. I'm a playwright, director actor, but I'm a graduate student at York University right now. And first of all, I want to thank you all for your work here on the panel, your research, Michelle, Rebecca, for spearheading this. It's an amazing accomplishment. I have a question, but I also have a comment, if I might, and I'm sure it's inadvertent, but I just want to share my perspective, which is that it's really important to have men in the room and that all males are not discriminatory. And Brian Quirk, for example, artistic director, I know to be very egalitarian sort. And I think it's really important as feminists and female artists to include men in the conversation and we're really happy that you're here. I think that's just something to acknowledge and I imagine you would all agree. And the second question I'd like to ask is about the role of mothers in the arts. I haven't had a chance to fully read this, Rebecca, you were kind enough to say that it was something that you and Michelle had considered, but maybe hadn't had time to explore as fully as you might have. I've written recently on this subject and I think it's an important one for everybody to consider, even if it doesn't get extensive airtime today, but I think that that's one of the potential barriers to women working in the arts. There are other responsibilities that are devalued in addition to their devalued work in the arts. Thank you. Thank you, yep. Yeah, it was one of the things that I didn't get to in my notes, but in terms of as a parent, I was fortunate enough within Stratford to be able to get Matt leave for both of my children, and which was instrumental, but within that time I worked as a freelance artist. One of the things when I was producing my first show, I wasn't a mother, one of my cast members had just had a baby and was having trouble with her latching with her breastfeeding and wanted to keep the baby with the caretaker who was actually their father backstage during our rehearsal period, and I was kind of like, well, as long as the baby stays backstage and Marion DeVries, my co-director, picked me up, smacked me across the face and said, Kira, if we can't make room for parents and women in our rehearsal halls, then how can we expect anybody else to? So I went, okay, yeah, you're right. And it was transformative. It was one of the most powerful experiences. The presence of the child in the room put the whole show, which was my baby at the time, into a perspective that gave the work, I think, more weight, and also one of the things that Marion said to me was, don't you think you will get better work out of Michelle with her knowing that her baby is backstage and if anything comes up and she's needed that she's right there? And I went, yeah, you're right. And it was true. So for my children, I became a big advocate for having children in the rehearsal hall. And I know a lot of artist mothers that have done it and there's always a bit of a like, oh, I shouldn't do it, oh, I shouldn't do it. And what I've always appreciated about whether I've been producing and I can set the rules or whether I've been hired and have been accommodated that way is the trust that I am given as a human being to deal with it in a way that's appropriate. And so that if the child needs to be taken out, the child needs to be taken out and if it can be dealt with and I can trust that it can be dealt with, that's been a huge thing for me within that piece of giving that trust to my colleagues or whoever or being given that trust. It's kind of magical. And I've been in a lot of rehearsals, my husband works a lot in community engaged arts and has encouraged our children to be sort of part of those processes. And I think it's great. And it's sort of one of the things that I think in terms of challenging our idea of professional and that the personal and the professional can't coexist, that there's room in there for a redefinition of professionalism that includes families, that includes people as parents in the room, particularly as artists. Hi, Tara Goldstein, independent theater company, Galey Road Productions. What I appreciated so much about this panel is that there are multiple ways into this big conversation. From, yes, working in the mainstream and doing exactly what we needed to do to learn from those who have made it in the mainstream to celebrating life on the margins. And I think all those multiple perspectives are really important. There are many ways to get at many different complexities. I'd like us to talk about all of those. I was very provoked by the beginnings of a talk of non-traditional casting and colorblind casting. And I really, and of course, the unconscious biases we all have. And it's very difficult to have those conversations and I'd love to see a space for those conversations today. Thank you. Great. Any other questions? Hi, I'm Martha Richards from Women Arts coming here from California, so I totally sympathize with the time change. My question, it made me so sad to hear you say that you really wondered whether you'd done more harm than good by having a separate Latina company. And I'm wondering if you could think a little bit about, is there any set of circumstances that would have made you feel better about that whole experience? And I suspect that if you got more funding, if it didn't get progressively harder, so I think your comments sort of raised two issues. One is about what would it take to make you feel like that work was valuable, the way she obviously feels hers is, but also just there's a whole issue of stamina and keeping going, that's very complicated. Yeah, I learned that passion can't drive a company on its own, you need money. And I gave it everything. I gave it my life, it became my life. It was my baby too. And the fact that I couldn't make it work, I felt like a failure. But it's funding. If I had had a general manager who I could pay a decent salary to, my company would have survived, right? And the thing that a lot of people don't wanna talk about is, culturally specific companies are at the bottom of the hierarchy. How do we get up? Like I'm a good grant writer, I'm a good artistic director, how did I not make it work? Yeah, I think you're talking about bias in the funding world that's the same as all the other. Yeah, yeah. Good morning, I'm Yvette Heiliger, I'm a playwright and a producing artist and very much an activist. And I wanted to ask Michelle with regard to funding, how did you get the money to do your study? I see so much time passes between the next study in a couple years and then the next study and in the United States we have that as well. No one's really getting the money to fund these studies and they're so important. How did you get the money? Did you do it out of the goodness of your heart? Yeah, sure. So for this we can thank the funders who we've been talking about, so they come in at times. We have the Ontario Trillium Foundation fund, I'd say one quarter of the research and the Ontario Arts Council also funded some and the Canada Council, so we pieced together a little bit from all three of them. I guess what I'm asking is, it was just grant writing and we pitched the entire project together. So there was four different phases, we pitched it all and that's why a little bit went towards the research from each, yeah. So we're gonna take two more questions and then come to the panel. Hi there, my name is Nora McClellan, I'm an actor for over 50 years and I am Associate Artistic Director of Theater 20. I just wanted to, hopefully, and thank you, thank you, thank you so much for doing all of this hard work that makes my head spin and doing it for me. I really appreciate it while doing it for all of us but this really is so useful. I just wanted, and I'm hoping that there will be more discussion today about mentorship. I'm reading here, I'm sure you can all hear my voice without the mic. I'm just reading here about, I don't necessarily know where that's coming from in terms of the fact that there are so many women who can be mentors, but also, and also that if that's possible that we can all work together, then I think that's terrific, that art is art and it doesn't matter about the gender. I wanted to ask you, Janet, I think it was you that was highlighting, removing all indicators of gender, age, and race from decision making, was that you? Oh, thank you. I just wanted to know what is, I know that it was under administration, what, and I just wanted to ask you, what do you mean by removing that and what is the decision? What is the decision making context? Well, a lot of people don't agree with when I say this, they don't agree with what I say. I want to add to the conclusion that if we remove who we, like we are innately female, I was born in Latin America, and if I move forward and apply for a job or I write a play or I audition for a role in a play, and somebody says to me, you're not Latin American, you're not a woman, you're gonna play this character that has no race, sex. I think to me that is condescending. It says to me that I am not worthy of that role, or the character has no, or like the reason color blind casting exists is because most of the plays that are produced are by dead white men, historically. And so how do we get actors of color to work on the big stages if we don't do color blind casting? But then that's saying that the characters that are in those plays don't have a culture or a race or a sex or a, and so that to me is like, we didn't see it in how we are in the world on our stages. It doesn't make sense to me at all. A lot of people do not agree with me and when I talk about Shakespeare, I think Shakespeare is held as the pinnacle in this country of what theater is. Like in theater schools, we are trained, I went to theater school, I was trained to be a classical actor, to go to Stratford, to become a Stratford actor. And they disregarded who I was as a Latina and who I was as a woman. When I was in the play Hamlet, I played Rosencrantz. They didn't want me to be Latina and they didn't want me to be who I was. They wanted me to be a man. How is that right? I'll just speak a little bit to that. I just wanted to say one of the best productions of the Scottish play that I saw was public theater, student production, production for students, for schools to come to Broadway, to the Schumann Theater downtown, and they had F. Murray Abrams playing Latino, Scottish, King and his wife was Asian and all the war scenes were done in Kung Fu and it felt like, and some of F. Murray Abrams' dialogue, he said it in pure Spanish, and it felt like in that case, they were including the culture and the backgrounds of the people playing, which is a different kind of cross-cultural casting and that's the kind of cross-cultural casting I really embrace. Often cross-cultural casting is used as a way to say, yes, there are people of color in our companies, but the perspective of people of color is not represented because there are not playwrights of color being programmed and I think one of the reasons for a company or companies that say, a company like your company or Obsidian Theater would be to say that, well, playwrights of African descent also have their own perspective and so I think all should exist, but in terms of that fatigue, you're the only one working on completely, completely understand. It's fatiguing, you get burned out and you're tired and you're still asked to leap through seven hoops before breakfast. So I promise you that this is not the last time with the panel, you're coming back actually at the end of the day and get to make more comments. I'm gonna take one more question. Hey, I get the last question, I feel like I won the prize. So my name is Banya Tarubas, I'm a playwright director and I'm a veteran of these discussions. I have a comment and a question, I'll be very brief with both. I really wanna support your insight regarding the do good, do harm question of identity theater and I wanna support it because I've been teaching at U of T for a few years and I always teach in two courses the issue of women in theater and I raised, you know, we talk about night with theater which has lasted longer than any feminist theater in this country and hurrah, hurrah and I find that the student's response is well then that's done. That's where the women are taken care of and we'll talk about why aren't there more women's theater companies and why is this still an issue? So I want to support you from that point of view but my question is also about the men. Thank you for bringing up our pleasure in seeing any man who is here but how about all the guys who aren't here? I'm really interested, Michelle, in studies has anybody ever interviewed all the men in power because when we, some many of us have encountered them and see how they take and have knocked out their doors has anybody done anything like that? I didn't encounter something such a study where all the men in power were interviewed but it's interesting like if we look at the different approaches that have been taken to these more comprehensive equity studies with Rebecca Burton's study in 2006 if you look at her response rate more women artistic directors actually returned her survey so even the results there were skewed in that sense if you look at her results there's maybe an unwillingness we could say or less of a willingness for men artistic directors to be talking about those things and be reflecting on those things but there are certainly exceptions to that rule that are highlighted in the study. I also would say the idea of men as mentors I think is, it's on the highlight sheet but I go into more detail in the study so the idea there is that it kind of came from engineering where there's such a dearth of women in positions of power to be able to mentor other women so men had to step in and also be allies so yes we need women mentors in theater but in areas like lighting design, sound design where the numbers are so low especially I think there's a need there for men to become partners but I think that idea of more research in the area of what is behind that what is the response of men in power I haven't encountered that directly but yeah. So I promise we are gonna keep talking about these this has been a great beginning thank you very much, a round of applause for the panel and for the audience please. So next we are going to take a quick break it's like a go to the bathroom, get water and get some refreshment downstairs break it's not a check your email kind of break and in that time that you're gone this room is going to be transformed into a different setup so please take all your things with you take everything with you and you'll be coming into a surprise setup so 50 minutes from now is going to be quarter to