 Good morning. Welcome. Welcome. Hi. Wow, I love this crowd already. My name is Derek Goldman. It is such a privilege and a pleasure to welcome you all here. Many of you have traveled a long way to be here. All of you have traveled some way to be here. And it's very moving and special for us to welcome you here in Washington, D.C. for this day and for me to welcome you to Georgetown's campus and to our global pre-conference for TCG, finding home, migration, exile and belonging. I, again, am Derek. This has been my home, my creative home, intellectual home for the last 11 years and it's very special to be sharing that home at this finding home day. Among my hats, I'm co-founding director with my amazing colleague, Ambassador Cynthia Schneider of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics here at Georgetown. And after years of planning and dreaming together, the lab has recently partnered with TCG to form the Global Theater Initiative, GTI, so many acronyms, which you'll be learning more about throughout the day from myself but also the full GTI team. But today's gathering really reflects and epitomizes the vision and hope for that initiative, which is about relationship building, it's about cultivating exchange, it's about bringing people together with shared interests from around the world and grappling together with challenging and critical issues we face. I may appear for the moment to be up here alone, but it's a trick of the eye. TCG executive director Teresa Eyring is in fact here. It's just that she has split herself and the invisible part of her is here. And the visible half is across town welcoming the constituents for another TCG pre-conference on equity, diversity and inclusion. But she'll be here with us shortly and as the day goes on. And it's worth mentioning from the outset that the vital work of that group, the equity, diversity and inclusion group, dovetails very deeply with many of our topics and concerns here today. And it's only due to the limitations of schedule template and travel that they're happening simultaneously, but we are very invested in making sure that the intersections between those discussions and issues are further developed through the conference proper and beyond as we lay the groundwork for conversations and actions. So I sort of just want to name that because there's that odd thing of like choosing one of the two for some and they're really importantly in conversation. In addition to my colleague Cynthia Schneider, I want to briefly acknowledge and introduce you to the GTI core team and the incredible efforts that each of them has made to make today possible. The amazing, from TCG, the amazing Amelia Casciapero and Kevin Biderman. And from the lab our extraordinary managing director Jojo Roof. It really has taken a village as they say to make this come together and it's been an incredible team working tirelessly. I want to thank quickly some of the people without whom today's gathering would not be possible. My colleagues in the theater and performance studies program and the Davis Performing Arts Center here at Georgetown, in particular our department chair, Maya Roth, technical director, Ronnie Lancaster, who's making all of the beauty and magic happening along with technical advisor Toby Clark. I also want to acknowledge our international host committee. Their names are in your handsome glossy programs. I won't share all of their names now, but they've been incredibly generous with their vision in helping us conceive and shape the day and with their time and effort including generously volunteering housing for our international artists and other major contributions without which we couldn't do this. And our friends and partners at HowlRound, which I think hopefully as everyone already knows is an amazing resource in for the theater field, live streaming today's events. So we say a warm hello to our many friends watching and listening around the world. And that will of course be archived. So even if you have friends around the world who can't be watching live, you can share the events of the day with them through that amazing resource. And that will allow the conversations and performances to ripple outwards and resonate farther and wider. In today's challenging landscape, it's very moving to look out and be able to welcome artists and thinkers from at least 22 countries here. Many of you are here for the first time. Quite a few participants in the day have long histories and relationships not only in the U.S. but here at Georgetown, including artists we have hosted such as our friends from DA Theater in Serbia, Belarus Free Theater, Freedom Theater, our resident artist Heather Raffo, among so many others. And DC companies with whom we are proud to collaborate often and to share culture in the city. Companies like Willie Mammoth and Mosaic and Studio and Shakespeare Theater and Folger Theater, Theater J, so many others. Along with Georgetown faculty colleagues from a range of disciplines, students, alums, artists and scholars and colleagues from the policy world. We come together against a backdrop of dark and challenging times in so many parts of the world. I'm reminded of the famous words of Brecht. In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing about the dark times. Our theme for the day is finding home, migration, exile and belonging. It's a heady name. But as we've been planning and preparing for the events, we've had cause to think deeply about each of the words and phrases that make it up and how our work as theater artists touches them in ways that transcend their status in perhaps our daily news cycle or our social media feeds. Finding home is something that we as theater artists have a distinctive understanding of. Like many of you, through coming to be involved in cultural exchange and global collaboration, I have found home and a sense of tribe in far away places with people who come from very different cultural experiences and backgrounds, including many of you who are here. Migration is something theater I think knows how to do. We are effective nomads. We know how to pitch a tent or a set and take it down or to ship it to another location to make provisional homes, material ones and familial ones and the beautiful performances of shelter and migrar that we will see today poetically and politically underscore this truth. And as theater artists, we're invested in the tension between exile and belonging. I moved by the way the word longing is embedded in the idea of belonging, the desire, the hope to connect, to be acknowledged, to be part of something that is suffused with meaning. Here at Georgetown, we're privileged to have students who bring a dual passion for theater and politics. They're invested not only in how to do theater well but in what it does in and for the world and very much inspired by these students and our colleagues. Cynthia and I founded the lab with a mission to harness the power of performance to humanize global politics. We do this by hosting, creating and developing performances as well as courses and public discussions and convenings on campus and around the world. And often this is about relationship building and creating stronger networks because so much amazing work that you are all doing is happening in different parts of the world. But our art form is still largely rooted in the communal and the ephemeral and so we don't always have ways to know and see and understand what each other are doing. So this opportunity to gather and to share and amplify what we are doing feels momentous. When we founded the lab, I think we expected that the artists would be the primary galvanizing force and that over time we would chisel away at and persuade those in other sectors to see the value of this work. But in many ways what we have found is the inverse that those other sectors, those working in politics, policy, human and economic development, peace building and human rights, education, science see the power of theatrical narratives to create motion and vibration and they are hungry for the potency of culture to help move some of what is stuck or broken in their worlds. The door is often open and our challenge is to step through it. And I'm grateful that many of our guests and participants here today are from these other sectors which I know will make that conversation especially rich. It was important to us in planning the day and intentional that we're going to move through the experience as a whole community. We've allowed time at breaks and meals for making more personal connections. Then in the coming days at the TCG conference proper, we'll be dividing up and choosing affinity groups and sessions. But today we will all be together. It was also important that we have the chance to experience exciting artistic work together throughout the day in addition to talking about it and the issues that we face. One of the challenges that the lab has tried to embrace has been to make sure that we're able to pursue artistic work of the highest caliber and to be able to have sophisticated artistic conversations and not settle for an instrumentalized notion of art that accounts only for its social intentions. And as many of you know it's not always easy to hold both of those values firmly in hand simultaneously. But it's vital that we do so, I think, because we recognize that just because work intends well doesn't always mean that it succeeds. Marty Lerner, the wonderful playwright whom we're fortunate to have here from Israel with us today, has a brilliant lecture on political theater and he talks about how Aristotelian concepts of the drama assure us that audiences will identify with the dilemma of the central character. And if that central character is the enemy of a community, bringing the audience to identify with that enemy or perceived enemy is the most radical political act. Once you acknowledge the fundamental humanity of the other, it is difficult to continue to oppress, ignore, violate, and pillage. War, genocide, incarceration, racism, Islamophobia are all dehumanizing processes and theater is by its nature embodied a space for the living encounter with another human being through which we come in our humanity to recognize the humanity of others. So in closing and thinking about our gathering today, I was deeply moved by a recent New York Times interview with a Polish sociologist, extraordinary guy, Sigmund Bauman, about the refugee crisis and its reverberations and I recommend the article to you, but he concludes, quote, humanity is in crisis and there is no exit from that crisis other than the solidarity of humans. In our art form, we're invested in the power of story as a humanizing force, a catalyst for empathy, gathered in human solidarity here around this earth. Our son among many of the critical inspiring examples of theatrical expression and inspiring sites of meaning making around the world to engage these urgent questions of our time. These are complex issues we cannot purport to solve or even adequately address them in one day, but we can forge new ways of understanding each other, create new relationships and dialogues and an appreciation of so much transformative work already happening and a catalyst for so much more that remains to be done. I'm really excited to share the day with all of you. And it's now my pleasure to introduce someone who I personally am very grateful has found a home here at Georgetown. Joel Hellman became dean of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in July 2015, following 15 years at the World Bank where he served as chief institutional economist and previously led its engagement with fragile and conflict affected states as director of the Center on Conflict Security and Development in Nairobi, Kenya. He was also manager of the governance and public sector group South Asia region in New Delhi. And as a development practitioner, he coordinated the bank's response to broad and deep complex global challenges such as the tsunami in Ache and North Sumatra. Prior to the World Bank, he served as the senior political counselor at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development in London, UK. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He's a graduate of Williams College, has a PhD in political science from Columbia University and a master's of philosophy from the University of Oxford and Russian and East European Studies. Earlier in his career, he served as a faculty member in the Department of Government and at Harvard University and in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. We're very fortunate to now have him here as the dean of our School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. It's my pleasure to welcome Joel Hellman. Well, thank you very much, Derek. Just what an audience of theater people want to hear from a World Bank bureaucrat of 15 years. But let me tell you why I'm here and why I'm so pleased that I've been invited to spend some time with you and welcome you here today on behalf of Georgetown and the School of Foreign Service. First, I should say that the School of Foreign Service is extremely pleased to welcome this year, the lab, the lab for global performance and politics as part of the School of Foreign Service. We think it is an absolutely critical part of our mission. And I want to tell you a little bit about that and why we're so excited to welcome the lab. First and foremost, as Derek said, I'm the dean of the School of Foreign Service. The School of Foreign Service, which sounds like a training ground for diplomats, actually was created before the US Foreign Service by a Jesuit institution here at Georgetown, which thought not about Foreign Service as a career, but service as a concept, engagement as an obligation and the responsibility to engage with the world. The School of Foreign Service is the oldest School of International Affairs in the United States. We are about to reach our 100th anniversary in 2019. We were started just after the conclusion of World War I, in fact, announced a few days after the armistice with a very, very bold mission. The School was created to actually foster and build the foundation for peace in the 20th century. After the United States, which had been an isolationist power for most of the 19th century, had been pulled into world affairs through a violent global conflict. As the war ended, they tried to think about what was next. And the founder, in announcing the schools, had said and announced, unprepared as we were for war, we are resolved not to be unprepared for the peace. And so they thought about how to build an educational program that would actually serve as the foundation for peace after such a violent conflict. And of course, the natural thinking about what needs, what are the needs, what are the key aspects and pillars of building the foundation for peace were intercultural understanding. And in fact, the mission statement of the School was peace through understanding. And of course, one of the first aspects of that was we ought to understand history. We ought to understand politics. We ought to understand the economics of different parts of the world as a prelude for better understanding what's happening, what's guiding, what's motivating world affairs. Language and language training was seen as a critical part of the school. But from the very earliest days, performance and culture were seen as an absolutely essential part of building the foundations for peace and security. And in 1919, when the school was created, international performance was still a priority, especially in sleepy Washington, D.C. So in the 1920s, the school for the first time tried to open up a window into the world by bringing performance on to campus and asked each embassy in Washington, D.C. to sponsor a cultural evening on campus. And this was a radical notion, believe it or not, in 1919, the first time that international performance was actually brought to campus. Now, Derek mentioned that embassies performances may not have been of the highest quality and artistic integrity that you can imagine, but nevertheless, it was a start. And over the years, we have continued to place an emphasis on culture and performance as an important part of an understanding of global affairs. And in fact, one of the most important majors in the School of Foreign Service is culture and politics. But the performance aspect, we've left to the artist, not the embassies. And as a result, over time, I think we've lost some of that critical engagement with performance and the power of performance, which is when I came on as dean, I was so thrilled to reach out to Derek and Cynthia and talk about bringing the lab into the School of Foreign Service to bring performance back into the foundation of global affairs and thinking about global affairs. But I'm particularly excited about what you're doing here today, the theme, Finding Home Migration, Exile and Belonging, because it's something that is absolutely critical to our school's mission and absolutely critical to my own personal commitments that I've done over the years at the World Bank and now here at the school. Let me tell you a little bit, a reason why I'm so thrilled that you're talking about this today. As many of you may know and have seen in the last report from the UNHCR, 65 million people are currently being faced with the travails of forced migration, forced migration, not voluntary migration, as a result of conflict, violence and deprivation. This is the highest number of forced migration ever recorded by UNHCR. So we are in the midst of a tremendous global crisis. I'm an economist and political scientist by training, and so I'm going to give you some numbers, probably not the first thing that you do in a group of theater professionals, but I think it's important for us to understand how critical this is. Right now, only 14% of the world's extreme poor live in conflict-affected countries. Most of the world's extreme poor, those who live on $1.25 a day, which is the definition of extreme poor, if you believe it. Most of the world's extreme poor lives now still in the large populated countries like China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan. But if we look at generation, if we look 20 to 25 years in the future, given what's happening in economies around the world, growth rates around the world and changes, while India, China and those large countries are rapidly reducing the world's extreme poor, those countries that are locked in conflict, and currently there are 36 countries around the world in active conflict. And of those countries, 90% of them have been in conflict for over 10 years. So the likelihood that they will remain in conflict far into the future continues. And if we look 25 years, sort of one generation into the future, right now 14% of the world's extreme poor live in fragile and conflict-affected states, as we call them. In 25 years, 70% of the world's poor will be living in fragile and conflict-affected countries. So the world is changing rapidly. There's growth which is wonderful around the world that's leading to poverty reduction. But what's happening around the world is conflict and deprivation leading as a result of conflict is concentrating the world's poor in a group of countries that are increasingly isolated from the global economy, from global political integration. And what's going to happen as that poverty gets worse and worse, as that group of countries get further and further away from global prosperity, the desire to leave, the desire to get out, the desire to look for a better future increases. Right now 85% of the world's forced migration comes from conflict-affected countries. So if you just project 20, 25 years, you're going to see that the problem that we're facing now, in which we have already the largest number of forced migration ever recorded, will only get worse and worse. As the problems become more extreme, as the gap, as the inequality, as the isolation of the nation's impacted by conflict gets more and more extreme. And what worries me most, especially as the dean of a school meant to train a new generation of people engaged in foreign affairs, is that at a time when we should be most concerned about this problem, we actually see the dialogue turning the opposite direction, the national political dialogue. Here in the United States, instead of thinking about the root causes of migration, what's happening, why? What's happening around the world that's leading to these problems? We're talking about building walls. We're talking about excluding groups of people coming to the country on the basis of their religion. But not only in the United States, we're on the cusp of a historic election in Britain in a couple of days in which they may leave the European Union. Why? Because of the fear and hate mongering associated with migration. In France, in Germany, across Europe, we're seeing the rise of right-wing parties, often coming to power on one issue and one issue alone. Migration and fear, and fear mongering. So instead of a national political dialogue that's confronting the problems that this world is facing, that's forcing 65 million people to leave their home and search for belonging somewhere else, at that very moment our political dial has taken a turn for the worse. Inward looking, isolationist, not engaging in the world, tired of engaging in the world. You can't talk, and if you think about situations like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, in the United States, people don't want to talk about it. Rather, they want to talk about the fear, the concern of the other, the risks to national identity that come out of that. And I'm so worried about the stalemate in the national political dialogue that I can tell you as an economist and a political scientist, data doesn't matter, political strategy doesn't matter, international strategy doesn't matter, this is not a set of issues that are being talked about in a rational way about what's happening to the world economy, what's happening to politics. There's something more deep-rooted that's leading to these fear. And that's why I think this effort that you're doing today is so critical, because what's going to impact that dialogue is narrative. It's humanizing the story of these 65 million people who are impacted. Humanizing not only their flight, but their story and their histories in their home countries, why they're leaving, what they're seeking, what they're trying to do, what their experience is. This has never been more important, and I think the power of performance, the power of storytelling, the power of narrative is absolutely essential because is, in my mind, one of the only things that can actually have an influence on the political dialogue at this very, very peculiar moment in the political dialogue in the United States and Europe. So it's on that basis that I am absolutely thrilled that we here at Georgetown University and the School of Foreign Service, with our mission as a Jesuit institution to reach out to those boundaries and reach out to those borders, see the world from the periphery. We are inviting you who are doing this in your day-to-day lives through the power of performance, through the power of narrative, through the power of storytelling. So it's wonderful to welcome you here. We see this as so core to our mission and so core to the political dialogue going forward. I wish you a very productive, exciting day. I wish I could join you all for it. I will say for the performance, but I would love and I hope that you get a wonderful opportunity to exchange your ideas, your efforts, and help build the foundation of what this school was originally created for of peace in the next century. So thank you very much. Good luck with you. Thank you, Dean Hellman and Derek, for really launching us into this day, which I'm so, so pleased to be here with you all. My name is Kevin Biderman and I serve as the Associate Director of Artistic and International Programs at Theater Communications Group. And before I go into my introductions, I just want to acknowledge you may not have noticed on the front of your chairs, our team has compiled not a random but a selection of factoids from various sources around the precise crisis that we've been hearing about this morning. These factoids you may find helpful in your conversations today. You may choose to share them through our social media channel. The hashtag for this event is hashag TCG 16. It's a great way, as Derek mentioned, for us to share what we're discussing with the TCG conference attendee. It's over 1100 people who will be joining us tomorrow, as well as the Equity Diversity and Inclusion Institute pre-conference happening on the other side of town. So I'm really honored here today to introduce the first performance of the day and really our first collaborative venture with the lab here at Georgetown. Shelter is a project of the CalArt Center for new performance and one day arts. It was conceived and written by Marisa Chivas from Los Angeles and written by Martina Costa from Mexico City. This movement based performance shares stories of the massive human crisis of unaccompanied child migrants crossing the US border and they're passing through the deportation's shelter system. Today is my first time seeing shelter which actually premiered in Los Angeles earlier this spring followed by several site specific performances around Los Angeles and the surrounding communities and including a performance last night at the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts. However, it's been incredibly moving to watch this creation process from afar. Shelter as noted in your program for the event and also their program which provides more context for the piece is a participant in TCG's Global Connections Grant Program, which is generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In addition to the shelter grant recipient, we have several Global Connections Grant recipients are able to join us today as well and I know that they're eager to talk about their projects too. What you're about to experience is the result of two years of interviews, conversations and work with unaccompanied child migrants and the students and faculty of Calarts. Today's performance features both students and recent graduates, which is why it's especially exciting to begin our time together with a vision from the future generation of our field. And let me tell you it's inspiring. So without further ado, I invite you to please turn off your cell phones. Hold your social media tweeting until later on. So please turn off your cell phones. The performance will last approximately one hour, followed by a short break in the lobby. As many of you know, restrooms are in the lower level, but you'll have to exit to the top. And then we'll gather back here for a conversation, which will include members of the creative team of Shelter, as well as other artists who will be joining us on that panel. So thank you very much. And I look forward to you seeing you later. Bye bye.