 Hi, my name is Martine Key Green-Roger. She, her, hers, president of LMDA until tomorrow evening. And I am Brian Moore. He, him, his, the incoming president of LMDA. Welcome. Welcome to LMDA. In our 2020 conference entitled Crossing Borders Part 3 on the Digital Threshold. And on behalf of the LMDA Board of Directors, I'm welcoming you all from Toronto, territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, and the Wendat Nations. I'm Brian Quirt, he, him, chair of the LMDA Board. Thank you so much for joining us for contributing to the conversations to come about dramaturgy and storytelling and about how theater and performance can affect change. We'll see you this weekend and hope that you will join us in person next year in Mexico City to take the conversation even further. Hello, everyone. My name is Brenda Muñoz. She, her, hers, conference coordinator for this conference and incoming VP of Mexico. Thank you, thank you for joining us. If you have questions during this panel, please feel free to tweet using the hashtag LMDA2020 or make a comment on our Facebook live stream so we can pass them on to the panelists. If you're attending the conference and have any questions about accessing, please feel free to email conference at LMDA.org or visit the solutions room using the link found in the conference, virtual hub. Remember that we have simultaneous oral interpretation available for all synchronous sessions. You can download the Web Switcher Pro app in your phones and then add the token that is available on the virtual hub under simultaneous oral interpretation. We remind you that we have simultaneous simultaneous interpretation available for all synchronic sessions. You can download the Web Switcher Pro application in your phones and add the token that is available on the virtual hub under simultaneous interpretation. Welcome. We also want to wish a happy, powerful and reflective Juneteenth. This Juneteenth, also sometimes called Black Independence Day or Emancipation Day commemorates 155 years since the last known enslaved black people in the US were told that they were freed over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Martine will drop a link with more information on Twitter, juneteenth.com. Thank you. I will do that. And last but not least, we wanted to do a quick thank you to our conference sponsors, the National Endowment for the Arts, Night Swimming Theater, the American Theater Archive Project, Page by Page, and APA Agency, as well as thanking HowlRound for hosting this session for us. And now we will turn this over to our panel. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I'm Anne Morgan. She, her, hers. And I'm LMDA's VP for Institutional Dramaturgs. Hi, my name is Heather Helinski. I'm the Co-VP of Freelance. And my pronouns are she, her, hers. And hi, I'm Finlay Fever. I use they, them pronouns. And I'm the other Co-VP of Freelance. We want to begin our session today with a land acknowledgement, recognizing the First Nations who protect and steward the land we live on. And because we are calling in from many different locations across North and South America and possibly even in globe, many of us are living, working, and profiting off unceded indigenous territories. I'm currently calling in from the unceded and forcibly occupied lands of the Pekumtuk and Nipmuk nations, also known as Amherst, Massachusetts. There's a great tool for finding out more about the nations on whose land you live. Go to nativeslashland.ca. Please take a moment to acknowledge those nations in the comments now, and you can find more about land acknowledgments on the LMDA website. I want to first express my gratitude to the LMDA community for what everyone is doing during this difficult time. In the wake of the global theater shutdown brought upon by COVID-19, LMDA challenged its members to imagine what might emerge from this difficult period in our lives with an essay prompt titled Dramaturing the Phoenix. The poll has elicited over 50 wonderfully diverse reflections upon this unique time and its effects and our potential for our art. How this project evolved is since March 12th when regional theaters closed. LMDA has been holding space every Saturday for pre-managers to gather. It was during our third meeting when there was a call to action by those of us who remember the economic recession of 2008 and 2009 and the pain that happened in our community then when there was a scarcity of jobs. Pre-landers who remember those days voiced concerns that we will again lose dramaters from historically marginalized communities if we don't do something this time around. We took these concerns to the LMDA board and a green light from LMDA president, McCain Green-Rodgers, which led to a meeting with class president, Ken Sir-Niglia, and V.C. of institutions, Dan Morgan, who within a span of 24 hours came up with an essay writing challenge so that instead of dramaters telling the wider theater community why the profession of dramaturgy is even more vital in these times as a brain trust but showing our value. We wanted to challenge our members to come up with big ideas to boldly inspire, provoke, and explore theater's potential to transform through global crisis. What resulted then was over 50 LMDA members stepped up and wrote through our collective pain. It was not easy for anyone writing through grief. There are musings, manifestos, meditations, poems, song lyrics, calls to action, lesson plans, program notes about a show, sourdough recipes for the future and eulogies for the dead. You know, I've been a member since 2006 and I've always known that LMDA was a beautiful community of artists but I've never experienced a moment like this when we so quickly took the basic tools of our profession, this way of essay writing, and used it not for our own personal career advancement but to uplift each other and fight for each other. It also gave us an opportunity to take a hard look at our own organization and ask whose voices are represented from within LMDA's membership and what other voices are missing and why. As we hear from a representative of these essay writers today at our first panel of our conference, know that if you would like to contribute your own essay to this project, it's not too late. The Phoenix Challenge continues to evolve and expand with possibility and if this panel inspires you in your own essay, please join this initiative by simply emailing us at www.lmba.org. We'll put it up on LMDA's website and include you in more opportunities that will be announced after the conference throughout the summer. Thanks, Heather. As Heather said, the response to this challenge was overwhelming and demonstrated the very deep bench that exists within the LMDA community and the dramaturgical power of collaboration and conversation. So in today's panel, in an attempt to showcase that work, this morning we are inviting seven of our essay writers to speak about their response to the Dramaturging the Phoenix Challenge and other essays that resonated with them. We'll also be interweaving quotes from other essays as we go as well. For starters, in his essay, Dramaturging Coronavirus, Yoni Oppenheim asks, how will we memorialize our dead once this pandemic has passed? You can read his full essay and all the others that we'll be discussing today on the LMDA website. As we move into the panel proper, we wanna invite our viewers to engage in this conversation as well. So whether you're on Facebook, Twitter, HowlRound or some other corner of the internet, please drop those questions into the comments and we will get to as many as we are able. And now, without any further ado, I am so delighted to introduce our first panelist. She is a freelance Dramaturg, producer, consultant and teacher. She is a self-described cranky badass and she is the author of not one, but two Phoenix essays, Sparks and I Dare Us Part Two. So take it away, Julie Felice Dubner. Good morning, everyone. I'm not cranky, I'm just tired today. And I greet you from the town which is now called Ashland, which is in the Rogue Valley of Oregon, which is on the lands of the Tekelma-Lakawa, Shasta and Applegate River at the Baskin-Dakupatebe. They lived here for millennial before their force removal in the 1850s. And I recognize the confederated tribe of Celets and confederated tribes of Grand Ronde who live here today. As many of you who have known me for a while know, I am not a cynical person. I am a disappointed optimist. And it's been a struggle for me, honestly, in this career of dramaturgy that I chose or chose me because I had assumed activism and leadership was part of the work. What I found is that the way the career has evolved in most American theaters and literary offices is that it's a passive job. We respond, we take care, we sit in the back, we take a back seat. And I try to laugh that we're the smart girls with glasses, everyone's best friends. I thought our job was to push and plan and fight, but I have often been left heartbroken by bosses or colleagues who wanted me to be more passive. And I ask us to be stronger now. We can still be best friends to artists and we should be artists ourselves, be louder now. I am very lucky to have the most amazing friends, some of whom are probably watching this, but these friends push me and challenge me and support me and have changed me for the better. We're going to emerge into a devastated world and there won't be or shouldn't be any place for passivity in theater, in politics, in the fight for social justice in our homes. This now, which I call the without time, has exploded from a time of forced isolation to an amazing uprising. And as the surviving institutions reopen, as new models are built and experimented with, as some leaders and boards try to go backwards, we have to push them and seize leadership ourselves to evolve instead of return, to demand good choices instead of safe choices, to encourage these places to serve artists and staff and audiences and communities instead of a building or a brand. The last few months I have raged in this project to friends on Twitter, on Facebook, and even to some members of the press about the unconscionable choices, choices that encourage that some leaders, I'm sorry, some unconscionable choices that some leaders are making in this time of impossible choices, choices that encourage maintaining cultures of secrecy, the devaluing of artists and staff's humanity, serving precedents that serve no one and maintaining what I keep calling the great man model of the American theater. This is an EDI issue. It's a moral issue and it's an ethical question. And who better to grapple and demand better than dramaturge? When we get back to work, I hope that we will be pushy and angry and the brilliant thinkers and planners and problem solvers that we really are. This is what I hope the role of the dramaturge will be and it is a passionate, joyful, humane vision of dramaturgical leadership. As I told my kid, it's okay to be scared, but you have to be brave. So as far as the essay is concerned, my colleagues wrote some beautiful things, but I ask you to pay special attention to Mission Accomplished by Sally Olive, which talks very much about prioritizing people and values. And she also talks about planning for a fallow year, which Sally somehow beautifully makes sound both responsible and poetic. I'm an old improviser, so Amy Freeman's essay, Yes and, really spoke to my heart, that we should not be in denial and we should not accept no. And Emma Goldman-Sherman wrote an essay called A Rave for Dramaturks, which talks about creating opportunity for yourself, but also within a framework of professionalism, which includes getting paid. Revolving and Evolving Theater by Kate Mully and Necromancing the Phoenix by Emma Pauley. These are fun, smart, sassy essays, which I loved. And also Linda, who's on the panel today, her essay as well. So I'll let her talk about that herself in a certain turn. And I'm done rambling, thank you. Thank you, Julie. Before we move on to the next person, I want to lift up another of our Phoenix essay writers. As Michael Feldman wrote in his piece, Rebuilding the Theater Around the Audience, now is the time for theater leadership to combine creative planning and digital technology to meet audiences where and when they are. Up next is Colby Frederick. Originally from Edmond, Oklahoma, Colby is a Philadelphia-based dramaturg who specializes in new play development. And Colby is the writer of a piece called Lightworkers. Hi, everyone. My name is Colby Frederick, and I am a queer Latinx dramaturg. I'm here today to talk to you about my essay, Lightworkers. The term Lightworkers actually comes from a musical theater performer based in New York named Sierra Bages. It refers to all of us. We are Lightworkers because we all have light within us. That light is kindness, respect, love, and empathy. When we can recognize that light within ourselves, we begin to do the work, so to speak. We can see our light by accepting what we feel, being mindfully aware, and then being present in any given moment. It's hard, but it works. The thought is that when we begin to encourage our own light, we can recognize the light within other people. When that happens, there can be a mutual exchange where we can encourage one another and love one another. The hope is that by doing this work, we can be present and live ultimately fulfilling lives. This study of presence and being a Lightworker is something I've studied for the last few years, especially in my journey with mental health. But I have found that it not only applies to my personal life, but also to my professional life as a dramaturg. My approach to dramaturgy recently has been working one-on-one with playwrights. I've learned that in this role, I am nothing if not an empath. We must be empathetic to the writers and teams that we work with, but also to the characters and worlds that don't exist beyond the page. That empathy makes us excellent collaborators, but it can also make us powerful advocates for change. During this pandemic, we've been forced to examine what about our world theater or otherwise that wasn't working. With no theater happening, we reflect on what was. And while there are many worthy and beautiful memories, I think it's important to take this time of absolute pause and focus in on how we can make theater more equitable. My essay is written from the future perspective, looking back on the lessons we learned during the pandemic and the changes we enacted. One aspect of equity I discuss are the physical barriers that prevent people from attending the theater, namely financial and physical accessibility barriers. My essay idealizes that we collectively decide not to let these barriers be as prevalent by continuing to produce theater for digital mediums. I know that this is much easier said than done, but I believe we can make theater more inclusive than it's ever been in this regard and others. On the note of inclusivity, racial discrimination in the theater is now at the forefront of our attention and it absolutely should be. I get it, it's uncomfortable to talk about, but that's good. It should be uncomfortable because a lot of white people are now listening to accounts about how systemic racism absolutely affects who gets to produce, be on a creative team, write and perform. With our voices as dramaturgs and our ability to empathize, we can encourage our peers to be the allies that theater folks of color deserve by continuing to talk about race, racism and how we can combat it as theater artists. Our relationships with playwrights can be our first step in fostering this kind of needed dialogue. Whether this means encouraging white writers to think critically about their voice to include or exclude characters of color or by specifically encouraging and honing the voices of writers of color, we can help create a canon that is equitable and inclusive of voices that are historically underrepresented. When we facilitate information, we also facilitate education. I don't believe there are any dramaturgs who don't wish to keep learning. We will keep learning and we will rise from the ashes of what was into a new era of theater. So thank you for your time. I appreciate getting to talk to you all. I'd also love to recommend some other essays submitted by fellow dramaturgs. I love them a lot and I hope you do too. They are Space on the Sidewalk by Kirsten Bowen, Necromancing the Phoenix by Emma Pauley and The Future is Accessible by Andrea Kovic. Thank you, Colby. I'll also add another Phoenix writer's voice, Brad Rockford, in their essay, Return to the Root, Sell the Building, Keep the People. I'm personally heartened when fellow dramaturgs collaborate in combining their dramaturgical powers as a theme. When I first opened up Jean Marie Higgins and Jennifer Ewing-Pierce's email to discover that they had been working through the entire month of April together on this essay, I was very moved. Jean Marie and Jennifer are friends who have talked through their ideas in this essay over several weeks using Zoom, tech, Marco Polo, and email. Jean is a visiting assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Her chapter is on instituted cognition in theater pedagogy, appears in Teaching Critical Performance Theory in today's theater classrooms, studio, and community. Jean Marie is an associate professor at the School of Theater at the Pennsylvania State University. A new works dramaturgs, she publishes widely on the intersection of critical theater and pedagogy. Their response to the Phoenix Challenge is titled, Teaching Dramaturgies for the Post-COVID-19. Hi, and I'd like to ask it, Jean, to also, there we go, okay, because we're a team. So we decided to, well, we didn't actually decide to write this up as an essay until April 30th. That's a secret, now it's out, everybody knows. But we've been talking about these issues all through the month of April. And let's all be honest, mainly through Marco Polo. So there you go. But we're really pleased with the result, which was a collaboration, I think that draws on both of our strengths and our passion for teaching. So I'm going to read a bit from our essay, and then Jean will talk a bit. We are going to talk about some other essays that we find really beautiful. And we're just gonna start. So what will dramaturgs do when there are no theater productions? The thought is sobering for those of us who have struggled for visibility as collaborative theater artists. On the other hand, with no traditional productions, no lobby displays to design and install, no program notes to write, no post show talks to host, the pandemic has liberated dramaturgy from the task driven modes it has adopted in regional theaters and universities in the United States. With the disappearance of many dramaturgy tasks, how can dramaturgs lead us confidently into the post pandemic theater landscape? Our LMDA peers have imagined new models for theatrical production driven by the dramaturgs creative sensibility. We're hearing from many of those today. But one thing is certain, dramaturgs will not rise along with the theatrical Phoenix posited in this call for papers if we do not train our students to see dramaturgy as a way of thinking rather than a set of tasks. Jen. So in light of that, we started thinking collectively about performance studies modalities and how we could teach the pandemic as theater. We can guide our students through thinking of the structure of the pandemic and how it plays out in the media and in the political arena. And we can talk about modes of fictionalizing the pandemic if we were to create it in a traditional dramatic format. Does it feel more like classical drama? Does it feel more like avant-garde drama? What does it feel like to you? We could talk about the competing narratives of the pandemic in the media and how they play out on the stage. We can even take a single White House press conference and analyze it as a dramaturg would analyze the performance which will yield, I'm sure, interesting results in this particular moment. We also, Jean Marie and I talked a lot about the emerging collaboration with Diane Paulus from ART and the Chan School of Public Health because public health, it occurred to both of us that our, and public health and theater are natural allies. So the reflections on form that Diane Paulus has produced from this collaboration are excellent. We'd like to point you all towards those ideas about form for the coming year. And also to think about the fact that theater is constitutive of public health. We are dealing with theater as public health in a crisis, but it always has been constitutive of public health. So that's something really exciting that has emerged that we'd like to discuss and explore with our students. And as far as how this might translate into a syllabus, and of course, this is always an evolving question, we came up with some takeaways that people who are teaching dramaturgy in the fall, just to add to what Jen is saying. We also thought that there could be a module in a course that is the dramaturgy of virtual space, where we really interrogate what the divisions are between the virtual and the real, both in performance studies discourses and certainly the way that new media studies has contributed to that conversation. What is the difference between the live and the filmed, the filmed and the streamed, and have these divisions held up during the pandemic or have they weakened? So interrogating the ways that we are doing theater now that we're not doing theater, as it were, do virtual and streaming formats produce more or less intimate spaces than live venues? And what critical language should we employ for streamed performances, like Zoom, Place, et cetera? Is it fair or apt to use the same critical language to talk about the kinds of performances that are happening now over Zoom? And in the classroom, we thought through just some takeaway, some points. These are by no means the most important points, but these are some things that we feel strongly about. Emphasize thought over tasks, build more theory into your syllabus, ask students to read work about what theater is and what theater does. That is after all the dramaturg's role to question the why and how of things, to Aristotle and Lessing, add theorists of time and space, Guy DeBoer and Yifu Twan. Study plays as theory, study difficult playwrights to Brecht and Soienka, add Eric Ayn and Sarah Kane, writers who confuse structures of storytelling to spiritual and boundary breaking effect. Throughout the university, bring performance to non-performance arenas. Encourage your students to participate in their undergraduate research symposia this year, but not in a performance category. They can share what they've discovered about how storytelling informs all practices, not just theater. And we want to tell you about some other essays in the Drama Shorting, the Phoenix group that we thought were terrific. And I'm gonna start by telling you a little bit about Kate Mully's essay, Revolving and Evolving Theater with a Little Help from the Beatles. And I chose Kate's essay to talk about because it is so smart and so joyous. And it's written in such a beautiful way that I feel like a lot of it would sound great out loud. So here we go. She says, the album Revolver, the Beatles album, was recorded in the spring of 1966 after three months of unprecedented rest for the Beatles. No touring, no filming, no recording, just time. It marked the first time the Beatles were not working and not in the same place since 1962. The four Beatles used this time differently. And she goes on to tell you about Sean, Paul, George and Ringo and how they each spent that time. And she draws a connection. She did like really deep research about what exactly the Beatles were doing in that time. And she came up with some amazing facts. For example, Paul listened to Radio Plays by Alfred Jari. He met Bertrand Russell. He was so excited and nervous that he knocked over a lamp when he met Bertrand Russell. And John continued to experiment with LSD and read a lot of books. This is not surprising to us. George married Patty Boyd and deepened his practice with Indian music, so and on and on. So it's a great history of the Beatles for that time period. But here's what I really enjoyed. So Kate goes on to say, if we are currently in our own version of that first quarter of 1966, isolated, separate, burnt out, unscheduled, what does our revolver look like? And so she thought about this album in relation to dramaturgy practice. And here's just a few of what she came up with using revolver, the album, as her inspiration. Eleanor Rigby, how can we make theater more inclusive? Taxman, what needs to change about the economics of nonprofit theaters as they increasingly produce commercial theater? Yellow submarine, invest in children's theater that adults want to see too. She said, she said, always question the status quo and your bird can sing. How can critical writing about theaters serve artists better? And tomorrow never knows. Endings allow for new beginnings. And a few people I would like to draw your attention to are, I think during this economic implosion of an inequitable and therefore inherently fragile, that therefore is very important, our inequity has made us more fragile, has led a lot of us to be thinking about what the new theater looks like in greater accessibility. So I'm just gonna quickly point you to Rebecca Curran who talks about online modes, online modes bringing greater accessibility to more people. Dan Smith who talks about cultivating senior audiences. Michael Feldman who talks about centering audiences using digital platforms because technology has been waiting for its day, right? Sierra Carlson talking about who are we going to reconvene for? And finally Colby Frederick who already spoke so eloquently for himself. So shout out to you all, great essays I enjoyed reading every single one. And then just a brief conclusion. What our syllabus ideas might achieve by de-emphasizing what a dramaturg does and focusing on how a dramaturg thinks and furthermore how a dramaturg might contribute to fields not traditionally their own, we might develop students who are interested in theater and performance, in addition to students who are interested in making theater and performance. When students graduate without the expectation of participating in traditional theater production in traditional ways, they will be equipped to take their place in defining what theater is and can be. And I just met with our BA program at Penn State University School of Theater yesterday. And collectively we've decided to make our dramaturgy syllabus in the fall of Black Lives Matter syllabus that we create together. So again, look to the students to tell you what they want to learn. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you both for sharing that. Up next, I'm excited to introduce Linda Lombardi. Linda is a director and dramaturg attracted to work that shifts our perspective and broadens our understanding of the world. An artist and activist based in Washington DC, she explores the intersection of dramaturgy and community engagement. She is a regular nominator for the Kilroy List, member of the Artistic Council for the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, a script reader for Great Plains Theater Conference, and currently serves as the communications manager at Americans for the Arts. Linda? Hello, thank you very much. Dramaturing the Phoenix gives us a chance to tackle big questions dramaturgs are so good at, but there are questions that we don't always get to participate in, like what will theater look like on the other side of the pandemic? How long will we be closed? Can we finally eradicate the systemic racism in our institutions? Change is staring us in the face right now. What if the question isn't what will theater look like when we're together again, but what do we want it to be? I want a necessary theater, one that embodies our need to come together and share a story with the community. For me, a necessary theater includes a plurality of voices, new power structures, and an investment in communities. For starters, those with power and privilege need to make room for voices we don't hear enough from. More people of color, more women, LGBTQ, people of all ages, and people with disabilities. But what if those in power intentionally relinquished that power and turned space over to those underrepresented artists? And that includes reducing the wage gap between artistic directors and their staff and visiting artists so that having a career in theater can be financially viable for everyone. That also means talking about artistic director term limits. Changing power structures from top-down hierarchies to an artistic co-op model creates theaters that are owned and operated by and for its staff, artists, and community. Because as nonprofits, we exist to serve communities. That starts with hiring local talent. Put that money saved on travel and housing towards salaries. Extend rehearsal periods and create schedules that accommodate for the future closures that are certainly going to come. We need to reflect the communities that we serve. So I wanna recognize something very obvious. I'm a white woman within an organization that is predominantly white within an industry that is still predominantly led by white people. The lack of diversity in theater isn't just a glaring issue, it's the issue. So I wanna throw out one more idea and it's an easy one. Stop being gatekeepers and start being bridge builders. As a director, I didn't think of myself as a dramaturg until a playwright called me one. What if we invited our fellow artists, theater staff, audience, and community members into this conversation and actively sought out that plurality of voices? This is our time to enact sweeping and lasting change to create more equitable systems and environments to advocate for artists and each other. We know that theater creates empathy. Let that be our measure of success. Let that be the necessary theater that comes from this experience. And with that, I wanna signal boost a couple essays that I was inspired by. Christina Hurtado-Kirson's essay, Who Gets Left Behind advocates for new producing models that don't reward privilege and embracing, this is a quote, the voices that are often overshadowed if not completely left out in the theater community. In her coda to Mission Accomplished, Sally Olof turns the current pause into part of a strategic plan where theaters go dark on purpose every 10 years to reassess everything from missions to goals to leadership. Jacqueline Goldfinger's essay, Let's Act as Bravely in the World as we do in our rehearsal rooms, offers a forward-thinking producing model that preps for the next wave of the coronavirus, including performances in the fall filmed and edited into high-quality streamable video for winter programming. And finally, in a psychological case for theater now, Miriam Weisfeld explores the impacts of quarantine. Studies reveal signs of post-traumatic stress, confusion and anger. The studies were about the coronavirus, but they could just as easily be about systemic racism. What Miriam so brilliantly points out is that once the physical crisis passes, the mental crisis remains, and that theater can play a part in healing us. And with that, I just wanna say thank you very much again for the opportunity, and I look forward to many more conversations like this. Thank you so much for that, Linda. I am thrilled to welcome our next panelist, Karen Jean Martenson is an assistant professor of dramaturgy at Arizona State University, where she is beginning to embed dramaturgy into coursework and theatrical practice. She is excited to be joining the LMDA Executive Committee as our incoming VP of Advocacy, and her response to the Dramaturging the Phoenix Challenge is entitled, Gazing Through Windows. Hi, thank you. I'm Karen Jean Martenson, she, her, hers, and I'm speaking to you from the land of the 22 tribes, which include the ancient Ho Ho Gum who built the canals that bring us life in Arizona, as well as the Akam, the Pima, the Yaqui and the Apache. So in sitting down to try to process this moment, I realized that I don't have the capacity to think much beyond that. So in my essay, what I did was focus on the immediate. So I was looking out the windows, the very same windows I'm looking out right now, and I was watching my neighbors in their apartments. It was evening, it was lit up, I was staring into these little lives. And that's something that we often talk about theater, right, that theater gives us this opportunity to peer into imagined worlds. But what I noticed was that this moment doesn't feel the way it does when I'm doing theater, right? And perhaps it was because of it just gotten hot and we had closed up our windows and cranked up our AC, but I felt more closed off and more shut off and shut out from community. And that made me recognize just how much I miss being in theater spaces with other people, with other bodies, sharing these human moments together. I also thought about the immediacy of the virus. What has it revealed to us? And I came up really with three things that have been made so clear at this moment. The first is our connection, that this virus started in one point of the globe and despite the vastness of our planet spread across it with great speed and great efficiency. And it just shows how actually connected we are. It's also revealed our vulnerability, both in our bodies, that our bodies can be ravaged by this invisible virus that comes in and does such harm, but also our social body, right? Our society is under stress because of this. And what we've seen through that stress is the disparities, that this virus is killing in the United States a disproportionate number of black and brown people that disproportionately people of color, impoverished people, are the ones who have to go out and put their lives on the line while those of us with privilege are even more protected than we always have been by that privilege. And in thinking of these things, I recognize that these are some of our deepest beliefs in the theater, right? That theater is about connection and collective action that it relies on our vulnerability and that it exists to point to the injustices and inequalities in the world and try to imagine differently. And so I think, as so many of the essays have said, we are not going back to the normal that was. We cannot go back to that. So the theater that comes out of this moment must be urgent. It must be theater that screams its verities. It has to show us the unabashed, ugly truths about ourselves. Next to the sublime beauty that we as human beings are capable of. And most importantly, it needs to be deliberately anti in the way that Ibrahim X. Kenney talks about it. If this isn't working to create equity, what good is it? I just want to raise up three essays of the wonderful collection, right? I loved reading so much of these, but these three really spoke to me. And the first is Kingdom Heart, A Dramaturgical Approach for the After by Dini Balone. And I loved it so much. And one of the things I love about it is Dini talks about how she was trained to approach plays and by extension theater work with a radical generosity to look for the good in the moment and to come to the practice with an open heart. And she pairs this with the stillness and silence that this moment affords us. And she really reminds us that theater at its best is an effort to understand our world and ourselves better together. And by taking that generous heart, that open heart, she implores us, we have to let this time make us better. Second essay I want to raise up is Radical Civic Dramaturgie by Veronica Thomas. And again, she sort of gives us a nice definition of what theater is. Theater is people in a place where something happened. And she gives us exciting examples of how that's manifesting right now. And my favorite of this is the Open Lobby's Movement that several theaters are now opening up their spaces for protesters to come in to get water, to rest, to be out of the sun, to share space together, right? And I think this is such an important and exciting moment, right? That theater is again providing rest, sustenance, empathy, resilience to the people who are out on the streets doing that most very important work, right? And this is, as Veronica talks about it, the civic practice of theater, right? And she really encourages us to look to our civic responsibilities and asks, how can our spaces be truly civically responsible to its publics? Who are these buildings for? And how can we make those buildings work for the people who share that space together? And then finally, I want to just mention our Turn to Witness by Kristin Johnson Nishati. This piece is beautiful, poetic, short, succinct. And it sort of brings you back where I started, right? But it is not offering any answers but reminding us of the importance of just being, right? And she reminds us, there will be stories to tell and our purpose will emerge, but now is the time to witness. And I think that's a wonderful reminder that we don't have to be doing everything but we do have to keep our eyes open, our hearts open and be ready to move when that time comes. Thank you. Thank you, Karen Jean. Next up is Jared Strange. Jared works as a dramaturg, playwright, scholar and teaching artist in the Washington, DC area when the state of the world NSPHC studies allow for it, that is. And Jared wrote an essay called So About Shakespeare in the Small Matter of Space. Jared? Thank you so much. I really appreciate being here and have enjoyed being part of these conversations. Like I said, my name is Jared Strange. My pronouns are he, him, his and I'm calling from Piscataway Land near Washington, DC. And my piece so about Shakespeare and the Small Matter of Space is really just, it's a long program note is what it is as I realized at the end of it. And basically it's a response to the story that was circulated pretty soon after we went into lockdown about how Shakespeare made some of his best work during the plague outbreaks, one of many that touched his life. And typically they're referring to when he completed King Lear in 1606. And like a lot of these, I wanted to take a bit of a closer look because the story sort of came up while there was a discussion about productivity and how much you should be getting done now that you don't have to go into work and you can stay home. You have all of this time now that you should be able to be working on things. And I think like most people, I was trying to balance taking advantage of this time but also recognizing that, the world is changing around us. And so when I looked closer at this, I also saw that two years after King Lear was completed in 1608, this is when the King's men that Shakespeare was part of moved into a new space. They were able to take a second home in the indoor theater, indoor Black Friars Theater and make bank charging a premium at this high-class locale and taking advantage of this exciting new space in addition to keeping the globe. And so I decided to treat that as a jumping off point for us to think about continuing to embrace online content and streaming and moving further indoors into people's homes through these opportunities, whether that's keeping archive streams going or integrating live and streamed and online performance. I also wanted to think about, based on an excellent New York Times article about how even though the plague was a consistent part of Shakespeare's life, there were many plague closures. It was never overly overt in his work. It's always in the margins. And all of the constrained spaces that we deal with, we're all dealing with spatial issues now, not being able to go, not being able to see each other being cramped in with one another in some cases. These are all going to be seeping into the texts that we read and that we look to produce in future. And finally, I would hope that as the King's men understood the value of space and we're able to take advantage of it, thanks to their patronage, which many of us will not be afforded, we should also really be thinking about our spaces when we go, if we get to go back into our theaters and how we can think about space, not just in terms of what our brick and mortar is, what our remodels are, what nice curtains and carpets we have, but who is sharing these spaces and how are we connecting them to the broader places around us? A lot of excellent articles are talking about similar things in terms of streaming and what's been available in terms of space and how to think about these Brad Rothbart's article has already been mentioned. They have a wonderful piece that has some really bold ideas about getting rid of buildings entirely or downsizing into small homes in making some of the equipment that we produce with available to our communities. Emily DeCoccas has a wonderful piece called This is a Theater Now, which is all about how to try and embrace a streaming theater at your home. How can you and how can we as theater makers try to recapture a little bit of that presence and a little bit of that togetherness and that theater going experience right in our living rooms or our offices? Lucy Powis has another wonderful piece as well, Rethinking Here and Now that talks about how to consider our spaces and where we should go from here and what people have already been doing even before all this happened to merge the online and the physical worlds together. Shout out as well to Madeline Pages who has another work on The Virtual Age and is digging into some of the history as well of people who were making innovative theater long before we had to force ourselves online. But one thing I really wanna dive in on one piece that I really appreciated is a piece by Marshall Bodvinick called We Need to Talk About the Backlog. And Marshall is really talking here about all of the plays that were slated to be produced and all of the commitments that were made and all of the things that have had to be put on hold now that we've had to close everything down. And he has a lot of really good practical solutions for how to move forward or at least some excellent questions, whether or not we have to cram things together we have to shorten runs, we have to move things online. And I really like that take on it because as much as I'm trying to muse about things and connect past and present, a lot of great writers including Marshall are really looking at the practical considerations. And I think that's so important to not forget what has been lost and what commitments were made because in times like this, we've already seen people take advantage of the situation to not follow through on contracts that were signed and on payments that were made and on promises that were made. And that's something however we decide to go about changing the systems, which I think is obviously an important thing to do, a system is only as good as the follow through. We have to make sure that we are delivering on our promises and making sure that those who have lost something are able to get it back. I think it's particularly important to have that conversation on Juneteenth and particularly appropriate because Juneteenth has become a wonderful celebration and is growing in notoriety all over the country and it's so good to see, but the story of it is about a promise that was not fulfilled and that was not followed through until later and that had to be enforced and that was just the beginning of a long process of emancipation that is not complete and that is full of promises that were not delivered on. And so in light of where we are, I think work like Marshall's can really focus us in on how we're going to deliver on the promises that were made and what it's going to take to do that. And that's all that I have. Thank you. Thank you, Jared. And thank you to all of our panelists. I'd like to invite the whole panel to come back on. We'll have a few minutes for questions. So if you're following along, throw those questions into the comments and we will get to as many as we can. I wanna kick things off with a question that came to us from Twitter or via Twitter from Heather Beasley who asks about the idea of artistic leadership term limits saying further destabilizing theater careers will force people to move every few years to keep working in the field. University adjuncts led to gradual erosion of stable academic careers, not equity. What might the unintended consequences be? I'll jump in on that one. I think it's a great question. And I think it's an idea that needs to have the tires kicked quite a lot before obviously jumping off the deep end into anything, but going off the idea of this happening like every 10 years or so there being a term limit where not just an artistic director but a managing director or anyone else in a leadership position, having them make the conscious decision to step aside and make that opportunity available to a rising artistic director, a rising managing director, a rising head of theater department in a university and keeping the conversation going in, it seems to be that the people who are emerging and rising up in the ranks of our institutions are meeting a ceiling before the ceiling. So figuring out a way to open those opportunities up more so that we can advance those. But again, it's something that I definitely want to be poked at about. So I welcome it. Does anybody else wanna chime in? I'm seeing Heather, you wanna chime in and then Jean right here. Yeah, I'll throw it out and say something controversial. 10 years ago, I was let go from a stable institutional position and you have to understand many of us as freelancers and constantly we're working from job to job. So artistic leaders join the club. I will say that. Yes, it does stabilize your life a bit. I certainly have my life in boxes, but I also think some beautiful opportunities have grown out of these changes in me. And I know I've personally grown from moving around. So embrace the change. My thought was that if we say that, and this is an excellent point, but if we say that artistic directors need to have term limits, what we're really asking for is a horizontal structure to institutions in the American theater. And so if we look at the hierarchical structures that we've created, we're really, those are after a more corporate model, we have adapted to those models. I don't think that's the only model. And I think that if there were more ensemble based structures in the American theater, I'm thinking of companies who rotate jobs among each other that if that were a viable model and I think it is, then I think that what Linda's talking about is eminently possible. Great. Somebody had a question about the Open Your Lobby Initiative, which, yes, I believe they have a website and we'll hope to get that to you in the comments. And now we have a question from Jane Barnett who asks, this is a big one. How will we deliver on promises that were made before the virus? Jared, yeah. I guess I should probably say something about that. And I'll go to Marshall's article that he brought up or that he's written here. And by the way, if you go to the website, it's literally the first one, thanks to the alphabet. What might some of these strategies be most importantly? Dramaturgs need to help their institutions map out a three year plan designed to make up all or most of the new play programming that has been lost to the coronavirus pandemic. So what I like about what Marshall is doing is there are lots of questions but there are also suggestions. And I wanna point out that a lot of the work here in this initiative is ruminative and ask questions like all good dramaturgs do but there are also really excellent bold suggestions like the 10 year term limitations. And Marshall continues, this means more than just rescheduling those productions that were canceled. It means devising a strategy that will allow a company to produce as many new works as they would during a typical three year cycle. And there are a number of considerations there, double bills of one hour plays, basically neglecting to produce works that are not new that would not be world premieres. So basically giving spots over to world premier work that was supposed to happen in the first place and again, deliver on those commitments that were made but there are still tricky situations of well, okay do we say yes to world premieres? Okay, good. Now what about second productions? Okay, now what about third productions? And then it gets a little bit trickier from there. So again, I really, really loved Marshall's work here because he's digging into some of these sticky issues but I think is also offering great suggestions and really setting the value. What is the principle that we're going to follow going forward? So that's what Marshall has to say. Does anybody else wanna chime in on that question of how we deliver on the promises that were made just a few months ago? There was a request to include hashtags in the drama targeting the Phoenix essays. That see, we will look into the logistics of that on the technical side and there is, I think we have time for one more question and I'm watching it being typed right now. So I'm gonna, how can LMDA further the drama targeting the Phoenix initiative? So, and I think that's a great question to wrap us up that this was a project that began in the middle of March most of these essays in their first draft at least were written during the month of April. Now we find ourselves in mid June reflecting on your own essays and the essays you've read. What would you like to see from LMDA as this initiative moves forward? Karen Jean, yeah. We're already taking steps to do this but I just wanna just reiterate how important it is. We've come out with an anti-racist model how to make our organization anti-racist. It's so vital and I love these essays. I love the people who wrote them and yet I'm struck and Linda mentioned this as well by the overwhelming whiteness of this space and we need to do better. And I think this is a really important note about how equity works. And again, I'm gonna turn to Abram X. Kendi but he talks about, are we producing equity? Because we all have wonderful intentions and our thoughtful caring, smart people who want to make this world better and yet we're still not having the results that we need. And so I just wanna commit, like say, LMDA is committed to this but we need to work very hard to make this a truly equal space for all voices. Linda, I see you've got something to say. Yes. Okay, I'm unmuted. I think part of it is about taking the ideas that are coming out of the essays and creating conversations around those overlapping topics. Like there were a lot of issues that are happening in multiple essays in terms of diversity and spaces and producing models and stuff like that that we can break down into like subgroups and start having conversations and see what LMDA can actually do that is activating our membership to move those conversations forward, particularly for those of us who are freelance dramaturgs and not attached to an institution where those conversations are happening for that specific organization. How can we have those conversations for the field? And then I think another step is accountability. And this is something that goes to what Jared was talking about and also the question about how do we fulfill our promises? But any of these sweeping changes that we make nothing's gonna really stick if we don't hold each other and hold ourselves accountable. So there needs to be some sort of like quarterly or a couple of times a year town hall meeting where we reevaluate and reassess what we've done and what we still need to do so that we're always working. I love that, always working. I wanna throw in one comment from Lucy Powis who wrote an essay of her own as well that I encourage you all to check out. But she suggests that term limits, this idea of term limits would dovetail well with encouraging more people to work locally which is something that has come up in a number of essays and what if instead of an uprooting of lives we encouraged a rotation of local leaders who were invested in their community. Unfortunately, we are at the end of our time I'm gonna pass the time to Heather to wrap things up but I just wanna thank everybody as well for joining us. Heather. Yes, thank you everyone for joining us. I'll add one more Phoenix writer sentiment before I actually pass that off to Martine is what Christine Cervino said in her essay. We obviously do not know how this pandemic will end. It's impossible to predict the ways it will change society though we know that it will irrevocably but if we look back to this devastating pandemic in history we can see that the massive structural problems it exposed eventually led to the creation of more egalitarian society one that came to truly value and patronize the art. We also wanna encourage you if you haven't done so yet to read all of the incredible essays on the LMDA website. You can also uplift them in our nominating process. We also if you have been inspired to write an essay for the Phoenix challenge based on what you have heard in red please feel free to send one to freelance at lmba.org opportunities resulting from the essays are just ongoing and thank you also for all the people who have provided some opportunities and please enjoy the rest of the course. Thank you all for joining us at the conference hub. Thank you everyone who participated in this panel. Thank you Heather, thank you Ann and everyone who's also on HowlRound and Facebook. If you thought this panel was interesting and wanna hear more about what is happening in the land of dramaturgy feel free to register for the conference at lmba.org or come back a little later today for the next session that we'll stream on HowlRound. We did hear some feedback during the panel and it seems of watching the HowlRound sessions on Chrome works a little bit better so we'll recommend that going forward for our next HowlRound session at 3.30. But for now we're gonna take a short break and we will return to the conference at 1210 Eastern 910 Pacific. We will hear about the Mexico US exchange at the LARC and that is sponsored by the American Theater Archive Project. Thank you everyone.