 Come on in. Yes, yes, yes. Hello, hello, hello, folks. Hello, hello, hello. We got some good people in this room. Oh, so excited. Yay. Hello, hello, hello, hello. Hello, beautiful people. Hello, so exciting. We have people come on in. For those of you watching live. Hello, hello, hello. So exciting. Make sure. Yay. Hi, Andrea. Hi, Andrea. Hi, I'm so excited to see all these beautiful people in the space. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Margo's coming in. Feel free to keep it on. Keep your video on. Feel free to keep your video on whatever makes you comfortable. I would love to see your face. It doesn't matter where you are. This is so amazing. So many beautiful people. Hi, Margo. I know you don't have your camera on, but you can put it on if you want to. Hi, Krista. Books in the space. Oof, so exciting. I know this is so beautiful. It's gorgeous. I'm so I'm I'm I'm overwhelmed with emotion a little bit. This is amazing. This is so beautiful. Thank you so much. Hi, Andrea. Oh, thank you. Hello, hello. All right, as people are trickling in, we're going to start. We're going to my name is Daphne Seacrae, and it has been I've wanted to run this series for my god almost two years now. So I'm very excited to be here in the space and to be able to do this series and to be able to bring these incredible playwrights for you. I'm going to introduce the series, introduce the folks in the space, and then I'm going to be quiet so that y'all can hear from the experts in the room. But welcome to the Afro Latine Super Friends Playwriting Hour. And in twenty twenty one, we had a look at us along with how round and like next to the comments curate the series called Latin X Super Friends Playwriting Hour. And you had Afro Latina playwrights in that series. But I wanted to showcase a series that only had Afro Latine playwrights. And so it was really important to continue this legacy in this program that had started and to have playwrights share their writing practices, their experiences, their anecdotes on their process, inspiration and their process for dramatic writing. Again, we're very excited to announce, you know, be able to come back and we have an incredible eight weeks of playwrights that are going to be here sharing with you for an hour. And also, this is going to be recorded. It's being live streamed right now. It is being recorded at the same time. So if by any means any of our playwrights are sharing something and you miss it, you can always go back to the video if you're taking notes and you're like, oh, my God, there was a slide and I missed what the slide said. Have the video. You could always go back to it. So do not worry about that. Do not stress about that. That'll be available for you. And this ideally is a resource for aspiring writers, students of dramatic writing, anyone, you know, in creating thoughtful and a unique blueprints for performance, whether it's for the screen, for the media. Each session is about 55 minutes long. And again, thank you so much for everyone being in the room. God, this is so beautiful. And again, we'll be here next week. I want to acknowledge a couple of things. First and foremost, I want to acknowledge the lands that I am in right now. I want to acknowledge the Tongva people, the traditional land caregivers of the Tobongar, the Los Angeles Basin and the Southern Channel Islands. And I want to also recognize the traditional ancestral and unceded land that I am in right now. That's very important. And I also just want to make sure that we acknowledge that there's a strike going on right now. And that myself, I am in support of the strike. And I'm so happy to see all the writers in the space right now. This is a time where you can, you know, spend on being creative. But it's really important that we support the writers and the strike that is happening right now. So I wanted to acknowledge that. With that said, I want to do a quick introduction of who's in the room. And we have the Rogers is in the room and they have their screen turned off. But turned on right now, they are our hell round TV producer. And so they will be helping manage some things so you might get a message from them. They'll be helping behind the scenes. We have two incredible ASL interpreters that are here in the space with us. We have Benny Barber right now. And we will also be joined by Amelia Boenker as well. And we also have live captioning by Megan Shelby. And that's another service that's being provided with all of that said, I want to hand it over to our incredible guest. Melissa. Yes. I'm going to put this on bio in. Oh, my God. I know, right? Yeah. And so I'm going to hand it over to you so that you can have all the space and time that you need. And I'm just going to put your brain in the chat. We're going to be ripping and running, folks. So first of all, thank you, Daphne, for this invitation and curating. Thank you, Daphne, for being here and helping facilitate. And thank you to HowRound, a community that I've been involved with for over a decade. Well, since its inception, I've been in community with with the spaces and and the affinity groups involved to make sure that work from marginalized communities or people from the global majority are centered and our work continues to be highlighted with dignity, authenticity and ethical relationships. Thank you for the land acknowledgement. I am Chicago based and Chicago born. So I also want to acknowledge the first nations that my my own experiences in history have been brought up on that land stolen. Those are the land of the three fires, the Ojibwe, the Ottawa and Potawatomi, also the first nations of the Miami, the Ho-Chunk, Menemonee, Sack and Fox people. They are still very much alive and their presence is felt and seen. So I want to acknowledge them as well as we bring in. We also want to acknowledge our ancestors, always, always, always first and foremost, our higher powers, God and our ancestors who have walked and suffered before us so that way we can thrive and tell these stories that are also connected and deeply rooted to our authenticity and our identity, Ache. With that being said, everything that I have learned through performed narrative, I learned at first in an institution and then as a person of color, as a black body, as a black woman, I had to unlearn that shit when I got into the real world and what authentic storytelling means to me. And I think that what I bring to the table in this conversation that is a shared circular community is just my process, the things that I've learned, how I've unlearned them and some of the tools that I utilize with anyone that might look like me or share my experience, how I tap into writing through the lens of the global majority, like through our specific lens in order to create something that I call decolonized theater, decolonized storytelling, the one that rings true to our authenticity and one that rings true to the lens of diversity and equity that is giving us the autonomy of our stories. In other words, we get to say our own shit, right? And how how we do that should be as invested and supported and centered as predominantly white works. Can we just be on the same page there? Great. So I'd like to first take the first half of the session and just talk about process, things that we need to know. I always say, let's learn the form before we bend the form. So I'm going to share a small power point that I created just to kind of gather and structure our dialogue because we could I put everything in the kitchen sink when it comes to these plays, but you shouldn't have to go through as much of the overwhelming process as I have. So we mainly want to talk about today, the playwright as a vessel, the process, the the conduits in which we tell the stories and then the platform, how do we amplify and how do we make sure that our work and our stories are visible and accessible? So those are the key elements that we're going to be discussing today. And those are the things that I think are really important to playwrights. First of all, playwrights of color, but mostly this presentation is going to be focused specifically on solo work. So the person. OK, let's let's take the title out right away of the playwright. We want to make sure that the person that is telling the story is taking care of, right? Who are you? Have you sat with yourself long enough? Have you made some deep excavation? Are you therapy right now? What is the story that you want to tell because of who you are? But do you know who you are? Do you know what experiences help fuel and create the stories? What has happened in your life that really impacted you that you think is powerful enough to tell? I think when I've never really considered myself a writer or a playwright and I was just like, I'm just a storyteller. Well, you know, I think as people of color, we are excellent storytellers. Our oral traditions are our ways of sharing story and family settings, the way of sharing stories and familiar settings with friends at the bar, which are uncles. Like we're excellent storytellers and that kind of craft is just as important as the ways that we've learned in your eccentric storytelling. Do you have a connection with your creative spirit? And when I say creative spirit, a lot of times people think news, right? We're thinking about our muse. Where does our inspiration come from? I want to acknowledge and share that I do believe we have creative current every single person, no matter if they're like a mathematician or in STEM or in, you know, biochemistry. If you think you're really right brain, it also has to do with your left. And similarly, if you're very left brain, you do have a lot of right-sided qualities. So I want to acknowledge that the idea that there is a creative current in every person is true. That's how we tap into it and how we also create a relationship with that creative current. I think that part of the playwriting process is to treat the person as a spiritual entity, as an energetic entity. And you have to continue to put in to that to that sentient part of yourself, the one that creates creativity, right, the one that channels story. So, you know, I think that it's important to, one, know that the playwright is a person and the person carries stories and energy. And the more that you sit with yourself in your reflective process, in your diary, in your therapy, in your in your memory making, in your memory recollection, all of those things want to start to form and have an interrogation process with yourself. Really learn and know yourself, because what's going to happen is that your voice will start to thread through everything you create, even if it's like complete nonfiction. Parts of you will start to be threaded into your characters, into your dialogue. And so really understanding yourself is the first step. Am I are we good so far? We're going to keep going. Great. Action. All right. So with yourself. Yes, just to let you know, we are not seeing you. We're only seeing the PowerPoint. She just wanted to let you know that. OK. OK. Great. Wonderful. Wonderful. That's fine with me. So we have a story after you've like sat with yourself for a while and you're like, man, I want to tell this story, you know, of being a young person, Puerto Rico. I want to tell this story of, of, you know, of an African deity in space. You know, you've got whatever that it whatever it is. Once you've found this nugget of a story, you want to hold on to the nugget because I think first you want to create the through line. If you want to just keep holding of like, what is the story? As you start to form and structure your story, if you can always keep going through that, that that little nugget, the byline, the through line, then you can really filter all of the content and all the things you want to come, you know, put into it if it maintains with the story that you want to tell. If you can write that story in a one sentence blurb, one or two sentences, everything you're going to want to tell, if it can link back to that one or two sentences, you're in good shape. If at the end of the day, you have this story and then it's got all of these other parts to it. You really want to decide what story is it that you're going to tell, right? And so if you have your if you have your nugget, if you have your byline, if you have your little blurb that helps create the filter, is it attached to this story or is it a story for something else? So many times I'm like, this is a trilogy. Like, I have to look at this story first to this chapter because this thing that I that is attached to it while it's connected, it's not a part of this story. So being very clear on it and that can shift, right? That can shift as you go through process. But getting a hold of the story you want to tell, put that in a jar and then put things related to that jar. I think in solo work, it's really beautiful that you're not really limited by much. I think a lot of times when we think about solo artists, you you you think you're going to go see someone's like autobiographical story. Oftentimes, yes, right? But how many times have we are like, I'm going to go see my friend's solo show and it's literally just about them. I'll be like, I know that work. How are they going to tell it differently? Solo work is not limited by by much. It's just what you want to do and then how to do it. Is this story autobiographical? Is it ethnographic, meaning is it culturally specific? And are you telling that story through that land, through that specific lens? And I think that's very helpful when we have folks from the global majority to center that work. Like we'd love to hear stories of something that is so culturally specific that we can find attachment and we can identify with those stories because they're so culturally specific that they're universally true. That's awesome work. I think we need to see more of that as well. We're not seeing a lot of afrofuturist work, you know, in the solo vein, right? We're not seeing much afrofuturist work, period. So how do we as solo artists or how do we begin to tell that kind of story by removing ourselves from the vessel and telling that in a different way? Is it fiction? Is it nonfiction? Are you doing this work based off an archive? Are you doing it based off of interviews, documentation? You know, we know a lot of playwrights that do this work. Anna Deverne Smith is one of the best playwrights in solo work to do things through autobiographic work and interview process research. Identity, how are, how is your identity or multiple identities informing this work? Are we telling a queer story? Are we telling a story, a solo artist in the drag community? You know, and their identity is important. Is it a South Asian drag artist and how all of those narratives fuel that story? Like all of these things can be involved. The political body, right? As a person of color, know already your art is political. Just it's what it is, right? Because one, as a person of color, you're you're combating the status quo, right? You're creating a counter narrative. So the politics and societal measures that have traditionally placed you in a box, you're already expanding that. So, i.e., the work does tend to end up political, whether it's through a societal standard, right? Like you're also thinking about policies around that body, right? Is it a satire? Are you using irony, comedy, farce to to basically throw something on its head? A lot of solo work that I write is is either hypersexual, right? We want to we want to look at patriarchy. So we're looking at society, but it's written through the lens of comedy. So I'm going to talk about having hairy nipples or like going to get wax. Really, it's funny, but we're talking about the societal norms placed on women's bodies through the lens of patriarchy. Hell of fucking political, but you don't really get that when I'm talking about Helga waxing my ass back there. Oh, this is recorded. I keep forgetting. Um, great. Um, that's that nugget of a story. We birth from there, right? Sometimes we don't have that. Let's talk about process. Um, maybe you've identified the story. Maybe you haven't, but maybe you want to draw a narrative. Narrative is not the story. Narrative is the written or spoken retelling of an event and experience connected to the larger aspect of a story. Right. So this, when we, you'll hear a lot in the theatrical world and also through politics of like, that's your narrative. This is their narrative. Narrative is specific and it's unique, but it also can be shared. You can have a shared experience and you can share narrative with someone. When we talk about performed narrative, it is truly your voice, your story, your lens that is connected to the larger arc of the story that you want to tell. Does that make sense? Between narrative and story, you can perform any narrative. Anything could have a narrative. Music can have a narrative. Dance has a narrative. The narrative is how you tell your experience through what medium you tell it. The narrative is the thing you want to capture. The story is the entire, the one, two, three, four, five of it, that point A to point B, right? So the narrative should be specific. And the more honest you are with the story that you want to tell, the more honest you are with the narrative, the more authentic it is and the more specific it is. Even though there are many Puerto Rican storytellers out there, as long as your narrative is specific, you will still be diverse within that category, right? When we talk about diversity and storytelling, we're talking about like all one people, they're not a monolith, right? Black people are not a monolith. So if we're very specific with our narratives, we're very specific that this particular Black woman's experience is very different from this particular Black man's experience, even though they're part of the same diaspora. So when we think about these umbrellas, the umbrella of people of color narratives, there is such a wide spectrum of narrative and the more specific and the more honest and the more brave you are with the narrative, the more authentic it is and it then gets to add some color and dimension to the diaspora. And it also becomes ethical. I like to mention ethics, right? Because, you know, I don't know how you felt about watching Woman King, but I felt super empowered by watching Woman King. But, you know, it was brought to production over advocation years by a white woman. So, you know, at the end of the day, especially when it comes to media, TV and film, I like to bring in the idea of autonomy, authenticity and ethical storytelling. Who is behind the storytelling? Is that their story? And if there's something, if there's a story that you want to tell, maybe it's worth questioning, are you the right person to tell that story? Who do you bring in to tell that story? If it's a story you absolutely want to tell and it's not part of your experience, then you might want to ask yourself, how do I get involved with people who are directly affected by that experience and how do I lift their story? You become a vessel. You become a conduit for that story, but it involves the people who are directly affected by it and then it becomes ethical work. Does that make sense? Do we think that that's a very important aspect to storytelling within global majorities? Absolutely. Absolutely. So, let's look at creating narratives. This is where, I don't know about you all, but folks who have never done a solo work before, oftentimes, like, where do we get started? How do we, how do you begin the process? Where do you start? How do you write? Y'all, at the end of the day, no matter how you find the narrative, wherever you pull it from, it still has to get written. Spoiler alert, we have to write. I will be the person to say, I hate writing. I am a very visual person. Please put me in a room with post-its and poster boards and let's just have a discussion. I like to figure out what those narratives are in multiple ways. I come from Betheluna, which is devised work, right? We, devised work means that we are often non-scripted and we create narratives based off of ethnographic and autobiographic work. We pull stories from the streets, from people's mouths, from our historiography, our elders, all of those ways. And then we get into a room and we'll figure out how to do it. Some of these techniques in order to pull narrative are free writing and free association. Just free form, you just sit down and you let your mind wander. We can have prompts or activating questions, memory jog. I've used many times Maria Irene Pornes' memory jogging technique where you sit by a river, you visualize sitting by a river and you are looking to pull a narrative and you start to facilitate your own meditation and you let the river, the water guide you to the moment and you start to document very specific things like where are you? Where is it? Who's in the room with you? What are the colors? What does it smell like? You can facilitate that kind of meditative space and really create it in your mind. Improvisation, sometimes I'm stuck on a scene, I don't know how to make it and so I'll just start improvising it with a friend and seeing what dialogue comes out, seeing what narrative gets pulled out. Storyboarding, I love post-its, I love drawing. Sometimes I wanna draw the thing and be like it's this and then this and now we're telling a story, it's collaging. Sometimes you just wanna make an outline. However you start to pull the narrative is what is your process, it's unique to you. I use almost all of these things. But for me, right now I like to write down ideas on post-its and then I've got 20, 30 post-its and then I start putting them together in groups and piles and I'm like that post-it actually doesn't belong anything up, doesn't belong in this story. That's another story for something else. Throw that away. So now you've got some techniques, you've got some materials. Now with solo work specifically, you don't have to be confined to a particular type of story telling. How are you telling this story? Modalities, the vehicle is how you tell the story. Are there music, is there puppets, is there dance and movements, monologuing, scene sculpting, film? Are you pre-filming something in your own? I've had mixed media. I've had a solo show where I've pre-filmed something and then I've shown, screened it while I've gone and take an intermission, a little break. Are you using soundscapes? Are you building sound in the room? Are you doing live DJ looping? We've seen solo work that's doing that. Is it object work? Do you have props? Is it very detailed specific? Are you using zero props and zero set and you're miming your life away in the solo work? That is absolutely okay. Is this work fueled by an interview? Are you bringing someone up on the stage with you and having a plenary? Are there culturally specific norms or ways of telling stories? My favorite scenes are the ones that have bochinche or gossip. I have two Diaz telling a story, right? I see people are like, hell yeah, my favorite thing is like, bueno. Lo habito esa muchachaque, all of those ways. And again, the more authentic, there is no wrong way to tell the story. There's just the limits of your own mind, right? And I think that again, as people of color, we should be bringing in our own very culturally specific norms of storytelling. Structure, okay. Again, specific to solo work. We've often seen typical play structure that follows and if you're a theater goer, if you are a theater student, a theater practitioner, we'll just let you know that oftentimes there's a structure where there's a beginning, middle and that beginning, middle and often has this diagram where there's this resting state, right? We call it our initial state and that is given to us by a lot of exposition. We tell people what is going on and then there's an inciting incident that's created by conflict and there's escalation and then there's a climax and then there's a anymore or falling action and then there's some type of resolution or anti-resolution. That is a straight play model. In solo work, it's so beautiful that we do not need to follow a linear format, right? It can be vignettes, it could be cyclical. I have had a solo work in Good Grief where it was absolutely non-linear because healing is non-linear, right? You two steps forward, one step back. And so I had like four through lines that I weaved in on itself and they were jumping back and forth in time. Solo work is really limitless when you think about it, but you yourself as a playwright cannot lose track of your story. I also know that we're at the 30 minute mark, Daphne, so I'm gonna keep going. I'm gonna give you about five more minutes, five more minutes. Right, right. And so once you have all of these elements, you have your story and you're thinking about your scenes and how to build this up, there are elements that I absolutely still utilize for sure from a straight playmaking, character, dialogue, arc. In this solo specific work, I use the word through line. What is the through line? Because it's the thread that keeps things together. So if I'm doing vignettes, I still wanna make sure my stories are still connected to the nugget, right, the through line. When is this story happening? Are we jumping in time? What are the themes built into it? Especially the point of view, you yourself as a solo artist, you only have one person, but it doesn't always have to be you. You can pick any person who is telling the story and through what lengths at any time. I also often think about the main conflicts to consider. These are things we learned in elementary literature class. What are the conflicts? Is it versus society, self, God, spirituality, and other human nature, those kinds of things. You want to add those things because it creates dimensionality. So some of the norms that you find in regular playmaking processes, you can fold into solo specific art. Otherwise we're watching existential movement work and again I ask like, why is that story important? Why do you wanna tell that story? Great, development. So you've got your story, you have it written down. Now it's the most important process and the most fun process I like to do is development. Just because you've written a work doesn't necessarily mean it'll get produced. And it also doesn't necessarily mean it's doing the things that you think it's doing when you're in a room by yourself banging your head against the wall and be like, oh, the story, how do I tell it? You wanna get it heard. Plays are supposed to be seen and heard. I always advocate, you have a new work and theater companies that have new work initiatives are your best friends. Theater companies that allow you to self-produce are your best friends. Workshop that solo show, get it read aloud, get some feedback, learn the process of constructive, not constructive criticism, but generous critique, right? It's like things that impacted you, things that people are really feeling, things that people, look at people's questions, look at people's reactions when you read it. Collaborations, I think it's incredibly important to make sure the people you're collaborating with, especially if they're a theater company or an organization that they share your principles and you are aligned in your vision, particularly if you're looking to bring your work to a predominantly white institution. I think that those PWIs are very, eager to get narratives from black and brown bodies, but is that a safe place? Is that story gonna be handled ethically and authentically? Do you feel like those folks align with your values? Make sure that you're having those conversations because right now is the time to exploit black and brown work all day, every day, because it looks good in their grants, it looks good in their funding. So just because they want your work doesn't necessarily mean that they deserve your work and they deserve your presence and they deserve your divinity. That is not a place where you want to put your body and your story. I would rather do my story in a park before I let a white producer tell me that I can't have black-out drums. In my play. So just keep those practices in mind, but it is all part of your development before your play gets produced. So your play is produced, you've had a premiere, congratulations, you're part of a very small group of people that get to do this really incredible work. How do you keep that work growing? You've had a baby, do you just have a baby and like leave it at daycare? No, you continue to nurture and foster that baby, right? You want to be in the rooms in those communities, you want to make sure your work is accessible. Document, document, document, I can't stress enough, record your readings, record your stage readings, record your performances. You must keep an archive because I guarantee you when we look at the theatrical canon in 20 years, it will still be narrowly impacted by black and brown folks because we are not a part of the major theatrical canon because our work is not getting reviewed by critics and it's not getting archived by the major platforms that publicize theater experiences, right? It's still predominantly white, those lenses are white. If you do not record it, it does not get archived, it is not how we explode the canon, right? You deserve to be part of the American theatrical canon and the way we do that is the archive, the public archive, make sure you're, if you can't get reviewers to review your work, get your friends and your community to come see your play and then talk about it. Now that the internet lives on forever, now that you have social medias, you should, your work should be accessible, you should be accessible as a playwright, you should be visible as a playwright. How do we do that? We have to build community. It's not networking, it's relationship building. Those people are your friends. Wait, let me retract, we ain't got no friends. Those people are your community. And I use that word very specifically, community is important, but not everybody is part of your community, just as not all skin folk are kin folk. I think that, right, I see Krista go off, right? It's one of those things. The game of visibility is to make sure that you are in connection with community, but for all the right reasons, right? How are you supporting somebody else? When we think about our lateral growth, we also should be thinking about our vertical, I mean, our vertical growth, we should be thinking about our lateral growth, right? How are we getting in the room with other people who are doing like-minded work? So we are co-sharing resources. And lastly, we gotta protect our work. Happy, write that shit as soon as you can. I think we don't talk about how artists should also be entrepreneurs. I don't believe in a starving artist unless you want to be starving. I think you should always first legitimize your work yourself, copyright it. I think that you should protect yourself from the IRS by creating an LLC in which all your artistic avenue and income goes through. I think that there is representation. Get you a literary agent, get you a booking agent that can get you into some of these, into the gigging economy, because there is money in the institutions for you to thrive and to continue creating art in ways that are sustainable. We are not talking about non-sustainable processes anymore. This is 2023, right? There is money to be had. There's money out there. Make sure you have representation. Start getting that in alignment and you are always worth representation. You are always worth a meeting. I'll leave you with this. As much as I just shared, and of course, this is recording, you could go back to it. There is no formula for performed narrative. There is only specificity, especially when you are decolonizing art firms created by Eurocentric practices. There's models that have come before us. There are no formulas. There is no one way, one path to do this work. You just be fearless in the excavation of your history, your claim to your identity and the transmutation of your experiences. And that will fuel your work. Keep both eyes on your own work. Don't look at what anybody else is doing. Make sure your work is specific, it's brave and it's honest, and your story will always create new pathways. So there's all I have to give. Yay! All right, folks, we are gonna open it up now. I know it was a lot. It was a lot to process. It was a lot to be able to put into communication and we're gonna turn off the PowerPoint and you're gonna be able to spotlight us and we're gonna be able to see all of you as well. And so we would love to open it up for questions. It would be absolutely fantastic to be able to hear from y'all. I'd love to see everybody. And also I'd love to see everything. I'm in gallery view for everyone so that way it feels more like a round table. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yay. Hello, beautiful. You're comfortable turning your, yeah, we go. Yay, thank you so much. Hello. So we would love to open it up for questions. So you have the power to unmute yourselves. We will call on you. But we would love to know what kinds of questions do you have about what Melissa has just presented or just maybe it's not about that but it's about something else that Melissa might be. Also, if you're in process, right? If you're in process right now and you're like in this process is where I'm at, this can also be a collaborative community share. I'm up here, I'm not, I am up here. We are in this together. So if that's also something that feels helpful, this space is yours now. And those of you on the live watching the live stream, you could also ask questions and we will be able to gather those and present them. But I see that Peggy, you have a question for us. Please, feel free to share. Hi, Daphne. Hi, Melissa. Thank you so much for that slide deck. I was like, yes, it's writing everything down. I would like to, can you speak more a little bit about of the difference between story and narrative? Yes, yes. Narrative, narrative for me, I use specifically performed narrative because storytelling is such, is broad, right? Like for example, let's talk about sex work, right? In the very large story and history of sex work, right? Sex work, I'm telling a story about sex work, but my narrative is being a queer sex worker from Chicago whose mother was also a sex worker. So my narrative that contributes to the larger story of sex work, that's to me the difference. So narrative is culturally and culturally and personally specific. Narrative gets to the most specific experience involved in a larger story. It is written or it is expressed through the person from which, from who they experienced it from. Does that make sense? Is it similar to giving a perspective? Perspective is fueled by external forces, right? When we say perspective, it's similar to opinion and opinions are fueled by outside, right? Your perspective, what I say narrative is, narrative is your experience, not your perception of the experience, right? Perception is how you view things that have been informed by external information. Wow, is this getting very specific? So the narrative is specifically how you have articulated your experience by your knowledge, by what you have felt, what you have seen. Perception is the lens and we have to be careful because then we're getting into framework, right? The narrative and is the framework, the framework is also fueled by your biases. It's fueled by the information given to you through living life, right? And so I think when I think about narrative, it's very specific and it is informed by a lot of things, but mostly it is your unique relationship to that experience and how you have transmuted it and articulated it and how you identified it. Perception, perception gets into, like I could have a perceived reality, it's not the reality. Thank good. Yeah, and I think, again, just speaking to like the specificity of your narrative, that is always interesting, right? Because then it creates a more authentic story that is very specific to you, right? Like I could have a shared experience, but I'm not having your experience. And I think that's what's really brilliant about solo work. And then we think about people like Sarah Brown, right? Who has taken all of these experiences and literally mimic them, right? She's creating the structure of the story, right? She's creating someone's narrative, she's pulling someone's narrative and then defining it. Oftentimes she does it straight out of an interview. She'll take it word for word, but sometimes like she'll craft a little bit of structure within it to create the vignette, right? And Sarah, I would also like, if you're new to storytelling and new to solo work, like look at the people who are doing solo work and all of the ways that they're doing solo work, they're doing character work, they're doing dialect work, they're doing ethnography. Ethnography, you can literally put yourself in someone else's ethnographic experience, but we also have to be careful, is that authentic storytelling? Tracy Ollman was amazing at walking in someone else's different ethnography. I'm dating myself, but Tracy Ollman is what gave way to the Simpsons. Tracy Ollman had her own show where she took on so many different identities, but what I would always suggest with that is that Tracy Ollman then completely erased herself. You transmute yourself as a performer and you literally paint that on, right? So I think what she did was revolutionary. What we are doing now in 2023 is saying that person should tell their own story. Whoever we're talking about, that person should tell their own story. We don't need to do blackface, we don't need to do brownface. We, you know, I think it's interesting the world that we're living in now of like who is then telling this particular story. But when you are telling your own narrative, a process that I didn't outline in my presentation that I use in order to keep my vessel protected, it was written in there, but we didn't really talk about it, is that the body remembers, right? I got you Vic, the body remembers. And so, so often when you are recounting your own autobiographic work, you're putting yourself back right into that trauma and right back into that space where your body is going to physically and literally remember being in that space. So I think very careful. Very careful. I did one where like I had to, I had to create an alternate performer that was not Melissa Dupre. I created an alternate identity and that identity was the performer that was channeling that work. So I could protect myself. Melissa Dupre was in another room backstage. Melissa Dupre was not on that stage. There was a neutral entity, a neutral mentality that was channeling this story. So it could no longer hurt me and by way almost disrupting the performance. Does that make sense? So I think Tracy Oman kind of taught me that is like, you get rid of Tracy Oman and you figure out who the performer is to tell that story. I know that was a little different but we should be careful with that. Vic, you had a question. Yeah, first I want to say thank you. This is amazing learning from you. Love you. That's it. And I was... Go on nephew. I was curious about like, you've named some of your personal heroes or pioneers I'll assume. I'm curious as to who those people are in terms of if we wanted to like look them up and like see how the history that you know and you've been explaining to us. Man, they say never meet your heroes but I met John Leguizamo. I met John Leguizamo recently and I told him I'm a solo artist because of him because he was the first person that I saw. My experiences, I had shared narrative. His narratives were my narratives or like the shared experiences, right? But his narratives were specific to him but I saw my people on stage and I saw that he was a theatrically trained comedic storyteller who used satire and comedy and irony. He's been creating all of these things since Mambo Miles, Spikorama, since he had his own show that came out right after in Living Color which also used sketch comedy to point out racism and societal things, right? And so like I come from that era and John Leguizamo was the first person that made me feel like one, only I could tell my story and only he could tell that story. And I think that solo work, theatrical solo work is a valuable and highly revered art form. You are holding space and holding stage for an hour and a half. It is an art form like no other. No one else is in the scene with you. No one else is carrying you. No one else is telling the story with you. It is a commanding stage and what he choose to use and how we're just like magnified to that captivated me. I was like, I wanna do that one because none of these motherfuckers are giving me some stage time in the real world. Like I have a $63,000 degree that says I could do Shakespeare all day but am I playing Julia anytime soon? The reality is no. And I do not wait for my work to come to me. I had to create it. So if I wanted to at least as an artist get on the stage I had to write my own stories. And I was gonna do it in the way that I admired. And so I chose solo work because John Leguizamo made me feel that sharing my stories in that medium was possible. And so that's where I got my passion just to get into acting. I wanted to learn how to do that but I never thought I was gonna be an actual solo artist until I realized that there were huge disparities within representation on the theatrical stage within Chicago, within across the nation that people with identities like mine are not giving space to even try to play characters outside of themselves. That to even try to humanize black people is to say that we can absolutely play some straight character that wasn't race specific. So just the idea that I had to create that this work out of necessity is also kind of interesting. I didn't go to get a BFA to be a solo artist. I was a solo artist because there was no work for me. Angel had their hand ups I'd love for Angel. And I think that might be our last question that we can have for the day. But Angel what question did you have? Yeah, first of all, thank you so, so much for all of this. It's been so serendipitous. Like I'm writing my own solo show right now. Yes. A lot of the questions that I even wrote to ask you you answered in the PowerPoint and I was like, what divine timing? It was so perfect. Look at that. Yeah, I know, right? I was like snapping the whole time. But my question was about, well, the first one is do you have any solo work that you recommend that's already recorded, especially by like Black or Latino people that we're able to watch? Cause I've seen Will Be Goldbergs, but I've been like looking for like some other like points of references, like watch online. To get what from? Just to get like an idea of what it looks like on its fee and like, you know, form and stuff like that. Or that we can- Yeah, I reckon my own and it's accessible. I would love to share my work. I have five solo shows, all of which are digitized. I have one full-length show. So, Seximity, Seximity 2.0, Sushi Frito, I have, I will find, but I recommend Good Grief. Good Grief is a great example of solo work that is non-linear, that has several through lines that has spirituality, mixed media, all kinds of things like created into it. I also think that is there a digitized copy of Slumdog Overlord? Because, you know, there are a lot of Christine Wong's new play. Oh, that's amazing, yeah. Yeah, you know, there's so much great solo work by names that you have not yet familiarized yourself with. You know, and I think that's so important to really recognize artists who are doing this work that have not been picked up by mainstream theater. One, because there are reasons behind those particular artists were funneled, right? And that's like pipelining. I think the best, the artists that are closest to you are the ones experimenting with all of these different forms. So like, Whoopi Goldberg has been doing solo work for a long time, but a lot of these things have like evolved since then. So Christine Wong, Beatty Wong has solo work. Daphne has some great resources. Yeah, Swatch Shop Overlord, sorry. I was like, Slumlord, Swatch Shop, thank you. And Anna DeVernay-Smith, you know, again, it's kind of dated by now, but this is the reason why I think archiving and documenting is important, because the ones that we have, they're already outdated in the modalities. Sarah Brown is incredible, and Sarah Brown has recently got produced by Meryl Streep to produce her work. Sarah Jones. Sorry, Sarah Jones. Listen, names and faces. I don't shake my own head. I'm just sorry. If any of you are in Chicago right now, there's an Afro-Latino performer. I can't remember their last name, but the play is called It's At the Goodman, and it's called Antonio Song. And it's autobiographical, and in it, he talks about the duality of being Afro-Latino and what it means to be, you know, like navigate both spaces, being black and Latino. And I was so excited to see that it's at the Goodman right now, and it's a solo show at the Goodman. And so it takes starting to look at some of these pieces and seeing like, and who's doing what work, where's the work being produced, you know, and seeing and learning from it. Some of the pieces you can find online. Dale Landersmith, yes. Yes, and they're directing, yes. And so it's, oh, and their work also, they do incredible solo work. So again, like trying to find the artist and just trying to see and seeing who's also producing that work. There's a couple of solo festivals. One of them is in New York, that's very, I know San Francisco has a solo festival. And then a lot of places where you will see solo work will be in fringe festivals, because it's very easy, yeah. And I think the more that you see solo work, the more that you will find people who are choosing different modalities, right? Puppetry, you know, I think there's animation, there are, you know, ways to choose who this story is coming from. You know, there are times where like, I don't wanna tell a story about my mom through my lens, but I'll do it as my mother, or like as my, I'll tell it about my mom as my abuela. You know, I think it's interesting to see how other solo artists are using all of the modalities available to them and expand that within yourself. But if you're just starting and you're like, how do I do it? I say start simple, tell a simple story. The most accessible way to start, go that route first and then start exploring once you get more comfortable with like, oh, that's how we get there. And also get a director, you know, I can't tell you like, a director will save your life. You know, a director will challenge you, a director will ask you these questions. Like is there a different way to say that story? Is there a way that we can maybe utilize sock puppets or like, you know, can we tell this in a taxi cab? You know, as a cab driver, they'll really expand the vehicle in which you use to tell the story. So hire a director. Yeah, or if you can hire a dramaturg director, hire a dramaturg who can sit with you and sit with your piece. I just, there's a playwright who does a lot of solo work and they're looking for a dramaturg and I literally was like, please let me be your dramaturg and I'm sending my stuff to be able to work with them. So like, for a lot of us who do dramaturgies, we love this kind of work and we'd love to be able to serve you, the playwright, the actor who wants to tell these stories. We have to wrap up because we are only a few times. I was just gonna say like, is there like any last minute, just like a quick, you know, 10 seconds? One minute, one minute. No, not even one minute, but like just a 10 second. Anybody else just really wanna be like last minute thing? Yes, see over here. Where can they find your work? That was a bad one. Like where can they find your work? My work, if you go to YouTube, if you go to YouTube and you're looking for a sexality, sexality is listed there, but if we can please, God, Daphne, I would love to get people's emails because I'll send you the unlisted ones. I'm highly protective of my digitized work. I'm highly protective of the work that I put out on the internet because the content can spread like wildfire now that there's TikTok and Instagram and all these things. Like I'm also stand-up comedic comedy. I don't put a lot of things on the internet, but I'd be happy to share the digitized version with you that are unlisted. And also you can see my scripts on the new play exchange. That's where my scripts are. The scripts are there. So thank you so much. And I will gather folks' email and we can be to see folks so that doesn't share. And you could just share the resources with folks that you feel comfortable with. So again, I will be happy to share my digitized work. Thank you. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us. I'd love for everyone to please thank our interpreters or ASL interpreters. It means a lot. Thank you, Melia. They're coming in. Also, a big thank you to Megan for coming in and doing our live captioning. And again, everyone in the space. I hope to see you next week. I hope you can join us next week as well. We have Christine Yves-Cato coming in and also we'll be talking about theater and everything. So thank you, everyone. Find me on the gram and DM me. Yeah. Find me on the gram. At boom boom deprave. Find me on the gram. Thank you all. Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much.