 Okay, so thank you all for being prompt on that break. I know it's not easy. So I would like to now, so you all met David Dower in our opening exercises, but I'd like to reintroduce him at this moment. David's a co-founder of HowlRound and also the Artistic Director of Arts Emerson, which is a peer program of HowlRound here in the Office of the Arts, which he can tell you more about at the end of today. In fact, if you would like a tour of this building, which has another beautiful theater that we aren't seeing right now, he, and also has a really cool history, he can show anyone who's interested in that around at the end of today. So David is a really practiced moderator at this dialogue format that we're gonna engage in, that we call Inner Circle, Outer Circle, beginning this afternoon into tomorrow morning. So I'm gonna hand it over to him to give a brief contextualization for why we like to use this format. It's something that we've used since, God, well since like 2010 when we first started doing convenings like this and he can speak a little bit to what we like about it and what we hope that it will help us surface over the next day together. David, take it away. Okay, great. So for those of you who have not done this before, this is a technique that we use at HowlRound, that many of you have seen things like it. There's a fishbowl concept and there's the long table concept. This is something slightly different and it was developed, I'm basically borrowing it without permission from a meeting that I was part of for years and borrowed it many years ago. And it was created by David Bohm, working with native elders for a conversation in the Southwest where they were working to try to map what they were calling the language of spirit. They were trying to map a language bridge between indigenous ways of knowing and Western science. And David Bohm believed that dialogue is actually almost like a substance in quantum physics terms. It exists and it's actually making an effort to get into the room and we are the people who bring the dialogue into the room. And the way they have worked for many years and it's incredibly powerful, hopefully we'll experience that in these couple of days, they work with this inner circle and outer circle concept. And on the inner circle, our job is simply to contemplate the question, listen to what's coming to you in response to it and if something does come, share it. If it doesn't come, wait, listen to yourself, listen to your colleagues and just speak here to each other. On the outer circle, this is called the listening circle. On the outer circle, the job is to actively listen to this conversation and to yourself at the same time. What are the things that you're hearing that you feel you wanna share when we break open the circle? What are the things that didn't come in at all that you feel were missing and need to come in? Often it'll be the person who has the least to say who's sitting on the thing that's most needed to hear. And so I'll pull on people. But for this to work, it's a very active listening on the circle, on the outer circle and this day is very focused on the inner circle. So we'll try not to perform to the listening circle, we'll try to stay with ourselves and on the listening circle, you'll try to stay present to what's happening here and then eventually we'll break it out, we'll all be on the circle again together and then we'll start to unpack all of the things that have come up and that have been trying to get in to the room. So we're gonna work here for the next 40 minutes or so and Jamie's got cards to let me know when we've gone to the end of our time together and then we'll all take our seats on the outer circle and we'll become a group of the whole again. Okay, it's clear? So let's give it a whirl. This particular circle, this conversation has been very smartly structured and I wanna congratulate all the people who put it together. We're starting with questions around the reality. We're kind of taking an inventory of what's happening, what's working, what problems there are, what trends there might be in this work already and it can be things that you've experienced through your own practice or things that you're observing around the field. We're really talking about art, theater in particular and climate change and so who would like to begin? We heard a lot already today and maybe something's already percolating from what's been said so far today. Anybody have an initial response to this prompt of where are we, what's working, what trends? You can go over it. I'll go because to some degree I'm an observer I think. Theater Without Borders is as Chantal and Elizabeth mentioned convened something, a gathering of people that became Climate Lens. Yuna and Lonnie know about it and it calls itself a network of theater makers and culture workers at the intersection of art and climate and we created a webpage and on it is a link of the organizations of people who were participating. I look at that link, that list of links and I start looking at all the information that has come in over the transom. I spend a lot of time on the internet and I see this pool of activity and this pool of activity and this pool of activity. I see some of it coalesced in small groups in the United States. I see other groups coalesced in Europe, a lot of activity in Europe. I see in my travels there's a few people that I talk to in Ethiopia. So it seems like there are these pools and they're like these all different listings of these organizations and they seem there is a burgeoning practice, a growing practice, a burgeoning field, a growing field but not particularly as someone said visible and networked with one another. So I wonder about that, that the reality is that there is a burgeoning field of practice at that intersection. It is happening around the world in eddies and pools but it's not connected globally. It's not connected even locally sometimes and that's influencing a lack of impact that the very practitioners who are doing it are so adamantly expressing and longing to achieve. So that's an observation. Yeah, that's a beautiful observation. So anybody have a response to this initially to the notion of it burgeoning? Does that feel true to your experience as well that there's something that's growing? That would say that there's something that's growing, that's spreading, that's emerging? Does that feel true in your own communities? Microphone if you have any? I'm agreeing, thank you. And so in what ways do you see it burgeoning, Georgina? I think it's just become more, I literally just hear it more in conversation with playwrights. I think in my practice I inherently write about climate change without knowing that that's what I'm doing just because of, I write about the human spirit or the human evolution and constantly in looking for that evolution, it's obviously tackling all these other things. And so it was recently I think that I noticed the lens sort of zooming in and people saying, oh, you're writing, and not about even my work even though I consider it an active practice, but I hear more of like, oh, I'm writing my climate change piece, or I'm writing my climate change play, or I'm writing my equal drama. The same way a playwright would say, I'm writing a theater for young audiences, like it's a genre, it's its genre. And I'd never saw it that way because I thought how can we actually make a difference if we're again separating, or it's like the thing with the Latino theater too, that happens, it's like I'm making Latino theater. I actually entered a circle like this five years ago for the Latino comments talking about the future of Latino theater. And the first thing I said was, are we even thinking about do we, are we gonna have a plan in 2046 to inherit? Like it was, I was already thinking about that. And so I think that's how I see it surface is that it's still this device in trying to define it or identify it, it's still separating it. And I just hear it more and more from playwrights, from companies, from people seeking plays, looking for the eco-play. We want our climate change play, we want our eco-play. Alyssa, you have a response there. I agree, and I feel like there's less trepidation around use of the language and the terminology in marketing for theaters. I think if you go on new play exchange, you can put in various environmentally-related search terms and find plays, and it's not equated with apocalypse necessarily or kind of written off as one tone. There's more interest on the parts, I think, of theaters and new play initiatives to explore what the stories might be. I come from the perspective of an educator, and I think my students are scared, but for different reasons now. It used to be they were fearful because they feel like they didn't know anything, and now with the ubiquity of knowledge that at least the internet affords, they feel like day two of eco-performance, they realize how complicit they are, and that feels crippling because they don't know where to start. So a couple of things that I wrote down thinking about this question is I'm wondering how we can bring analogies because I think they're very helpful for students. How can we bring them full circle in theatrical narratives or performance contexts? So for example, I've read some wonderful articles on analogizing climate change and World War II, or there was a recent one I think in the Howl Around Curated series on slavery and climate change, and I'm thinking those are very useful for, we're all students of this, right? It's very useful for people to begin to understand the unimaginable, but how do you bring that full circle and not just kind of feel content with understanding it a little bit more? How do we actually engage interest in the stories for the moment's sake and for the future's sake? Not for the, oh, we're beginning to understand it and therefore get a little bit more comfortable with its sake, if that makes sense. Yeah, I have a question to you, Robert. Go ahead, take that, and go ahead, Hannah. I also have a question to think about, which is what is the particular role or power of theater? We're talking about theater as a sort of focal point for our work in relation to climate change, and you're talking about the new play exchange and talking about the play of the month or the flavor of the year, kind of. And so just even also to be thinking about what's working about theater in the face of this change. Robert, do you have a thought? Yeah, I think in answer to that question and to Alyssa's points about burgeoning new play initiatives, I think I can speak to one specific initiative at ART that is teaching us a lot about how to go about thinking about making work in this regard. A couple of years ago, Dan Shragg, who's a historical geologist who runs Harvard's Center for the Environment, actually came to our artistic office and asked if we might consider creating a joint commission program between the ART and Harvard Center for the Environment. And that desire on his end was coming out of a real frustration that his colleagues and he were publishing all this kind of evidence of crisis, but for whatever reason that scientific discourse was not breaking through into a cultural sphere, so they came to us and we, over the past couple years, have been working on a way to cross-pollinate. So a power of theater in that regard that we're enjoying is thinking of theater not necessarily as a discursive or didactic medium, but one in which we can bring together people from different disciplines at every stage of the creative process, so some of the things that playwrights working on this commission program are able to do that we wouldn't be able to offer without this program where they're able to go out into deep ocean observatories off the coast of Cape Cod or spend a week living in the Arnold Arboretum and Jamaica Plain, so bringing scientists on as creative collaborators rather than just subjects or people whose research we regard as primary sources has been a really interesting source of burgeoning and abundance for us. Any other? Yeah, and I love that, and thank you for sharing that. I think that, yeah, when you say that, it's really exciting to me because I feel like with the work that we do in Superhero Clubhouse, we talk a lot about how the act of making theater is a model for how society could be, can be. And therefore I think one of the core values we've always had is, yes, interdisciplinary collaboration but also thinking beyond that, how are you making this piece? What is the process by which you're going about doing it? Who's voice is involved? What is the future you want to propose here? I think those are all questions that we hold near and dear and have tried for a long time to develop a set of tools to guide and express, and I was saying to someone earlier we were chatting how exciting it is to me nowadays to try to empower more people to be part of the creative process, to people who are not artists or don't identify as artists, people who don't identify even as scientists or anything just to like, because I think that the process of making a piece of theater together for a group of people is such an important thing and it teaches you so much and it ignites so much, there's so much possibility in it in terms of world building and yeah, so I love what you shared. I want to ask about outside the U.S. What trends or how does it even sound to, two of you in particular, listening to the idea of centrality of theater as a tool or in this, in our work in this circle, we're using theater as a tool. How does it sound or how does it play out in outside the U.S. in other contexts? I can give you one, this one example. We have a festival and conference, Crossing Boundaries in. Or could you speak a little louder? Okay, we have a Crossing Boundaries Festival and conference which is organized in Ethiopia Adi Sababa. And the first was in 2015 and we started organizing the second edition of the Crossing Boundaries Festival this year at the beginning of this year, but it didn't happen. It was the team was on performance, climate change and human condition. It doesn't happen because of there was a set of emergency in Ethiopia and lack of funding and also very few number of applications because the climate change is not familiar, especially in Ethiopia and in some parts of Africa. We are the people who are the most affected by climate change, for example, in Ethiopia, drought, deforestation is very common. We know climate change is affecting us, but theater is not acting towards creating awareness. I've been in theater profession for the last 10 years or more, but I have never seen any play written or produced on climate change. So I was wondering why I always ask myself, why is theater reluctant to engage itself to the most important question of our time? So this is the reality that we have now in Africa. In Crossing Boundaries, we have only, in the previous festival we have 11 countries participating in the festival. There was different issues, but this time we have applicants from five countries from South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, but none from Ethiopia, which is organized in country. And we were asking people, we made it public. We made the call public and we contacted the theater professionals to take part in the festival. But most people think, especially in Ethiopia, climate change is a Western issue or it's a luxury. And most of our plays, I think, Robert has familiar, most of our plays in theater productions are on human relationships and family, love, and most of them are romantic comedies. We don't write and engage our audiences in the most important question of our time. I think there are, the challenge really if we speak about this internationally is that we call different things theater. Go for it, say more. And whereas if you're talking about industry, they call the same thing industry everywhere. So the idea of theater about climate change is kind of alien because, not because of any other reason, except that it's the framing that is a bit alien, I think, to what theater in India means. And for instance, a good example would be, there is a Ramayana which is performed over a month, which is an epic, but it's a modern thing. It's not like some kind of religious thing. It's a modern thing. It's like Muslims play Hindu gods and it's all of that. And for that one month, the people who are performing that, they are treated as gods, but they're smoking and they're coming back and they're performing. But this performance travels across one of them. There are many such performances. One of the performances of this epic, it travels across six villages in East India and it maps essentially harvest. It is like site specific for 1,000 years. When they cross the ocean in the epic, they cross the river and the entire village, all the villages move. So essentially if I go to your village, I'll stay in your house and then we'll go to her village and we'll stay, it's like that. So within that narrative, there is environment, there is mythology, there is war, it's together. I think part of the challenge today is that institutions that want to fund climate change work want artists to make stuff in silos, which is just very counter-intuitive to what people work in. And of course it's language, the application, everything is in English, whereas all these performances are not in English. So there is a rush to ask people to make work on climate change because it's urgent, but there's no urgency to go and watch what exists. I think, yeah, that's what I have to say. Thank you. Okay, so I think that there's also some value maybe in thinking about widening, when you say this group that I've been a part of that's met a couple of times now in New York City of New York City artists, and actually not just New York City artists of various kinds of performance artists, we call ourselves climate lens, because we wanted to propose this idea that because climate is now our reality that we should be making work, or we should think about making work through the lens of climate rather than about it. Because that is perhaps something that's more inclusive. What is a love story through the climate lens? What is a family drama through the climate lens? What is a movie, what have you? If you talk to, you know later, she'll have some great examples for you of what I mean. Yeah, that's all I wanted to say. Through it rather than about it, go ahead. Yeah, I wanted to echo both of those things since in a way that I think the key for me or where I see the change happening to really towards theater for climate change is that everyday thing is to, the remithologization, what's the word? Like remithesize the consciousness, you know? And so like read, so take the things that are already existing and listen to them and see how pilgrimage theater is working and what it does and if we absorb what is around us and we respect it, then we love it. And you know, those things instead of like sort of trying to reinvent the wheel which I noticed that is a lot of what's happening. I mean, I write sci-fi as well and a lot of that happens to be about proposing ideal versions of a future. But I think there's a link missing or perhaps that's what I feel of bringing back the myths and re-enchanting sort of that consciousness and using animals, of course, as Yuna has said, immigrants identify with the tales of animals. And so using these things that are our entry points to tell our stories but with the lens of climate change. Alison, you have a... Yeah, I'm in here, here at what everybody says. And I think one of the things, we have to make the lens so wide and I do think when you first asked the question about what's burgeoning, I think one of the most exciting things for me is to look at the way not finally, but finally more the activities and the challenges of social justice and environmental justice are the same thing. And so much of it comes from the cultural structures created by white supremacy and the requirement of othering that has become so central. I can only speak to white America because that's what I am a part of. And if you look at the history of the environmental movement, it was a deeply racist, deeply white supremacist thing. So I think in the spirit of what a lot of people have been saying, we need to create lots of work about climate change. We also need to widen the lens in our love stories and we also need to look at everything that already exists and say everything that ever existed has been within a climate and it's all sitting there in the language of whatever playwright. And a lot of it is just pulling it out so that reminding people that whatever othering we have fallen for never was true and it doesn't ever have to be true. And a lot of that is there's a thing we do at OSF we call Green Turgy. Amritha Ramanan and I talk about it a lot is we do Shakespeare plays and we do a lot of other plays too, but in every play, every play takes place in a context and environment. And I do think a lot of it is simply getting used to the language. When we hear the phrase climate change in a play now, there are a lot of people who they just go on their own journey, right? And they create this imagined whatever it is in their minds because climate change has become so political and so culturally othered. In the same way phrases like white supremacy, people go on their own journeys. The more often we put these words in our mouths and in the mouths of our characters, the more comfortable our audiences will be to go along on the journey of us, of making these connections between all these things. So it's create the art and make the language about the art as all inclusive as possible. And so we don't, I'm very excited about creating a wide hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of plays about climate change, the environment, but I'm also excited by the thousands and millions of plays that are produced everywhere that already exist and that we can tell whether it's the school children who are doing Alice in Wonderland. Let's talk about this in terms of this wider world that they were operating in. So we have much more power, I think, that we know we do. Good. Yeah, we'll go here and then here. Yeah, and I think something that is really exciting to think about battling as we undertake those initiatives is acknowledging that the theater has historically often been an ideal instrument of exclusion, both socially and imaginatively. Like I think it's interesting to be having this convening in a black box because I think the theater has historically trained us en masse to exclude non-human life from our own imaginations. And I think thinking about going back to these texts and structures in search of those other voices is a really exciting idea. Alyssa, you had a thought on that. I've found two strategies really helpful in the classroom, the college classroom with students doing workshops. And one is to actually start with a narrative they know fairy tales are easiest for them, but it can be many other things. And it kinda points out to them what they don't know but desperately want to about climate because as they start to flesh out the three-dimensionality of the story or look at the ways in which it's exclusionary and they need to adapt it for today's world or tomorrow's future, they are encouraged to inquire more deeply than adapting science articles and books. I work with the Sixth Extinction, for example, and they do pieces and our warm-up reminded me of it because I remember a couple of students working with the essay that's about bats and they had the entire audience watch it by turning around and folding forward and looking upside down at what was taking place on stage rather than trying to merely anthropomorphize the bats, right? It was trying to say, you know, how do you encourage a different way of looking and put that responsibility on the humans? So those are just two anecdotes, but one layer I wanted to add that complements a lot of what's been brought up is how do we bring humor into all this? It's both a trend but also something I think that can be a liability in that it seems to rub shoulders with hypocrisy and complicity. And I feel like that can be in a productive way. Is it appropriate? Is the name of the short piece from Climate Change to the Interaction? I'm trying to remember. Shantel talked about it at the start of today. What is it? Appreciation, thank you, thank you. I've forgotten. But something where you kind of, you know, steer into the skid of how ridiculously complicit we are in all of this. And then what do you do though with that uncomfortable laughter? That's something I'm curious about and I'm wondering if any of you have had experiences with either productive or prohibitive laughter. I guess we'll talk. What are you sitting on, Jessica? I mean, just different things. And like, so I don't, although I agree about the notion of framing in terms of theater that like, you know, you don't necessarily need a frame of theater. You know, I suppose I'm not in the theater scene. So, but you know, similarly like when I was in the Marshall Islands, there was a women's meeting and some women from a group, some elder women, they were irradiated in the 1954 Bravo test by the U.S. and they just stood up and did a piece, I guess we could frame it as a term of poetry, about climate change. But they're also most familiar with the U.S. military. And I think it's important to historicize climate change and the rhetorics that we use and thinking about the way that the military and multinational corporations have created certain languages of complicity, of vigilance, of neoliberal responsibilities. And so I think that like a number of the anxieties I was just kind of hearing around and different frames actually are really manufactured and I am interested in historicizing those. And I think it goes back to what you were saying in terms of colonial, neo-colonial, white supremacist, patriarchal, gender violence and violence against indigenous and other persons and spaces. And so those are just the things that I was thinking about. Like how do we decolonize our rhetoric as part of this? This is a bit of a segue then and it bounces right off of that. Earlier I was hearing a great deal or some, and it's echoed again here, about the imbalance in terms of resources, money, power, even the language has created a kind of barrier, intentional barrier it sounds like in this work. And I wonder if we could spend a minute thinking about where our richness is. So if these are deficits, like we don't have the money and we don't have the political power and in some ways the language is locking us into frames that we reject. What are our riches? Where are we strong? You mentioned a lot of local, hyper-local activity. And in many ways, climate is experienced locally, is more viscerally than globally. What might be some riches that you could say, well, this is what makes me hopeful or this is where we might turn? Yeah, right? I'm just gonna try to, as you were speaking, I was thinking of a performance which I had seen in a Buddhist monastery, a Tibetan performance. And I was thinking that it was so provocative because this work actually doesn't need a lot of money. Right. A certain kind of performance because when we are talking about a dramaturgy which is connected to the environment, it doesn't necessarily need a lot of stuff. And I think that's the strength of some of the best work that I've seen, at least in my little experience. The other thing is that when the dramaturgy is pitched, in the way environment is, environment is already historical and mythological. It's already present in a history. Hence, it doesn't necessarily need to be introduced as a new character if you see what I mean. So it's in a way, if the overall dramaturgy of space, of time, of light, and the story is in union, then the work becomes automatically very powerful without, again, it needing very many twists and turns. So I think the dramaturgy and the thing about material are both in favor of this work when done in a certain way. Great. Anyone else have a sense of a response even to that? Yeah, Roberta. I have, I know you asked us to think of where the abundance lies and I struggle sometimes. Yeah, go ahead, say more, say more. I, we are, and Yuna actually articulated this in a way that has stuck with me at gathering. We are beings in our environment that's, it's happening now, it's not a gonna or has. So this is true and the acknowledgement of that and using, as Lenny was saying, a different lens could open pathways to giving others this sense we have that we're integrated. With the environment, I'm not saying this very well, but what I struggle with is this notion of the local experience and the one-on-one introduction in relationship to, and we were talking about this, tears of impact. And this is where. Can you talk about those tears for a second because we had that conversation outside of this room? We did. We'll bring it in. And so what I struggle with is I see burgeoning work, I see a range of work from SpongeBob's, the musical, you know, the ecological, the Broadway, you know, climate change play to performance art and visual arts and songs. And so I see a huge spectrum of work being done locally and globally and a desire to connect to see that work and to support that work, the work of artists. But it's the infrastructure and the concentric circles that I struggle with. Like how then, if we were going to model, how then does that impact the institutions within which artists are working, the communities within which work is being presented and then the policies and the policy makers and these larger global meta phenomenon. And I'm struggle, what I struggle with in the reality and describing the reality is, yes, and a strength is that the field is burgeoning, that the enthusiasm is growing, that things are becoming more normal, that it can be present in the world and seen and not, and received. But to me, I'm worried that it's, that what we're struggling with is wanting to have an impact that's greater at these other tiers. Yeah. So I have a question and Allison, did you have a comment or did the mic just end up in your hand? Yeah, just real quick. I do, following up on you were saying in terms of what we have, we do have the power to model collective will, right? And that's so incredibly important. And I don't think that theater necessarily puts that out into the world, that that's what we do. And the more we can do that, the better. But I do think we can also look at changing our internal practice. There is, I mean, I'm speaking from the regional theater model, there is nothing less democratic in the world than a regional theater rehearsal room, right? I mean, that shit's crazy. And so I think we need to use what our belief in collective will also to go up against the gatekeepers of these large cultural institutions. The amount of resources that is controlled by large cultural institutions in this country, specifically, is enormous. And the power they have over determining the fate of arts in our country is wrong as well-minded as so many people are in doing this work. And it's like we need to, I'm saying this at one of the biggest theaters in the country, we need to like have sit-ins in our artistic director's offices and say, no, I'm not going home until you do this play or you undertake this program. And I know the realities that we all face in terms of all arts organizations are incredibly finance-strapped. But really, what does it all matter? Like, you know, if we can't agree on one thing, like we shouldn't destroy the earth and every living thing or those living things that can't survive these changing conditions. I do think we have to draw a line in the sand and we have to put our bodies in the way and we have to put our jobs in the way. And that's easier for me to say. And I'm not asking everybody to do that, but I do think there are people who can actually embody the collective will within institutions. What's exciting to me in general, and maybe that's what's the strength, right, is that there's something exciting about it, is not so much that let's get in those artistic director's rooms and get, because I hear that from other pockets of what's happening in the theater when it comes to representation, right? We're not gonna do this until you put women on stage. We're not gonna do this until you put Latinos on. And that's fine and well, and that's part of what it is. But what's exciting to me, and I think our strength really lie if we're caring about this, is to do the rebellious act and the truly rebellious act, you know, to be site-specific, to put it in the places, to do pilgrimage theater, to take people through the journeys so that it's not dependent on these things. Of course, it's easier said than done and it's idealistic and I don't know the solution. That's why I'm here. But the hoping, the thinking about it, and the believing in it, that truly the true believing in it is the same thing that makes me believe that obviously the planet is fine without us and that if it wipes us out it's still gonna, so there's this regenerative model that nature is giving us, that we can apply to the arts, that we're not mimicking nature in how we're creating the arts, we're mimicking our social structures and that's what I think is very different about trying to make theater for climate change is like let's look at what's already in nature and mimic that and see what happens. I mean, it could fail, but. Nick, go ahead. On the note of mimicry, I think one of theater's greatest strengths in my mind is the ways in which as a process it models what we need to be doing more broadly, so like systems thinking, for example, is something I have to introduce to my students and there are so many people, subscribers often included, who come to the play and they think like that's it, you know, and as a dramaturg, I talk a lot with playwrights and students about how, yeah, the audience's experience, the first impression is the thing, but more and more I'm starting to try to think beyond that and models like the Ecoside Casebook and other things that have been published around, workshop-based performance and concern with climate change, it makes me think about transparency about the process, that that is something that theater has as a strength and then this is really simplistic, but the fact that we repeat what we do, you know, if you write a play, you're more often than not very hopeful that it will get repeated again and again, so when you put on a Shakespeare play, when you make a change from the, you know, so-called traditional framework, people will sit up and notice and is there something innovative we can do about the fact that a play gets repeated or could you move an art visual-based installation from place to place and how does that change it and all these different things we can do with materiality? In the US, I just want to call into the room a project called Cry You One, which I think some of you have seen or you know about and we may talk about at some point in this, but it's a New Orleans-based project around Cry You One, an ensemble-created piece that was about the loss of coastal land. Jessica, you had a response. Oh, no, I was just going to say, like, in speaking about, you know, making things sensible to people and again, you know, not having the kind of theater background like when I remember, you know, speaking in front of the Department of Defense about nuclear issues and people were just talking about nuclear issues, nuclear issues, right? And I brought up, you know, some of the connections and narratives between the issues in the Marshall Islands and, you know, what we had been talking about in terms of bridging nuclear weapons testing and climate change and I was actually just talking to the Executive Director of the Marshalls Educational Initiative and she was like, yeah, if you remember, you know, a lot of the people from DOD were just like, we had no idea that these connections were even made. So I think even like, it's not simple to get in the door in there and it's not simple to have those kind of conversations but like, you know, if you, I think too, like we need to have keywords in the language but I also think presenting something in a way where like DOD people will just kind of listen and now that, you know, they recently put a report about climate change and nuclear weapons testing, right? Linking these things. So it was like, however many years ago that was, people weren't really thinking, you know, I'm not saying it was like me that did it but I think it was like those reiterated conversations, you know what I mean with like people who don't, yeah, just kind of breaking down those boundaries too and that to me, what I'm hearing is like that is also a kind of theatrical endeavor and that's just what I wanted to say. And we're gonna open the circle out here in just one second but what I am hearing underneath this is a couple of changes and I just wanna see if you would agree with me. In one area, I hear that theater practice is actually, it can be and maybe is evolving in certain ways, both individual practice but also the habits of institutions are being, can be evolved in the US and perhaps there's some kind of evolution that can take place in other contexts. I'm most familiar with the US one but keep bringing your own context to the fore if you're not in the US context so that there's the possibility of changing both individual practice and then institutional practice. And then there's also this change of who the audience is. You're talking about the audience, the people who are participating are different than what the regional theater audience perceives it is perceived to be and the DOD audience is a different audience and perhaps there's something to do about a head tilt around well if we're making theater for whom not just toward what end and the for whom question and then leads to things like pilgrimage or it leads to other, you know even what OSF has done in terms of its audience. So are these areas of potential or progress or motion at any rate that you're seeing both practice and then for whom in terms of theater? Is that, am I hearing that properly? Or does that not sound like anything you're related to? I'm gonna stop talking but I was on a panel for NIFA unsurprisingly and I mean just because power, you know, even great organizations, we all depend on each other to make decisions about how we fund and what artists we value. And the conversation around community involvement and community involvement not just in terms of participating in the art in a moment but actively participating in the devising of work is completely different from the conversation that was happening 20 years ago among organizations that are funded by folks like NIFA and NIFA I think is an extraordinary organization and is actually out front of the field. That's the New England foundation for the arts for people who don't know about it. And so that's awesome. We're gonna break this circle open now. So if you wanna just take your seats, we can leave the chairs here and I'll continue to facilitate just so that there's somebody and you don't have to worry about it. If you're moved to chime in, just raise your hand and I'll keep a note of people in the order that I see them but sometimes the conversation will be more eruptive than that and you saw it happen even in this circle. And I wanna make a welcome and a kind of acknowledgement of the people who are watching on what is the third circle. So if there's anyone who's watching the live stream live, the Twitter hashtag is, sorry, can't read it, I don't have my theater and climate change. Theater is an REI, I imagine. Yeah, theater and climate change. So feel free to tweet your questions in and someone will be monitoring the hashtag as well or your comments. So you're hearing the beginning of our discussion. Who's sitting with a comment, a response, a question, a challenge to what we've heard so far? So we're gonna use the microphone so that the people on the third circle can hear us. So we'll go here and now I'm still getting names so I'm gonna have to point some here. MJ, I saw your hand and then Peterson. Yeah, could you say your name when you talk just so the people know who you are? Whoops, you didn't want the microphone? Oh no, I was saying, I didn't know her name so I was pointing. Thank you, Teddy. Thank you so much, Jamie. Thank you to everyone. My name is Teddy. Hi, that was so cool and I just want to acknowledge that was really beautiful. Thank you all for being so candid. I, what really struck me prior to this and then during that conversation was the idea of reality and I was also just wanted to welcome in the reality of where we do our work and the reality of that I'm cold right now and I imagine many others are physically cold and so just to bring in that we make a lot of this work in spaces, I come from a regional theater background that are old, that are out of date, that are underfunded, that are energy inefficient and that lack some of the ability to fundraise whether to improve that or the priority of maintaining the work on stage to address really that we empathetically can speak to a lot of the other fields that are coming to the climate change conversations saying yes but this is the way it's always been done and I don't have the ability or the funding or the time to radically rethink the way we make our work in the way we actually impact the environment so that was just one thing I wanted to bring in the idea that we have hot lights in a cold space full of people that in my experience have often been old and out of date so not to throw a problem out without a couple of solutions, I suppose the first is how do we stand behind those organizations, I'm not abandoning them saying you're energy inefficient and therefore worse than the rest of us, how do we invite audiences to welcome and make space for work that is presented outside of those institutions and we can address this is using sunlight, using the field, using the space that we have and doesn't necessarily impact the environment in the same way that these large auditoriums may and then I guess my other idea is how do we as a community really acknowledge that publicly and welcome away in order to take a first step that other fields may be able to follow acknowledging and humbly that we may not have all of the tools to solve all of the problems but that we're engaging in the conversation and welcoming others to sort of help us. Jane? Yes. Great, thank you. MJ? Thank you for that Teddy. Cause the framework that you lay out highlights the ways in which theater institutions are like steering a cruise ship and they can be really slow moving and clunky and then I also think about theater as opposed to other genres as being actually very nimble, I learned, so I wrote a sitcom pilot set in Antarctica that I hoped would be the next Parks and Recreation and while I was working on that, I learned that ABC and NBC both purchased pilots set in Antarctica, one from the creators of New Girl, one from the creators of Bob's Burgers and both of them never ended up going into production and it makes me wanna bang my head against the wall that those stories didn't get to be told on those enormous platforms that network television represent but theater, on the other hand, does have the luxury of a quicker turnaround and we can fill this room several times over with professionals who have been able to successfully create content about climate change and I'm so sorry, I forget your name. Alyssa? Yes. Melissa? Well, Alyssa, I was so appreciative that you brought up the role of humor and I link that back to the spectrum that we set forth to create about hope and despair and the role that humor can play there and I wanna interrogate that further, that's something that I'm really interested in because I also think that humor is a tool for disarming and inviting audience members to come in and to be glad that they're in the room and with such a heady, difficult topic, I think that humor can be a really important tool while also honoring what you said about complicity and hypocrisy and I think there's work to be done in operating with those truths and moving forward with them. Peterson, then we'll go to Yuna and Lydia, can I pull you next, I can feel you have things. I echo what you said about humor, in fact, I think it's essential to bring into this conversation because of how it physically changes our audience's bodies and their brains, I mean, it literally does but what I wanted to ask was a question about the overarching question, what's working and I'm wondering how do we define working and who defines working and how do we assess it? When we ask this very important question, are there some collective aims and goals that we have that we're looking for that we can assess this work to see if it is working and what that means for us? So Yuna, then Lydia, Cicada, how are you doing? I'm gonna come to you just because I wanna get other perspectives from outside the US as well. Thank you, I just thought that that first conversation, the inner circle was incredibly rich and I resonated to so much of it and I guess I kind of wanted to say something about what I was hearing and I wanna take off from Roberta's discussion where she talked about being aware of these pools and pockets of burgeoning activity but then also being concerned and sort of held up around questions of infrastructure, the context and systems within which we sit and which we do our work and I wondered if that, you know, you're talking about a kind of disconnect there and to me that disconnect also mapped onto some of the other things that were said, one was these two accounts of, or two understandings of theater, one of theater, as Lani was saying, an Allison theater as a place of collaboration, consensus, a model for community, for creativity and then what Robert said, which is the history of theater as a apparatus for exclusions of various kinds and I'm thinking that's one of the, that disconnect between two visions of theater but also between certain kinds of activity and then the larger underlying systems that are there and I guess the third conversation mapped onto for me was, I think what you said and I don't know your name yet, yeah about why don't we use the models that are given to us by the more than human world, by nature, to do our work rather than rely on the ones that have been bequeathed to us by the socioeconomic systems within which we operate, to me that's again another version of the same disconnect, you know, one way of doing work versus another system that's forcing us to not do work in that way and so to me what all this means, what this disconnect is really about and I'm gonna use a word that's not a popular word in America or it was a popular word back in the 60s and that's the word ideology, when we talk about the climate lens what we're really talking about is the need for a new ideology and a mobilization around a different set of values and hierarchies or non-hierarchies I should say. We talked about making the lens wider, you know you've got Naomi Klein's fabulous book which the title This Changes Everything, that's a real truthful statement about how we need to understand climate, we have to understand it everywhere and everywhere but ideology includes and this is related to what you were saying about decolonizing, it's not just decolonizing the language, systems is also decolonizing our minds and so the way I've been trying to think about this is to chart a multi-species ideology and anthropocynic ideology, a dis-anthropocentric ideology that just the way we've in our history progressive movements we've had to fight against white supremacy, fight against the patriarchy, the thing to fight against now is anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism and that's ideological and that involves a paradigm shift but then also certain amount of commitment to revolutionary activities. Okay, great, thank you, Lydia and then Elena I see you taking notes would you mind coming in after, and Cichetti would you mind coming in after Lydia? Okay, good, thank you. I can't say that I've formulated any specific thoughts just yet but I'm 100% with you, Luna, that I think that the fundamental thing that has to happen is that we have to completely change our value system and so that's why for me the idea of embracing non-Western worldviews is so incredibly important the idea of dismantling the notion of empire is so important because without it I don't know that we'll actually grasp the necessity of what we need to grasp because of what our values are centered upon so I also thank you, Alison, right? Alison, yeah, yeah, yeah. For talking about decolonizing and on so many levels for everyone it has to happen. I also just think that one of the things that came up too is that there's different types of theater, different forms of theater and just wanna make sure that we're all recognizing that in this room that your theater, your home institution is not someone else's home institution is not the way someone else makes theater with five-year-olds the way someone else makes theater on the corner and the backyard, whatever that is but that all of those different things have different aims and goals and serve different people who have different needs and so likewise thinking about those kinds of models what is the fundamental thing that we all can kind of wrap around if that makes any sense or get behind and so I agree there's like this, what's that fundamental thing because all of us are working in so many different ways. Okay, great, thank you. And then after Elena, I'll go to Marta and then Ramona. Oh, Twitter question, okay, great. So, Cicada. Oh yeah, it's very interesting when you, what's her name again? Yuna. Yuna. And when you bring this team about the ideology because I think it's the most important to discuss now. I don't think it's from the old 60s or 70s but from now because I come from Brazil and when I was preparing myself to come to this meeting my colleagues always asked to me what are you going to do in the US, America now and with that we have in Brazil a political coup against the structural government, democratically elected government and it's a coup that was made by a group of people the rich people and the middle class people who believes in this ideology that came from US for the people there and the idea that what is important for instance about oil, about these oil companies, about all these things and the people ask me what are you going to do there to exclude climate change? Why? No, because we have more urgent things here to discuss, they said to me and I said okay, we have but we have also to discuss this but of course you need to decolonize our mentality and our mentality is always that or we are pro or we are contra US and this ideological mentality that come from US this North epistemological way of thinking and when I'm here, I'm staying I mean thinking about okay, we need to discuss climate change but in Brazil now we have problems with the poor people the people that are the most important victims from this new government that ideologically made a coup in Brazil and these people is suffering now and people has not conditioned to think about the climate change now because they need to think about the price of gas then days ago we have a strike, a big strike about gas and gas is a problem about the gasoline is a problem about the climate change but for the people there, it was terrible because people has nothing to eat sometimes in some place where I live that is far away from the big city the big syndrome, we had very big problem with what's the name, food and gas and et cetera and this is for me what is reality what about what kind of reality we are talking here I think we are talking the reality is very local in a place but in the other side it is very ideological and I think we need to think about this point and we need to think about that all this discussion about climate change to me come from a North ideology I have no lots of people discussing I have no example, of course the only people from Latin America here, from South America here and I hope in three, four, one year we will have more because we need to make a more strong discuss about that in South America but the point is it is or not a North's epistemological point of view yeah, yeah something that we also heard in the circle and just to call out that there is a kind of just a privilege or kind of talk about white supremacy Allison but there is a frame here that is really specific and not necessarily global in terms of even this circle and so to keep calling those differences into the room don't sit out simply because it doesn't include you we want to make a space that actually includes so break into it in that way Elena okay so I was trying to gather my words I feel like I'm really learning a lot here and then the few people that I've talked to so far just really acknowledging and claiming my own artistic identity I guess and so some of the things that stuck out to me was this need to figure out how the framework can be indigenized I guess because I think we talk a lot about decolonizing but for me and the work that I do and also because I'm a mom and if you say don't do something then they're gonna do it right and so I think focusing on indigenizing rather than thinking of something that you don't want to focus on and I think for me with some of the work that I do and I think it happens in theater as well but kind of the retraumatizing methods that we use from the Western standpoint so when we talk about the trauma-informed care and you know these ACES scores and all these things so I'm explaining from a public health standpoint right now that we kind of retraumatize people by focusing on the negative and expressing our ideas of what will happen so I did an activity in one of my classes, I have my master in public health but I did an activity where they told us to make this imaginary line, asked us a series of questions and if you had experienced any of those things you take steps backwards but if you have or if you have not then you walk forward and almost every person in my class was, we call them washiichu but like the white descent they were way above the line and I was myself and another native student in my class or indigenous student, we were behind the line and I think that was the first time which I feel like I've worked through a lot of that stuff like the trauma that I've gone through in my life but it retraumatized me and I remember crying and so I didn't even know where it came from so I think when we think about theater instead of thinking of the negative parts of what Western theater has taught, I think we need to take it into an indigenous standpoint and the word that comes to me is a word that is with my people and I've heard it a bunch of times in this room but it's called midakuyayoyashi which means we're all related and it's not just, sorry guys, I'm getting nervous. That's okay. But it's not just us and other people that we're related to but it's like we're related to the ground, we're related to the wind, we're related to the water, we're related to and we understand so like when we eat food we put it out, we put some food out for all of our relatives and I remember my little girl because I didn't understand it either and my little girl was like I went and checked it, mom, mom and it was still there, the food is still there and at the time we were living in an apartment and I was like I don't know, they must not have been hungry because I didn't know how to explain it then she asked one of her grandmas and they were like so how it works and this is teachings from an elder and she said that every single thing in this world has an aura or an entity or a spirit and so when we place out food we don't just place it out for the animals, we place it out for the spirits, we place it out for the insects, we place it out and so the spirits, when we say we're feeding our ancestors they're eating off of that aura and that spirit of the food that we're offering because our prayers were put into that and if we're living in the country then the animals will come eat it. So everything is directly connected in that way and I think when we think about theater we really do need to look at an indigenous standpoint and we also need to understand that we're all related and we need to quit and we all have different experiences, we have different walks of life, different paths that we've gone through and it was strategically meant for us to feel disconnected from each other and so one thing I've learned really kind of the hard way is that nobody's trauma is worse than anybody else's. Every single group of people have gone through some kind of trauma and once we realize that we're all connected and stop trying to say who has the worst pain or who's worse off then we can really build really good things together and I think humor, oh my gosh, definitely humor. I think that for us we believe that laughter is the best medicine so anywhere that we can put it into the work that we do it's so important and then the last comment is that I think, I lost my place. But anyway, so I think, yeah, thank you for calling on me. Marta, I'm gonna take the Twitter question first and then come to you, is that okay? Great, so Ramona is monitoring the Twitter feed and so go ahead. Yeah, so this is from Kristin Ahern and she says, going off of institutions doing things, how we've always done things, where did design and production fit? How can performances happen in a way that does not minimize the role of designers as collaborators but enables us to do art in a more climate safe way? There's a lot of talk about site-specific work and a feeling of minimizing elements of design as the way to make theater in a more sustainable way. Can there be a solution that is inclusive of designers rather than exclusive? Good. Marta, have we moved past your thought? Yeah. Okay, good. Shantel, I'm gonna pull on you for a second. So in putting this together, what are you sitting with thus far in the conversation? I'm hearing a lot of desire to have a multiplicity of practices and ways of looking at theater exist while at the same time lifting everybody. So it sounds to me like it's not about, like although there are certain basic things, fundamental things, maybe ideological things, we maybe need to agree upon. I feel like the richness in this group and in the field in general is to let all of these different ways of doing theaters exist at the same time because they come from different people, different traditions and they reach different audiences who have different needs. And I think I like to be reminded of that because sometimes it's easy to want to, like I get really upset in the world in general when people make blanket statements, like everybody has to do this. Well, maybe not. Maybe if you live in the Arctic, you can't eat vegetables all the time. You can't be vegetarian. You have to take the context into consideration. So I'm liking being reminded that there are different ways of doing something that are all valid and needed and need to be equally supported. Yes, Marta. And then I wish I could come back to you for a question. Sorry, I felt deeply responsible to that person that asked that one question. So I just want to just quickly say to that, yes, absolutely incorporate the designers and the wherever you guys are is essential. And I just, I missed my plane very quickly. I'm very slowly actually. When I ran into this person who was working on packaging and said that there are 84,000 people that meet in a convention annually of all about natural foods and that they don't know about good packaging. And I keep thinking about how can we, sustainable packaging, how can we infiltrate all these people in this room into other arenas to really move, have a kind of collective impact happening. And I just want to quickly say, this is such a great gathering and I'm so grateful to be here. And my brain is going, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. So it's very hard to make this calm and to come out one word at a time. Okay, so first thing, diversity. I think that a lot of us, those of us who are raised in monotheistic traditions have a hard time that we don't think about not finding, coming up with the one truth. And there are many truths and I don't know if it's true but I think that in polytheistic or philosophical traditions like Buddhism, it's easier to think about multiple truths happening simultaneously, all valid and helpful for given situations. I think we have to move from a mechanistic view of the universe that we inherited from a lot of scientists and others to a more biological or a biogeochemical view of our world. And so that we can really think about moving like water rather than logic models as we try to move forward and as we come to a rock or whatever that we just go around it or under it or just keep on moving and flowing it through time. I think that those of you who have talked about thinking about nature as opposed to other models is just spot on, I agree so much. And I think maybe can we, I like to think what I say ecosystemically and I think about the different disciplines that we have, Allison has heard this before in Chantal, of if artists and scientists and urban planners and whatever, we're all different species and we have different languages and different fashions and different ideas of what's on time or not and different acronyms and absolutely different ways of moving but they're very similar and we do talk to each other but they're different. And we really have to be able to map a kind of ecosystem of change. Like how does change really happen among all of these disciplines? How can we all come together and break our isolation to make that happen? Where is the role of the arts? At what junctures are the arts really, really critical to help move things along? And at what points? Not, there's a very nationalistic joke that I hope I don't offend anybody. I'm one of these traditions so I'm offending myself but it's heaven is where the Italians are the cooks, the French are the lovers, the British make the roads and the Germans make the cars. Hell is where the British cook the food, the Germans are the lovers, the Italians make the roads and the French make the, no French make the cars, sorry. Anyway, I screwed it up but you have that idea, right? We all have our incredible strengths and we wanna make sure that we know where our riches and how can we all put those riches in those great places. I'm closing now, here are my notes here. I think that also for thinking about the audience is critical, essential, absolutely essential and they're all different. And I think if those of you may know about the six Americas that has come out of the Yale Forestry School and the George Washington, George Mason University about climate change. And there are six different demographics that came up out of the survey that was started in 2009 and it's done every six to 18 months. I can't remember since. And it's looking at Americans from the most alarm to the most dismissive in terms of climate change and what are their characteristics. And I think that if we can think about creating work with and for people, I think it can be much easier because if you speak Chinese to someone who understands only French, it's not as useful as if you can find some kind of estuary, some kind of place where different people can come together and commune in some sort of way. So that's all. Great. So I just, I'm gonna take one more comment because I said that I was coming back to you and then we're out of time for this session and we go to a break next, is that what happens? Yeah, okay, so we'll do one more but then we're gonna go to a break and keep the conversation going in the break if there's something that is sitting on your head just keep speaking it into the space. So I had a specific question for you since you had brought it up and it relates to Ramona's, the Twitter question. In the world that you're talking about in terms of the moving month-long pageant play, what is the role of design there? Design is very much embedded in the story itself. You see, so it's very important that someone crosses a water body and go elsewhere in the story. And hence in this case, in these villages there is a river, so one crosses the river. Whereas in a different part of the country where it's in the hills, they would have some other way of crossing it. And I mean, there is a version of the Ramayana where Ram, the God, himself is Muslim. So it's a Muslim Ramayana. So again, design changes because then that kind of iconography comes into it but it's to do with nature essentially. And so the design is designing what's the experience into what's already there rather than building things. Building and the environment is completely inside the design. Yeah, I had a feeling that was true for what you were saying. All right, let's take the break. Yeah, she did, she made it, everybody heard it. Good, so let's take the break and we'll be back and we'll do this format. Very well done for the first time of a circle, you guys. That actually worked quite well, so thank you. Yeah.