 So, welcome everybody to the Marker Segal Center here at Prelude and this is one of the, I think, important sessions about the civic engagement and the big question of what to do in the days where we live now and the times we do now. So, we're going to be here at the single thought that perhaps it is time to go back to basics and we think also what artists are doing and how to engage and that perhaps as much as politicians as we accused them have left people behind, workers, families, the everyday American, the real American, whatever that also is and that perhaps it is also time to re-engage in a very basic, simple way and we are a public university so we think there's a public theater and there's a big old tradition of engaging with the public in public spaces and in Europe especially there's a big tradition that public spaces and streets at the parks belong to the people and you don't need permissions, you don't need a medical sponsor or a chemical bank or a visa or master cutters and people can do things on the streets and they're also perhaps a bit lost but there are movements Friday for future movement, there's a movement in Germany and France that people be spontaneously on Thursday evenings in parks bring their drink and talk to each other instead of mediate the discussions through television and others and they think that or we think the time right now where we think there are dangerous times and sometimes we'll talk about Hannah Arendt and you know the significance of what free speech means and the freedom of gathering and then perhaps we should also try to get out of the institutions where we are in, maybe get out of the way to see people just as audiences as in a way as politicians shouldn't just see people as voters but to have a dialogue or to create a space for dialogue and there are also public spaces and they are not fully used and I think there's a lot of creative potential, I think there's also a hunger and there is also an urgency that we re-engage and wake up and understand that democracy is not just a consumer democracy it's actually a way to participate and to get people engaged in neighborhoods and perhaps this project which we are thinking of could be working, we don't know it's something we would like to find out, get your feedback but we think it's a serious proposal, we really want to engage, we really want to invest time, some of the resources and so Senaz who has been a curator also, she liked the idea of the project so she has been working a bit with ASTM Research and I would like to ask you to share your thoughts and then maybe we come together in a small circle and maybe discuss or think what this could mean, we will see this as a founding moment of that movement and see if it will get traction or not but I think we only can do something in life and something in our specific moments and engage with something so this is a contribution that we will try to do, we have to try many many things and it will work, some won't work, nobody will fully know but I think it's important to really engage and this would be an engagement of the Seagull Center and I'll see you soon, please Seagulls. Hi, this is going to feel a lot more formal for a moment than it finally will be because the practice behind the podium and so I'm going to keep it but it's only a brief little thing that I want to, oh, Ellie and Drew, excellent, join us, please have a snack, also I want to know that any time you feel the desire come by, get a snack, so come through. Yes, great, awesome. So I know most of you and those who I don't know, I look forward to getting to know by the end of this evening. So Hannah Arendt, I had no idea who she was until Frank brought her up which is actually, it's a point with most of the people that I researched for this talk, which is a three to five minute talk. But this is all my research, I've got a lot of articles and I'm going to leave it right here in case you at some point want to limit it. So Frank came to me with this idea and there was just something about it that I feel like I was on the same level with you in that moment where it was, I don't know what we need to do but I know we both wanted to move towards something. And so we started to just meet and work on it, I think is the first step towards a lot of, that's the way my artistic process definitely works which is my essential thing that I do, is oh, just get together and figure it out. And so that's kind of what we are doing. So welcome to the inaugural public assembly for the public parks project, which is a new initiative, a new public laboratory devoted to civic engagement through theater performance research on the aesthetic and the political. Our first idea is to organize speeches, public dialogues, storytelling, discourses, music in all 140 parks in New York City. Now that sounds pretty ambitious but I really think that the idea is feasible. And if we look at some of the archives for the public parks, if you can find these online, they really speak to what happens when you get a group of people in a public space you have in congregate. Our lives are increasingly privatized and in spite of or possibly because of social media, actual physical spaces of ritual and practice, shared practice and shared inquiry are disappearing. Yet there is this need, this desire and I can feel it with myself, my friends Drew came over a few, like a month ago, we had a salon sort of thing where we sat down and we were like we have to start talking to each other or nothing's going to change. But anyway we need to remain, people still desire to come together face to face and have conversations towards understanding common good, whatever that might mean. I mean it in the most general way at this point. Questions where do we all stand? What do we care about? How are we connected? And we want to engage these public parks as spaces of discourse and we also need to give structure to that discourse as we open them up for human congregation. Alan Gansburg. He's not the only one but he definitely has a photo in there. So I did, as I said, a lot of research for this and someone I stumbled across and a lot of these names are new to me but definitely not new to other people, so forgive me. But German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, he brought, he did a lot of work on the public sphere, which is, again you may already know this, but a social area where individuals come together freely to discuss and identify problems and through discussion, influence, political action. His idea was that by having private individuals and government authorities, by finding a place between private individuals and government authorities where people could debate public matters, this could serve as a sort of counterweight to political authority. That being said, his conception of the public sphere is no longer adequate for the critiques of the limits of actual existing democracy in late capitalist societies, which is something that Nancy Fraser brings up, she's a critical theorist and a feminist, in her, it's a very long, dense article that you can find in there. And she counters that an adequate conception of the public sphere requires the elimination of social inequality and that multiplicity of spheres is preferable to a single public sphere. So that is what we are doing, this 140 parks, this idea of multiplicity is creating a regularly held multi-space engagement where different publics can sit together and engage in explorative conversations. The idea being that these networks that are many will intersect and like a labyrinth, this is a multi-curial labyrinth, which is more like a maze and less like a labyrinth. It has many, many entrances, many pathways, multiple chains, it's open-ended and you can enter it from many different ways, it's like a hypertext. You'll find that article in there too. So this made me think about how important it is for us to be thinking about local organizing over national leadership at this moment in time. So much can happen through decentralized power as evidence from Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, and Greta Thunberg. So she is proof that one 16-year-old person can turn the tide of human consciousness on the unfolding climate crisis. Historically, another inspiration, which was new to me but shouldn't have been new to me, is Joseph Boyce, a German artist and a member of Fluxus who I thought he was pretty cool. He held open public debates on a very wide variety of subjects including political, environmental, social, and long-term cultural trends. And he introduced this idea of the social sculpture to mean human activity as a work of art that strives to structure and shape society or the environment using language, thoughts, actions, objects. He created the term to embody his understanding of the arts potential to transform human society. So he also has an incredible yellow vest and it has a fur in the pocket. That will come up later. So we are now in the moment of working on the concept and we want your advice as our theater community, as artists, collaborators, fellow citizens. We want to try to do something small that maybe gets bigger. And this is just the beginning. And another idea we have is to say maybe there are these cultural producers and we train them in sessions to take on the work of helping us to implement multiple events in multiple parks. And maybe there are a hundred of them. And maybe it is like chain casting where we find a hundred people that in terms of race, age, gender identity represent the makeup of New York City. So we are also thinking about inclusion and representation because we can't talk about inclusion and we have to practice it. So that is also in our minds. And maybe we know we want to find some kind of structure, some kind of formal structure. Maybe these events happen on Fridays for Future, on weekends. We are not really sure what the best ideas are at this point. We just have some of them. And so basically at this point the speech is done. We can go to, yes, this is, oh, so also Kristen Tippett has this podcast called, well, On Being, but she has a new one, Civil Conversations. A Civil Conversations Project and Jonathan Rousan who is an applied philosopher was on it. And he said this and I just like, I wrote it down immediately. Because I think that this is kind of, what he's saying is kind of what discourse can do in these public parks. So yeah, so our question is, what ideas do you have that you'd like to contribute? What is important for us to be thinking about as we move forward? What excites you? How might you want to be involved? Let's start talking. So I think if we could just like take our chairs. And you should come down here to Jackie, you too. Jump in, jump on down. You can grab my shoes. You can just like, you know, we can pass a couple out to like this area. And then as you're next to somebody who has a microphone or needs a microphone, feel free to jump in. I'll give you a little rundown. Okay, so I guess the first question. And if someone eventually, if you don't want to talk in the microphone, I completely understand that. If you will, it would be wonderful so that we can record it and I can write it out later. But I guess the first question is like, what intrigues you or what do you find useful or compelling about this seed of an idea? Next Saturday is Art in Odd Places, which I was supposed to be part of. And what they're doing is going up and down 14th Street, which performance art. I was going to go as the invisible man with a butterfly and a bunch of children behind me with flapping their wings, thinking that we were going to be butterflies, which is on the metaphor of a butterfly. Flapping its wings can change the direction of a storm and even create a storm. But I'm just saying, so there are things happening. I grew up in New York and Union Square is notorious for a place that is a social sculpture in the metaphor of Joseph Boyce. And that's something that happens with an audience and without an audience, but there is a history of people coming together in that one specific park. And that's why it got the name Union Square is because the unions were started there. Emma Goldman used to speak there all the time. There's a whole series of things that I'm aware of that might be of interest to this, but we're not alone in that, but I like your idea. It just has to be more unique in some ways and yet be something that engages people. Just a thought. Hello. Yeah, well, the thing that popped into my mind as you were, as you introduced this, and thank you for it, is the fact that, I don't know, I guess my mind just jumped to it could be anything. And I think that there's so much work that is in public spaces that, to me, sits under the umbrella of this is work in a public space. And so there seem to be a lot of characteristics that that work can take on, whatever that is and whatever that has been for the last, I'll just say five decades, just because I feel like that's where a lot of the work that I've engaged with was created between New York City, where I've been for almost 16 years, and Washington, D.C., where I was born, is that it has needed to engage safely with the public. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is that my mind is kind of first just now because I'm like, it could be so many things. I guess I hear work in public spaces and my mind just goes to a certain color palette. It goes to a certain type of art. I also do performance art and so it is definitely a haven for performance artists and people that are working with spaces and people in the moment. But I guess what I'm most excited about is just upending that and figuring out how to create something that is new and that really seizes people and merits that second look. Maybe this is me being jaded, but I feel like it's very possible to walk by a public mural that has had every amount of heart and soul and meaning and intention behind it. But people just walk by it because it continues to look like everything else around it because it looks like the most rebellious version of art that was happening in a world that we are no longer living in. So I'm thrilled about the idea of making things that command attention again and that really get people's attention in that I guess we haven't seen before in that case. When you guys start talking just at the first round of this, if you could just give us your name so that we start to get to know each other, that would be very cool. I'm Ellie, who are you? I'm Chiyoko. I'm Sunaz. So I'm Bitoir. What I'm wondering is when you say like art outside, is it like you say we're going to do art outside and so it's like an organized form of art that is just localized outside or it's like more like an happening that you can then kind of organize in an outsider way. For example, if you think of the idea today like of the hashtag, so on somewhere there is under the representation an hashtag that so people can rely, that it's your movement kind of, but it's really of the form of the happening so that people don't expect it and I feel like today whether art is outside or inside, if we know that it's going to happen, it's the same. Hi, I'm Tori and I'm really excited that this is happening right now because it's been totally on my mind about I'm a theater artist but I don't want to get more into theater therapy and community theater or public theater like this so this is really cool. Recently I heard of a group that's in Spain and I went to some of their workshops it's called Learning by Helping and basically what they do is they find a problem or like someone will come to them let's say with like for example they did something in Brazil where they had a group of kids who were from favelas and had obviously like troublesome lives and what they did is they found other issues in the world for them to focus on and so like I don't know like teenagers or something so instead of like focusing on like home life things they were like oh wow like we should learn how to be more sustainable or something or recycle so like it's like changing your mind for another issue this is just an example but basically what they do is like they find an issue and instead of telling someone to do something a certain way it's like finding creative solutions to something so while you were speaking I was just thinking it would be cool just publicly in a park to just like have a sign that says like teaching each other skills like one person knows how to juggle, one person knows how to do like a certain type of knot and just like hi what's your name, my name is this you know it's like this very small way to communicate with someone where you're changing, you're interchanging a skill that's maybe small but also like so cool because that kind of is lost in a way in this world I don't know it's just an idea but I'm really excited for this conversation One of the, I mean this is again just an idea I think there's a movement in France but also in Germany that people just meet on a Thursday evening from 5 to 8 there's no agenda, they just know in the neighborhood park a friend of mine took me to there and said I don't know he said no that's really nice, people after a while just go and meet like in Italy where people just have conversations it's a place where you can go, it's not a bar people bring their thing down, this is possible here because it's forbidden but you're just in a place in your neighborhood where you go and talk or meet your friends or meet other people on one level, very very simple human communication but then perhaps on weekends we say you know that someone brings a chair and maybe someone plays a piece of music maybe there's a union leader who said let me tell you what we are struggling with maybe there's someone in a hospital who says let us tell you what we as nursing, whatever we have, there's someone from a school teacher or someone does a reading of a poetry to a very simple things but it's somehow organized that there's a coordinator, a cultural producer who gets some kind of training where people send the emails to or not and other things can also have a website you know when you go out there something will be taking place by the people and for the people there's no central power who says yes or no but there is someone who says okay you can come here you can come then, maybe this is a good time and if not you can also do it on your own but just know that people meet each other person by person look into their eyes and discuss and most probably there will be other sides of our political opinion also do things but then see who does it better because I think we will win we will have better arguments and we will include people and say it's not scary to imagine a different future I think Edouard Glissom who was here in this building he always said all the fears that people have perhaps rightfully about jobs and how to live and the exchange is a failure of imagination we can imagine a different future this just helps that people feel at home and connected and is a very simple old idea of Greek you know community where people are in public spaces talking about perhaps philosophy I know when I would ask philosophy professors here or students or teacher say go out and discuss Plato and 10 o'clock in Brooklyn where it doesn't work they will go, they would be thrilled it doesn't exist Handan who is a colleague from you who is a Turkish professor of theater who does playwrights she said all her Turkish friends who are fired in schools because the government told them about they are teaching in parks at the moment and so I think this is the idea to do something so we are not whatever the art is we just create a forum for a civic engagement and to practice what is the most precious thing which is free speech and an exchange of ideas my name is E.L. I use She-Her so one of the things that I would be really curious about is like what is already happening in parks that your organization could either connect with and support or like respond to or enhance or honor to me that is potentially really exciting and one of the things that I feel like I run into all the time as someone who is relatively new to New York is I don't know where to find anything everything is like so atomized a lot of the time and there are a lot a lot of groups doing a lot of things and they all use different promotional platforms and none of them seem to communicate with each other as effectively as they could and sometimes there are and this is the case in any community redundancies and multiple groups all trying to ask or answer the same questions at the same time in ways that could really compliment each other beautifully so I would be really interested in finding ways to do that to build a big web out of the little webs that are already there my name is Denise and I'm relatively new to New York so I very new to New York actually and I was like yeah it's not working hello okay now I can hear myself okay and to echo what you said I mean I might be wrong because it hasn't even been a year that I've been in New York but I found the culturally engaging politically engaging events very closed like the entertainment is out there you can find it easily even theater in the parks like the public does that and people can go see it but as a theater artist if I wanted to be engaged and actually active in any of those events there was no way for me to find it unless I was very persistent unless I found people who knew and I can't even imagine for someone who's not a theater artist and who's not that persistent how to find those events and I think it's very interesting it's a very great idea especially for the performance arts or for any kind of arts that is engaging versus entertaining to give the opportunity to artists and non-artists to just find it out there and be engaged in it so I think it's a very effective thing one idea is to create an app I would say we try to say what can happen you're at any time just click on it and then at 8 p.m. the experiment is this and you can swipe if you like it or not and then perhaps you have very simple websites if we do this idea of cultural producers we do one or two days seminar here and we have the idea that they get a yellow vest and they're looking like a boy's felt vest with a number and they are really responsible they hold people and say okay you can talk in the afternoon you can do this, you can do here and I will be there hopefully most of the time Fridays and start and invite with my friends ultimately perhaps also encouraging people do salons at your home invite people that watch movies read poems, read books or something but the idea to kind of a little bit formalize it say this is happening at that time but as you said there's a lot out there we don't need to tell anybody what do people know much better than I do although I think we could I was thinking like maybe the app or the blog or the website could simultaneously have these formal spaces where in which or these time spaces where in which we are occupying and discussing and also offers information about other things that are happening at the same in those spaces as well so we're sort of unifying where so that someone could go to us and get all the information about all the parks somehow I mean I know that sounds ambitious but yeah the courage people also to vote to participate you know go out there all you have to do is find one person who votes who didn't vote before that there would be no discussion you vote and you find one person in all those talks and then things would change yeah I feel like it's really I really like the fact that they are gathered by questions because like usually when you go to a show or a film or whatever it's like you are in the moment of your life where you are thinking of something and so you kind of looking into the arts like the answer and it also like will encourage the artist to know like to show more what they are doing like especially so like not so much by location but more by about what? like content, yeah maybe yeah Frank you reminded me of Joseph Boyce without a rose we can't do it where he sat at a table in Documenta I think was the first one and he just had a rose at the table and he would sit and people would come and sit and talk to him and the concept is without a rose without the rose represented nature without nature we can't do it so maybe an idea that I've tried to do over the years was have a rose there and let people know that this is part of a symbolic sense on that reference years ago maybe 15, 12 years ago I had an experiment a social sculpture of a meeting of inquiring minds and we had no subject that we were speaking about people would come to different cafes around town or different places and it would always be in a different place and the interesting part was it was no subject and the subject came out of the first conversations someone would take notes I would and would create a poem out of it of the points that referenced and then I would read it or somebody would read it but the interesting part was people who were sitting around in the cafe would come and join us because they thought it was interesting and just that sense of people coming around talking drew other people who were had no idea it was kind of it was called a meeting of inquiring minds Hi, I'm Emma this is all made me think about the concentration of geography in conjunction with this project because I feel like so many of the new references Fridays for the future Greta Sternberg even the movements of the past couple years have been like sort of anti geographical meaning like using the internet and using these sort of centralizing platforms to connect people and often that connection is so dispersed that bringing people together you have to be following the right people you have to be in the right conversations as if you were in a physical room like you're in the right room there are sort of barriers to entry to self-selection but something like a public park is or hopes to be like you can't not notice that you can't not pass through it on your way to work and we isolate ourselves in those spaces more and more but I wonder what the marriage between the two is and how especially in New York I frequent my public parks in my neighborhood but I'm not friends with my neighbors and I've only lived in the place I've lived for less than a year but I like to be friends with my neighbors and so many important conversations happen in parks like all of my I think some of the deepest and most important conversations with my parents and my best friends have all happened in parks but those are enclosed communities so how do we open that up and how do we break through that sort of rushed social barrier and we create in those spaces and the second thing I was thinking about was what you were saying about outsiders and like outsiders versus insiders which made me think of the term outsider art like how that is marketed in the art world and how that that is focused on people who aren't trained as artists sort of propagating their art and yeah I just think that outside, outsider art like there's like just so many concentric circles there yeah I have a response to your question I have one second, let's grab Brian and you're next I'm Ashley I think the one thing that I would think would be important is about being consistent in the scheduling of the thing and since it's becoming winter I also would propose that there are public atria that can be used to have something that's the winter location for the jam and it also seems like it may be a space where people could also know when to tune in regularly on like Facebook live or whatever that streaming service would be I've done performances that are created for those events where we go site specifically to a location but let viewers know that they can tune in at this time and that could mean that people in their own atria or parks could tune in at the same time and you'd have a community of people in their public spaces but it also seems like the idea of a curation you know the great thing about making work in parks is that for $25 you get a permit and then you can do you can have a group of people there and there are lots of I'm sure you've gone over this already but a lot's about about whether or not you can have amplified sound and not amplified sound all that type of stuff so you can create there's a moment when during Occupy when I brought pages down from Brexlerstuk and you know handed them out to people and so that became like a kind of text that could be used as performance work that was created specifically for that but that had a theme so there's a potential of making workshops of that type of work so that theater is no longer well it brings the activation of theater into a kind of into the public space and that also means that it could be a workshop for writers for exactly that type of thing to have somebody I mean I've also done my response has to do a lot with work that I've done in public spaces because it's cheap and it's a great way to build up a resume frankly but also it's a really great test for audience I mean if you can have people like neighborhood folk who come by and they are listening to a Greek tragedy then you probably are doing an okay job with that work so it's also a really great litmus for the work itself but I think that it would be great if there was if in the schedule it was people gathering who are basically pitching ideas in a way or talking to each other about ideas but then we'd know every Saturday some sort of performance would occur and you can tune in at this time or you could come to this place and they could be like all works in process type of things or things where it's just checking out what is this what is this statement that we're trying to activate in this space but I think that having something really consistent is the thing and then having staying power going on but I think that having the seagull as a launch of the platform is very helpful because there's a built-in audience there so so if I were at one of those gatherings I would say in response to how do you start a conversation in the park the other side of the ocean dreams in my childhood with you yet you can play this in the park you can play this in the synagogue people are suffering you've all heard we can't talk any more exactly the same way rather in front of us so I tried to turn it off you can't turn her off so I was at BAM last week at the performance of Why I went to see The Master you know and I sat there in the play and the question was why theater which is what we're in some ways talking state-of-the-art audience wonderful performers wonderful performers and the play begins by asking you know why theater at the very beginning of time and then a personal critique we got hung up on Russia and Mykovsky and I just didn't understand that but two days before I saw the play four million young people were on the street and the play had nothing to do with that now we can't write plays or do works that are always completely consistent with the moment but what do we say in those places and I have to say I couldn't help myself at the end of the play I certainly waited for the applause and I stood up in my least aggressive self I sat four million people four million children and their supporters were on the street last week reminding us about what we face why theater why theater there were some different responses I think one of the things to think about in these meetings and call for which I think are fabulous is to say how do we intervene in the culture not just at the level of the street how do we intervene with our peers how do we intervene with the grand art how do we go to ballet how do we confront people and say it's no longer time nothing can be the same the medical profession is not the same architecture is not the same nor is the theater so I'm experimenting with that I think the idea of these meetings is wonderful to come and I would turn this into that if you like and I would love to hear it so the idea is maybe a park or place in your neighborhood and you need a discussion you are there in the time we have till 8 o'clock we have till 7.55 but the big idea for us is we would take issues but does do you guys think this makes sense and that is a big undertaking for us so that it's also you you have your experience do you feel this is something to explore so it's a very serious question on our side, I don't know enough stuff is already out there so for us it's something what we thought we would like to hear from our audience, people who come at prelude yes that was the first thing I was going to say as I've been listening to all of this is no matter what challenges you will inevitably face no matter how intellectualizing we can get about what it means and picking apart or when it comes down to people's schedules or how much it costs or how far away it is do it anyway that's my number one advice and even if it's only once a month at Columbus Circle Central Park or if it's every night in a different park in the distant reaches of every borough no matter where you end up with this or start with this just do it that's my number one comment I'm going to have Ellie you're going to wrap us up and then I'm going to wrap us one more time and then everyone should go to the public the final the foundries 25 years book launch it's their final thing it's their closing and I have better words for that than I'm going to say when I introduce it in five minutes leave your email, we're going to another session so we can continue this hand around a piece of paper with anyone who would be willing to give their emails and I'll invite you to the next one of these but Ellie please I definitely think that this is potent and necessary and needs to happen and I think that something that I am feeling right now which makes me question if I'm jaded, if I'm bitter if what, maybe all of the above is that we all come from very different worlds and even if we come from the same world and we're working towards creating a unified world at our core we all come from very different worlds and very different places and maybe this is a reason so much, just to go back to what I was saying at the beginning so much of the art in public spaces and those who have been permitted and promoted and archived who are creating those pieces of work and the things that have sustained those people are not necessarily from the same world as the worlds of everybody that you're trying to create so I think that yes definitely should happen but there also must be the question of why are worlds differently acknowledged of where individuals come from in order to build a world that can be unified as opposed to just putting the platform out there because you can't like speak to someone from a completely different world if you don't understand a bit about what their world has been and what making work is in the context of their world. That's beautiful, thank you I'm gonna say for us this is we're learning because what we're also trying to do is organize a decentralized experience and lead a an initiative without being in charge does that make sense? And so a lot of the wanting to sort of delegate out or like expand out the agency is very much in order for it to not be just what we think it should be which is why I think the next step is to have another meeting like this and I look forward to seeing I hope many of you there and I think everything that we experienced tonight is just the smallest beginning of what I am excited to continue on Thank you Thank you so much Please join us at the alabash recital hall for the final evening this evening's final shindig I'm on my way, David