 Hello, everyone. Welcome from Animating Democracy at Americans for the Arts and Art to Action. I'm Pam Corsham. My pronouns are she, her, and I co-direct the Animating Democracy Program with Barbara Schaefer Bacon, whom you'll meet in a moment. And we'd like to start with our land acknowledgments. Animating Democracy is on the unceded land of the Pekum Tuk and Norwatic people here in what is now known as Western Massachusetts. And Americans for the Arts in Washington, D.C. is on the land of the Anacostan and Piscataway peoples. We acknowledge that these first peoples have been connected to these lands for millennia and still are to this day. And we commit to working to find and take actions that redress injustices of past and present. Andrea. Thank you, Pam, and hello and everyone. Thank you for joining us today, both in the Zoom room and on the live stream. On behalf of Art to Action, which is based in Tampa, Florida, we are on the land of the Seminole and Tokabaga peoples, and we pay respect to Indigenous peoples past, present, and future as we grow in our work of decolonization. We build relationships at the speed of trust and endeavor to move from acknowledgement to action, as Pam said, with respect and gratitude to those who are the people of the lands on which we live and work. We invite you to acknowledge the first peoples of the lands that you are on currently and name them in the chat. And if you would like to learn more, you can visit nativeland.ca. And I'll see you again in a few moments. Thanks for being with us. Great. So once again, thank you for joining us for Art Dialogue and Race. This is the second session of our series, Animating Democracy Reflecting Forward. And we're so delighted and excited to have the opportunity to work with Art to Action on this series. As some of you may know, many moons ago, Andrea Asaf was one member of a small three-member team that launched the Animating Democracy program. And as one of our colleagues back then and throughout these last couple of decades, she's really contributed so much to the thinking behind Animating Democracy and this work of art for change in general. It's been awesome to also work with Andrea's colleague, Gabby Vigera, who's done a lot of the visual work that you'll see today. So thanks so much for that, Gabby. And then just lastly, I want to thank HowlRound for live streaming and archiving this series. HowlRound has been an amazing resource for this field, a powerful space for convening and for discourse, both written and in spaces like this. In addition to live streaming through HowlRound, we've also got a Zoom room here at Art to Action to enable some folks to maybe be a little bit more immediately before us and with us. And so we want to welcome everyone in whatever space you're in and wherever you are on the planet for being here. Barb. Thanks, Pam. This Reflecting's Forward Series is an opportunity to consider the practice and progress of community based and socially and civically engaged art. For each session, we're bringing together artists and cultural leaders from Animating Democracy's founding years with new generation of leading edge practitioners and thought leaders from the arts and from other sectors. Through the lens of their work, featured speakers and artists will help articulate critical questions for today and for the future of creative change work. This session opens with a thumbnail sketch of Animating Democracy's work with all of our partners and peers, followed by two important legacy tributes. Then we will step into our topic, Art, Race and Dialogue with presentations and dialogue between our featured artists and speakers Katrina Brown and James Scruggs and facilitated by Kim Previa. So that snapshot that Barbara mentioned about our work will start now. The power of arts and culture to contribute to civic and social change was illustrated by the artists, the projects, people that animating democracy has been fortunate to work with and support over the last couple of decades. And we'd like to take just a few minutes to offer a glimpse of sort of the DNA behind our work and our 20 years of work with partners and peers. And we'll do that with these images and words. Animating Democracy's shown an early light on arts for change work. Taking a practice to theory approach, we stayed grounded in and supportive of local practitioner-driven work. We funded arts-based civic dialogue and engagement projects across the country and created welcoming but rigorous convenings for critical exchange and catalytic learning in the field. We asked questions like, what does this work look like? How does it work? And really, what difference is it making? And over time, Animating Democracy has contributed to documenting and understanding arts and culture as a space, invitation and catalyst for engagement dialogue and activism. With partners and allies, our programs evolved to serve and advance this expanding field of practice. In 2007, with support from the WK Kellogg and the Nathan Cummings Foundations, the IMPACT initiative began working to position artists and the arts as valid and vital contributors to civic engagement and social change. We created and activated tools and resources to help practitioners, policy makers and funders understand and assess social impacts. We engaged across sectors to nurture an ecosystem of supports and work to inform discourse and policy about quality and equitable practices. As we reflect forward, we see societal challenges mounting rather than receding. But support, infrastructure and leadership for this work has expanded. We are pleased that recognition and resources honor Alana and BIPOC-led organizations and artists, and that leadership for this work is more widely distributed in this evolving ecology of arts for change. Animating Democracy, gratefully, acknowledges the thought partnership and collaboration of all our partners and supporters. First, we thank the Ford Foundation for its generous and early support. We extend admiration and gratitude to all our grantees, advisors, liaisons, researchers, evaluators, writers and all of our funders. On behalf of Americans for the Arts, Pam and I thank you for your vision, creativity and very powerful work. Great. So we have one more thing that we want to do before we get into the main event. And in each of the sessions in the series, we're taking a few moments to pay tribute to an artist who is part of Animating Democracy and whose work really impacted our thinking and the participants with whom we worked and also the field at large. These artists are now past, but we truly remember them for the contributions that they made and we're honoring two today, Seku Sundiata and John O'Neill. Seku Sundiata was a poet whose bold, rigorous, multi-disciplinary works emerged from a love of one's community, a quest for social justice and a vision for a better world. One of the most known works that he did was the America Project, a deep response to the aftermath of 9-11. Working with colleges and universities, the America Project held poetry readings, interviews, community sings, civic conversations and dinners in homes, churches and bookstores across the country. And among the questions at the center of the America Project and the dialogues that happened with it were, what does it mean to be a critically engaged citizen and resident of the U.S. in a time of intensifying U.S. imperial power and influence? And what are the prospects for love, compassion and human solidarity in that endeavor? What emerged from this journey and the discoveries was Seku's remarkable staged work entitled the 51st Dream State. In 2000, when Seku joined us for our very first learning exchange with grantees, little did we know how profoundly important his participation would be. The morning's introductions of grantee projects turned into an intense and unplanned discussion of white privilege and Black and brown people's exhaustion of having to educate and listen to white people work out their own stuff. Unresolved, we broke for lunch. After lunch, Seku entered a space that was still holding the tensions of the morning. He was expecting to share a poem or two as a basis for a facilitated dialogue. But he stepped in front of the room, took a deep breath and the words that came out, gentle, slow, sonorous, fast, furious and full. His poetic power embraced, refocused, inspired and reset the group. He created a new and generative space for human emotion to be felt and honored and for thoughts about race, democracy and dialogue to be formed and expressed. We remember Seku Sundiata for bringing himself and his work into animating democracy and for a brief moment that's remained everlasting in our hearts and souls. Andrea, thank you so much for that moving memory and tribute to Seku Sundiata, someone who was a great and inspiring artist and moved so many of us. It is now my great honor to pay tribute to John O'Neill. There is so much to say about John, and those of you who knew him, I'm sure, have so many stories and memories to share as I do. John was a playwright, a performer, a civil rights organizer, co-founder of the Free Southern Theater, which saw itself as the cultural arm of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Movement. Later, Junebug Productions, he was a founding member of Alternate Roots, where I knew him well as well as through animating democracy. He was a mentor to me and so many practitioners of theater, community organizing, dialogue, facilitation, nationally and internationally. His impact continues to resound. He impacted the thinking and evolution of animating democracy and everyone who was in that cohort, as well as us as the organizers, through his presence and participation in the learning exchanges and through his artistic and community practice. I invite you, if you're in the Zoom room, to lift up memories of Saku or John or anything you'd like to say about them, and we're going to play a short clip courtesy of Junebug Productions to hear John in his own words. Let's take a few minutes to listen to that. I am a storyteller. Storyteller. Now, I say storyteller instead of liar, because there's a heap of difference between a storyteller and a liar. A liar, that's somebody taking cover things over, mainly by his own private benefit. Storyteller, that's somebody where you're taking uncover things so everybody can get some good out of it. Storyteller. He had a good meaning to be found in the story. You got the mind here. I approach almost everything through the lens of story and storytelling because I find that what happens when you get to telling stories and working through metaphor rather than argument, people come to shared understanding more quickly. They started going, oh, I understand. That happened to me too. Let me tell you what happened to me. And then boom, boom, boom. And so I don't think it's accidental that most of the great holy books, for an example, are in fact simply collections of stories. When I finally decided I was going to work in the arts, didn't know exactly what I was going to do, but finally decided that I would be a playwright and would finally decided after that that the context in which I would begin my life and work after school was in the civil rights movement. And when we decided we'd make a theater, I found other people to work with and so forth. And I found myself really worried that there was not a coherent, there was little coherency in the way people think about art. It just, it was incoherent. You know, if it wasn't about making money, that was the only consistency I could see. And I remember telling my dad when he asked and I came home and said I was going to be a playwright. He said, frankly son, what do you intend to do for a living? I wanted to be a writer myself once. But what do you, I said, I don't intend to work for a living. I intend to live for my work. That's just a small moment of a wonderful interview with John O'Neill that you can find on the Junebug Productions website on their page called Our Story about their history. There's a wonderful, that the rest of that interview as well as more interviews and I encourage you all to go check it out. One of the many legacies that John left us was is the story circle process which he was a developer of and a teacher of and a leader of for many, many years both during the civil rights movement and this artistic work for decades. And in the spirit of John's legacy, we will be introducing in a few minutes our guest speakers using an adapted story circle process. But before we get to that, I'm going to introduce you to who our speakers are going to be today, who our guest artists are in animating democracy in the learning exchanges that we hosted and organized for several years. Attention that often came up was between dialogue practitioners, dialogue facilitators and artists about the notion of neutrality. There was an idea at the time in dialogue practice that the facilitator should be neutral and if art was to play a role in dialogue that perhaps art should embrace this notion of neutrality as well. And many artists pushed back against that and talked about the importance of having a point of view and both aesthetically having point of view in it in the creative work but also what the artist is trying to say or what the community is trying to say driving the work. And that was an area of tension and exploration for several years in our process with animating democracy. So in this session we're actually going to look at the role of provocative or confrontational artistic work in creating transformational dialogue, in creating transformational change. And really we're going to talk about race and the history of racism in the United States. And that conversation might go deep as the work itself that we're going to look at is impactful and deep. So we're going to invite you on this journey with us. And we want to let you know that there is no chat on the HowlRound right now. And if you are in the Zoom room, we are now going to turn off the chat function. And we're not going to be doing a Q and A in this session. This is an intentional choice recognizing the sensitivity of the subject of race and racism and how important it is to be able to facilitate those dialogue spaces and the limitations of this format and the time that we have together today. So we invite you to listen deeply to this exchange, to be fully present, to be in your body and to reflect on your own experiences and what the work and the dialogue that we're going to have bring up for you. And we have a wonderful facilitator who's going to guide you through that process as well. But right now, I'm going to introduce you to the two artists that will be featuring today whose works have deeply engaged issues of race in the United States and sometimes in challenging ways. James Scruggs, you can see his bio here and will also drop links for people who are in the Zoom room. But I'd like to give some relational introductions. I first got to know James by presenting his piece Disposable Men at New World Theater and at the University of Massachusetts and seeing his work, his process in person. And since having many, many conversations with him, both around work related to being a survivor of 9-11, which he is and how that has intersected with my own work. And most recently, Art to Action is commissioning a new work of his that takes on the criminal justice system called Off the Record, which I hope you'll follow and get to know more about later. And today, we're going to see a clip from Disposable Men and engage James in conversation. And we're also going to be joined by Katrina Brown, who is a filmmaker who has dedicated many, many years now to her project Traces of the Trade in which we look at the role of the North in the transatlantic slave trade. And we're going to be seeing a clip from that work and hearing Katrina talk about it as well as engaging dialogue. Traces of the Trade was one of the anime democracy funded projects, and at its time was controversial because it was creating a space for white people in the U.S. to talk to their families and other white people about the history of slavery in the United States and the history of race and racism here. So these two fabulous artists are going to be in dialogue facilitated by Kim Pivia. And I'm so excited. It is really my joy and honor to welcome Kim, whom I know of well through alternate routes. Kim is a leader in alternate routes and served on the executive committee, is also a producer of an organizer of the Lumbee Film Festival and an incredible facilitator who I have had the great honor of co-facilitating with. And so with that, I will gladly welcome Kim into the virtual space. Kim, how are you doing today? Well, now that I'm seeing you, I'm much better and just so delighted to be in this space. It's a beautiful day here in Red Springs, North Carolina. I'm Kim Pivia. I use she, they, and cousin pronouns. And I'm on the land of the Lumbee, Tuscarora, and Chirol here in Robinson County. And like I already feel creator and creativity and the ancestors here in this space. And just thank you so much for, for lifting up and continuing to lift up voices that aren't here that, that, whose spirits of course are still here with us and will always be here with us. Yeah. Well, just really so excited about that. I wanted to just lift up a little bit about how I show up in this work. I really like to explore the tensions around the work, but in generative ways, and in ways that engage our bodies and in ways that give us the tools to not override ourselves, but to expand ourselves to hold whatever it is that we're called to hold in these moments that allow our liberation and our breakthrough. So not running away from, but giving ourselves all the tools and what a powerful act of decolonization it is when we, when we bring our body back into it. So just wanted to name the way that I hold the work, which is, I frame my work working love, which means that no matter what it is that I'm working with and working to be malleable with, that love is one of the ingredients that we, that we put into it and love not in the manby-pamby way, but love in the way that orients in our bodies love in the way that is a field that calls us to want to be together and to be in relationship. So yeah, just really excited, super excited to be here. And again, just a reminder that we're not going to have a chat, but just really deeply listen to us as we offer this conversation. And, you know, we talked earlier before everyone came on and our goal is to really just get out of the way of what's already trying to happen. Think about what had to happen for us to all come here and be at this moment today. And, you know, we decided it was intentional to begin with story circles as we were gathering and planning for this and our stories were arising. We felt that our, I mean, not felt, but we could tell their hearts were opening up and in the words of Grace Lee Boggs, we were practicing becoming more human human beings just in the interactions with each other. So in the figuring out how to honor John O'Neill in particular, beginning with story circles felt like a really appropriate way to do it. So Andrea will be our facilitator for that conversation. And you just heard from Andrea. And now we want to invite James and Katrina to our space. Welcome, James. And Katrina, who I've been so fortunate to get to know in just a few brief meetings before, but yeah, so super stoked for this juicy conversation we're gonna have. Thank you so much, Kim. And hi, James. Hi, Katrina. How y'all doing? Good. Excellent. Thank you. Thanks so much for being with us today. I'm going to do a really quick overview of the story circle structure process, which of course has been modified for this virtual space, but really as a tool for those watching and just a reminder of how we will use the next, oh, 10 to 15 minutes of our time. Story circles uses a timed story sharing structure. You'll have up to three minutes each. And I will time you. I'll have a little cell phone here and let you know if you are getting to that three minute mark when it's time to wrap up. When we're doing story circles, we ask for a true personal story, meaning based on your lived experience. So in this case, not fiction, not pontificating opinions about a theme, not someone else's story, but actually your own lived experience. And if we were in person, we would sit in a circle together. But in this virtual space, we'll just do a virtual circle like this. We'll start with James, then go to Katrina and then to Kim. During story circles, there is no cross talk until all the stories are finished, no interrupting, and no discussion. After everyone has had the opportunity to tell a story, then we'll have time for dialogue. We encourage everyone, whether you're spotlighted on camera or in the Zoom room or watching the live stream to practice deep listening, be fully present, bring your full self here and notice what you're feeling and how you're responding to what you're hearing. If we were in person, we would all agree to confidentiality, but since we're live streaming, we'll just be mindful that whatever we say is public and is being recorded today. So that's a very brief overview of the story circle process, much truncated for our virtual space. But if you'd like to learn more about story circles, please visit Junebug Productions and get in touch with them for trainings and in facilitating this wonderful methodology. So now I'm going to give our storytellers a prompt. I will invite you to please tell a story about a time or a specific experience, a specific experience that brought you to the work that you will share today in this session or the work that you're doing now. So I'll repeat that one more time. Please tell a story about a time or specific experience that brought you to the work you will share in this session or the work that you're doing now. And I'll give you just a moment to think on that as I set the timer, and I will pass it to James to begin whenever you're ready. Okay, I'm ready. I would like to briefly introduce myself. I am a 66-year-old Black gay man using he-him pronouns. I'm calling from New Jersey land, stolen from the Lennie and Lenape Native Americans and from land where people who look like me were enslaved. In fact, New Jersey was the last northern state to abolish enslavement. I offer this land acknowledgement and enslavement and acknowledgement in the hope that we as a nation can move toward actual actions of retribution to Native Americans and descendants of the enslaved. Acknowledgements are a performative start, a humbly await action. My little short story that I'm going to have, which is about two minutes, I guess, I'm going to share some video from my first production, which is Disposable Men. I was working in the World Trade Center for Windows on the World on the 106th and 107th floors of the tower number one. I was on vacation. I was due back on September 10th for a reason that I don't understand. I extended my vacation in August to September 12th. On September 11th, in 2001, everyone knows what happened. I lost 74 coworkers. I lost four men I worked with and hired. I lost a six-figure job. I would not have left that job. I was a pipe dream artist. I was an artist who was going to dot, dot, dot. And I don't know that I would ever have done that. The fact that the buildings came down was horrific in every single way. And that launched my career. I decided I would not go back to corporate America that I would instead follow what was in my heart, which was to be an artist. In my mind, it was like starving, preceded artists. So I didn't want to take a chance. But post-911, I became very brave because I know what my coworkers saw on 911. There's a room that faces uptown with floor-to-ceiling windows. And I know two of my coworkers were in that room. And to me, that's what fear, that's what fear looks like. And when I get a little nervous, like, no, I'm a little nervous, you know. But I remind myself that my coworkers face fear for real. And I am, I draw strength from them. And I'm grateful to be here. And I see Andrew looking at the clock. So I will wrap it up there. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, James. Katrina? Thank you. I was struck by a native tribal map by Aaron Capparella at how many tribes there are in the D.C. area that used to live here, like, more than somewhere in the 10th to 20th. So I acknowledge all those who lived here in this area. And in terms of the history of slavery, my work, the story that informed the creation of the documentary Traces of the Trade, is, was started by my grandmother when she sent a booklet to all her grandchildren, mostly with proud stories that she wanted to pass on. But courageously she put in two sentences about our Rhode Island ancestors having been slave traders. And the double shock for me was first hearing that and then realizing that I already knew and that I had buried it and repressed it because it was too painful. So I was in my late 20s at that point and determined to not repress it again, but to reckon with it and face it head on. And happily I was in seminary, so I was in a place where reflection on such things were supported and encouraged. And a particular class that I had with someone named Joanna Macy, who people may have heard of, but she's a deep ecology leader and she was teaching a course that at one particular class just rocked my world through the guided meditation that she led. It's Tibetan Buddhist meditation and I'm going to describe it in a very abbreviated form and I invite you to actually think along of how you might answer some of the questions that were posed to us. So she reminded us that before we were incarnated into this current manifestation of living as a human, we were out in the ether of sort of ball of forming energy that was coming together and sensing that it was ready to be born again. And she said, as you will remember, there's a reincarnation committee in the sky. And as you will remember, the reincarnation committee insists that you come before them to propose what kind of family and person you want to be born into, what country, what city, what race, quote unquote race, fictional concept, what class socioeconomically, who else is in your family, who are your ancestors, what formative events would happen in your life and you had to tell them all these things that you had chosen because they wanted to make sure you were focused on using that profile as it were to contribute to the healing of the world. So all of it had to be justified by how that would position you perfectly to make a certain contribution to the healing of the world. So it was transformative for me to hear that after I wanted to push this ancestry away. And it invited me to think about being someone who would create something I didn't know would be a film at that point, but create something that could be of service to addressing the harms of enslavement in this country and beyond. Thank you Katrina. Thank you for that story and we'll certainly get into it more when we see your work. Passing to Kim. You're muted. I only had a dollar for every time that happened during COVID. I could fund all y'all's dreams. Yeah, my story actually changed from listening. So I was living in Fort Lauderdale loving my life and creator called me to come back home. And I came back home with a plan in my intellectual brain that I thought could be useful to the community and could, you know, to solve the things and checkmark and I could go back. And so I came and sat in the spaces and tried to speak, but it was as if I was invisible and it was extremely frustrating because I knew I'd been called home. And over time we had some small successes. We started some organizing in the community and invariably it seemed that we were getting into conflict despite our best intentions. That something was getting activated in the work that was disallowing and we were breaking up with each other. We were struggling to living in states of confusion. And I had done, you know, emotional intelligence work for corporate America and I kept feeling that they're like, you know, I could use this and my indigeneity and some other things to be more grounded in our practices. And I was driving around my community because I didn't know I was very lost and I was like, okay, creator, I need you to help me understand what I'm supposed to be doing. And I would drop tobacco or go by the river and just really sit to hear. And it was in that time when creators said that when you learn to let your intellect serve your spirit and not the other way around, you'll know what you're supposed to do. So when that happened for me, I began to really marry the body and understand the energy and the energetics of how we are with each other and be intentional in naming that and offering tools for that. Because it helped us change our ability to move forward in the community by rolling these practices in. So with the artist in particular, we were able to then recreate the artist market that had failed the first time around because we got so caught up in the dogma as well as creating the Lumbee Film Festival and the community is able to align more as we begin these selling practices. Thank you so much for that. Thank you for all your stories. For those watching in a regular story circle, as a facilitator, I would also share a story but for time to make the most of our time with James, Katrina and Kim, I'm not going to do so right now. I'm just going to take a moment to name some themes and connections that I heard in what was shared and then invite you to do the same. What really struck me is the notion of fear and courage. And it particularly struck me in the context of this session on race and dialogue and art making that so often we hear when we're doing anti-racism work, so we so often hear people talk about the fear of talking about it. Right? Or what we're afraid to say or we're afraid to feel or afraid to acknowledge. And it was really refreshing, James, for you to remind us what real fear is and how to have the courage to move through those spaces where we feel afraid. And Katrina, your story mentioned that too. And in some way, Kim, yours, the courage, and this is the second theme I heard, the courage to follow a calling that in some way all three of you talked about, whether that calling was coming from a spiritual practice or an inner voice, like the idea that at some point what has led you to the work you do now was listening to that calling and following it and having the courage to do so. And the third thing I would say is this notion of, and maybe I think we'll get into this in the dialogue, Kim, what you were talking about, about community and what blocks us from building, what gets us stuck and how we move through that. And sometimes that's very internal, Katrina, and we need to find the notion that you brought up of being in service, how we are called through our work, whether that's making art or facilitating community or producing work, that it is what drives many of us to do what animating democracy refers to as this art for change work is that idea of being in service to something larger than ourselves. And so maybe that'll come up in the dialogue as well. I am going to soon exit this conversation and leave the three of you. And as I do that, perhaps I'll just invite you to begin by sharing, are there any other themes, connections or reflections that you heard just in this opening story circle, something that you connected to in someone else's story. I'll jump in and say it was moving to me to hear you say, Kim, that you changed your story on the spot after listening because I have such training to be prepared, be prepared, and it can be hard to just let go to the moment and switch gears. Thank you for that. Which I have to say is very much in the spirit of story circles. So thank you for modeling that, Kim. Well, I think I almost had to because, you know, I talk a lot about creator and creator got joke and creator got winks. So adding to Katrina's story, if you hang around me for any length of time, I'm like, yeah, there was a day when I was planning this lifetime around, I'm sitting up there with creator, I'm like, hey, send me to an indigenous community in the Jim Crow South with some trauma shit. And I will, you know, and put me through all these processes and I will remember love. Like that is literally my joke that I tell. So when you said that Katrina, I almost fell out. I was like, huh, I didn't know that it was a little, what did you call it reincarnating committee in my language, it's a different thing, but the same thing. So yes, I do feel like a particular, pick this particular path, and then how to pay attention to what's already trying to happen like Paula Larkin said, Lark says, you know, where's the swirl, where's the friction that we feel in our body that says move that way. Yeah. Ooh, thank you for naming Paula Lark. Yes. Paula, we're shouting out to you out there somewhere. James, any reflection before we move on? Yeah, I just, just want to reinforce the fact that I'm a man of a certain age. And I remember when people didn't talk about white people, people didn't talk about race, race was a problem for people who look like me. So I really, I really appreciate the fact that Katrina's showing up here and talking about the kind of work white people need to do. And that's very important. And it's, I mean, I think there's a amount of bravery that comes with that for all of us to be here and to actually show up. We just behind the scenes, we had a couple of pre-meetings where, you know, things got not raw, but just real, you know, and I'm really grateful to be here with two, three real women. So, you know, yeah, I'm excited about being. Thank you all so much. That is my cue to gracefully exit and leave you to your facilitator, Kim, for the rest of the session. Thank you all for being here and continue to be real. See you all soon. Thanks. Yeah, we'll do our best to continue to be real. Just want to say for our folks, just offer a little bit of grounding and just noticing in your body before we even begin, because it was lifted up, the presence of fear and how much courage it takes to have these conversations. And fear is, it's going to be present, but to be able to just be with it, to metabolize it, to ferret out the parts of it that are worth it. Sometimes our brain is sending us a signal to run like hell, because we need to. And sometimes it feels the same, but it's really just a discomfort. So just want to give you a moment to just check in with yourself, because we also named relationships and relationship with our self matters first, because who is the me that I'm bringing to these conversations that we're trying to have. So just taking a moment to just check in with yourself, you know, just noticing, did you take a moment to get here to get present? Are you still thinking about what's to come? Are you noticing any anxiety or any tension? So just take a moment to check in. And then as we're moving through these conversations, we'll talk a little bit more about it on the other side. But the breadth is always a beautiful tool for bringing us back to the present moment and to our capacity to expand, to hold these deeper conversations, to stay in relationship and connection with ourselves and with our bodies. And being in relationship with our body is such a powerful act of decolonization, because they win when they teach us to separate from our bodies. So we're reclaiming our bodies and bringing those back. And now I'm really wishing I had brought my earbuds, but you know, so if you hear the neighbors, it's all good. It's all relationship. Love it so much. Yeah, so super excited to keep moving forward in this conversation. And I'm going to get back to my document here, who was, as I said, it's so great when you can be flexible. It is, but then, you know, I also can get a little bit lost. So just want to invite us to breathing. And sometimes if you need to tap, I'll also tap here. And I noticed my brother James was doing a little bit of swaying earlier. You know, those of us that were raised in school and in church, we knew to sway our bodies a little bit, but we were told to stop moving. We know to sway and move a little bit. So be sure to use whatever tools you want to, to stay fully connected, not to override, but to stay fully connected. So I think we'll save the slides for on the other end there, Gabby. And I'd like to invite James and Katrina to share samples of their work. So I think it looks like Katrina, you might be up first. Hi. So I don't have much to say by way of setup of the clip. It's going to be a clip of the opening just three minutes of the film, Traces of the Trade, and I'll have a couple remarks after that. Every year, my family would get together for July 4th in Bristol, Rhode Island. It was a big deal because Bristol boasts the longest running 4th of July parade in the country. We'd watch the parade from the lawn of Linden Place. This big white mansion used to belong to my relatives. It's right in the center of town. This is me age two with my mother and grandmother. Here's me age three, bossing my brother around. My DeWolf ancestors were known as the great folk in Bristol. They were professors and writers, artists and architects, and many Episcopal ministers. I was proud to be related to them. I was also drawn to this fairy tale world of old New England, these images of my grandparents when they were young. It never occurred to me to ask how we got so established. One day my grandmother traced back. I was in seminary when I got a booklet in the mail that she wrote for all her grandchildren. She shared our family history, all the happy days. She also explained that the first DeWolf, Mark Anthony, came to Bristol as a sailor in 1744. And then she wrote, I haven't stomach enough to describe the ensuing slave trade. What hit me hard was the realization that I already knew this. Knew, but somehow buried it along the way. What no one in my family realized was that the DeWolves were the largest slave trading family in U.S. history. They brought over 10,000 Africans to the Americas in chains. Half a million of their descendants could be alive today. I'll just share briefly that what the film follows is a journey that nine fellow DeWolf descendants and I took to retrace the triangle trade. Having written 200 people and nine decided to join me and we went from Rhode Island to Ghana to the slave forts and to Cuba where the DeWolves owned plantations. It was intense. I'll leave it at that. And I can conclude there and pass it back to Camar Andrea. Thank you, Katrina. Yeah, let's invite James and then we'll collectively have conversation after we've witnessed both pieces of work. Okay. Yes, just a really quick quote from Amsezer. Beware my body and my soul. Beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, even in thought. For life is not a spectacle. A sea of grief is not a proscenium and a man who wails is not a dancing bear. I've always been very interested in making work that implicates my audience to get them to make a decision to participate, to bring them in, to disappear the fourth wall. And what I'm going to show is an excerpt from a piece, Disposable Man, which is a solo piece with like five, six channels of video done back in 2004. It's standard definition video. So diminish your high definition hopes and, you know, and watch this. What I'm just going to say briefly before this to frame it is this piece was, it was live theater, of course. The audience was actually given 41 laser pointer guns. And they were invited to participate. And what you're going to see is what happened. Not everybody participated. I didn't, it didn't matter to me what happened. Every gun was numbered. And if you saw your number on the screen and you were asked to point the gun on my body, you knew what was expected. And I dare say that you would feel it whether you did it or not. So my interest was in largely in implicating the audience. And with Amadou Diallo, which is the incident that I was exploring, I was fascinated slash horrified at the high number of 41. He was shot at 41 times. And I wanted to show an audience how large a number of 41 was in a way that was oddly beautiful. So I'll stop there. We can talk about more later. And push very lightly. You will see a red dot. Each gun is numbered. Pay attention. When your number appears, shoot where instructed. When you were prompted, shoot and hold it there. Don't stand outside. It's me and my cigarette. We turn the corner and that's when we saw the suspect. He was fidgeting, looking very nervous, agitated. When he saw our unmarked car approaching, he clearly flinched. Very aggressive body language. Clearly he was up to something. This car full of white men come around the corner driving real slow. Strange. In my neighborhood, a car full of slow driving white folks is a bad sign. That's when the situation took on a life of its own. I mean, it doesn't make sense now, but I reached for one while it. I mean, I'm not doing anything wrong. I live here. It's a good day. Officer Rawls, he yelled gun. At the same time, Randy went down and we all assumed he was shot. We drew our weapons. That's when the first shots were fired. First bullet, bullet number one would be right here. Bullet number one was right here. Bullet number two was here. As soon as my hand touched my wallet, it kicked in. Black man and I stand absolutely still. Undercover cops charging. I knew I was in deep shit. We assumed that he was wearing a bulletproof vest. So we keep firing. Feared for our lives. I saw all of these bullets being fired by the suspect. I was hit. I was hurt. I kept seeing these white men, their guns pointing at me, exploding again and again. I looked for their eyes and I caught one for a moment. He was scared. He was really scared. Scared of me? I want to tell him it's just me. I live here. I can prove it. Thank you, James. I invite us all to just again check in with our bodies and again not to override, but to honor what we've just seen. To give ourselves a chance to metabolize it, to take it in. We're all moving at the speed or beyond the speed of life faster than that. So just take a couple of breaths and see what's there on the other side of a couple of breaths. Not to override, but to hold, to metabolize. Let's just inhale together and exhale one more time. Inhale and exhale. So thank you, James and Katrina, for your brave work. I do feel it in my body. And I'm imagining, because that's what we do, I'm imagining that that might have been intentional. So since we're having the somatic conversation along with this, I'm curious about what it was that you wanted us to feel or if there was an intention and what it was that you were seeking for us to feel. What was the intention? James, you're off. Camera, Michael, so go first. Okay. When I created Disposable Men, this was post Rodney King and I was, when Rodney King incident happened where five policemen viciously beat him, I was like, finally, finally justice. It didn't come. There were others before Amadou Diallo, but when Amadou Diallo was shot, he was an unarmed black man standing outside of his own home, approached by I think four or five policemen who unloaded their clips. One policeman actually reloaded and I just could not, I couldn't understand. I mean, I was Amadou Diallo. You know, I could easily see that happening to me. He didn't do anything wrong. And I was really interested in telling his story in a way that was visceral, in that I could put the audience in the role of the policeman and I would be Amadou Diallo. And we handed out, as I mentioned, we handed out 41 laser pointer guns. Each one was numbered and I spoke to people afterwards. Some people decided not to shoot, but they told me that when their number came up, they felt something. And that's what I was really interested in, is that the audience experienced what a huge number 41 was. And at the end of the piece, I wanted to have 41 points of light floating around and it was this beautiful music and I was still, and these points of light were there. And it was oddly beautiful and horrific. And I wanted the audience to sit with that. That was my intention, not to traumatize, not to do anything other than to consider what it was like for that man, to consider what it is like for a man who looks like me. Thank you, James. Katrina, did you have anything you wanted to add to that? Respond to that? I would throw in what you've already raised up, which is body and emotions. And I made a decision pretty early on that the power of an art form that has narrative and characters and imagery and music is a form, in this case filmmaking, that helps people feel emotions and just, you know, in the privacy of their home, if it's on TV in a theater, if it's in a theater. And I think for white folks in particular, actually was flashing back on how Joanna Macy also named numbness as an emotion. It doesn't usually get listed when people list emotions, but it was really helpful when she did that to sort look at how as part of white privilege, we just kind of numb ourselves to the pain that's being suffered by people of color. So I was interested in cracking open that numbness with the fact that there were 10 of us and we were all going to be different and be on our own emotional trajectories and so on and so forth would give people, it didn't mean people had to like us or agree with us or what we were feeling they could react against as well as be pulled towards. And you know fast forward there's been, I started working on the film in 1999 and the concept of white privilege was out there thanks to Peggy McIntosh and others, but concepts like white fragility hadn't, they'd probably been named but hadn't gotten popularized. So the last thing I'll just offer is it's been so helpful when people of color have raised up the fact that white people's emotions are have a long horrible history of people of color taking care of white people and their emotions, their fear, their defensiveness, their guilt. It hasn't been safe for people of color to express their emotions about all of this in a public way around white people. So thanks to the naming of some of these things like white fragility, I think it can help tease out things that we should do in affinity spaces just for white people so as to spare people of color are processing that doesn't mean we don't need to process. Thank you. Thank you for that. You know and Resma Minicum's work around grandmother's hands and racialized trauma in the body and lifting up that we've been taught to think about race but it doesn't live in our thinking white supremacy culture the culture that allows this way of being to continue lives in our body so it's a somatic experience. And so then knowing that art activates the body and that we're sitting now at this intersection of how do we use art at the intersection of race having race conversation through art but the dialogue part that is so tied to our somatics. How do we begin to like manage that energy even tied to like the earlier conversations we were having around whether or not to even ground folks before or after because does that then take away from their visceral response? How do we like Grace Lee Box talks about become more human human being so that and even John O'Neill and Joe Carson talked about you know finding the way through so it gets activated and lifted up but but what's I'm just from the artist's point of view then is there a role for the artist or even a responsibility or anything and of course this is just me genuinely curious because I don't know this is how we you know hopefully we'll be nimble in the evolution of how do we evolve these these conversations in ways that actually allow for our transformation and our liberation and aren't just conversations for conformations conversations say that build relationship and and our capacity to to move forward to create the world that we want so yeah hopefully you found a question in there. James do you want to jump in? Yeah to you invited me I will yeah um yeah I guess you know what I'm hearing and I'm hearing in our conversations which is really interesting to me is how do you talk about how do you talk about this stuff? How do you talk about the history of a country that is ridden with racist carnage that is too horrific to really show most times that people don't really want to engage with and right now there's an initiative to erase which is really disturbing for me um so and I you know sometimes I've been in rooms where I feel like the bullet in a china shop because I'm just feeling like I'm calling it like it is you know and I don't um almost without regard um because I feel like largely um that is what is needed I mean we went through we meaning a society we went through Rodney King we went through Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Brianna and as a society I really believe unfortunately we needed to see a black man die live on TV that is horrific to even just say it but George Floyd died we saw the nine minutes of his death actually happened to us and that is the thing that has moved the needle forward in in many more ways than any of the other things that um that have come up in my in my lifetime and I feel like it's really sad that you know we're a society where we we have to see it you know we can't we can't just sort of talk about it and allude to it you know um we have to see it and I think that if we did not see George Floyd die on camera we would not be at a place now where we're asking the questions that are really asking and that we're getting the the the the the the attention to um Black Lives Mattering and uh and and and the things that are happening right now I really feel like um that was a moment in time and unfortunately we needed to see it viscerally which makes me wonder about art that is dealing with race and racism I don't feel like um it's out of place to be in your face so to speak excuse to you know I'm a performer sorry but yeah I think that there's there's room for that and there's also room for nuance and thank god for for Kim who's who's like she's really um carefully facilitating this discussion and I have no intention of traumatizing people but I I am so afraid of the phrase that to talk about trauma is to inflict trauma and if that is true then we can have no discussion about the history of America unless we find nice ways to talk about enslavement and lynching and you know red lining and it's you know make it a pretty it's not pretty um James I was struck by a segment of one of your other performances um the three fifths supremacy um white supremacy and um and the white woman that you had doing the like karate chops um and how she was basically saying no go away stop I don't want to talk about it whoo whoo and she was doing it with a smile on her face um that was a powerful image and the other thing I'm um thinking of from your question Kim is at the most simple level um after every screening we do that I facilitate of traces of the trade I ask people to turn to someone sitting next to them and share what's on their heart at the conclusion of the film um not and I specifically discourage intellectualizing but what's on your heart um and it harkens back to when I was a kid and I would go see independent films that um were about various uh injustices um I would be so moved by the by the end of the film and in that darkened theater I would let myself cry but as soon as the lights went up wipe away the tears wipe away the tears um so I really wanted to honor that moment of transition from the end of a film to encountering another human and um inviting that dialogue because I think when there's that emotional honesty at a moment like that that helps set the stage for some deeper soul searching and and relationship building and hopefully some accountability emerging if it's a screening for a particular community like a church to take the conversation farther and turn to action towards racial justice. Yeah thank you both um for your beautiful and thoughtful responses and again um you know because I'm a somatic practitioner and we're like holding all of these um like just shift turning this diamond around and seeing it from all these points of view uh and I'm I'm feeling the passion with which you're holding that space and I love that and I am curious too how then we so we've named fear as definitely part of these conversations and that the art can sometimes evoke fear and or trauma and knowing that the brain is a very simple tool that has a brain stem and if it's activated in the amygdala it goes offline which separates it from our emotional corner emotional center and throws our cortex off so we can't actually think at our best state and so we're activated at that point in time so as we're learning more about these tools how can we marry these tools where the body can actually be settled so it doesn't then um there's a way through can be thought about and that relationship can happen because first if we don't feel safe we don't feel connected and if we don't feel connected we can't think about what can we learn so how can we or do we even need to offer that you know as part of the art or is that part of maybe talk backs that then create deeper intentionality around dialogue and art and race so that so that all the goodness is not left on the stage or maybe sometimes it is because I think there were times when James talked about he wanted to you know to engage with folks and other times you know not so I'd love to just hear you know whatever is coming up for you as we're holding these intersections and the juiciness of what can come forth not in the knowing but how are we you know even thinking about this differently how are we letting this change us even in this conversation um I'll jump in you know this question of safe space is so complicated because it's not safe for people of color to talk with white people about it um in some respects you know I I noticed at a certain point that you know the types of emotions that white folks have in response to a piece of art or life about racism um those emotional responses are vulnerable responses so things like fear anxiety guilt defensiveness those are vulnerable emotions but when you have vulnerable emotions and structural power as a white person your emotions can take things where you want to go as opposed to where others want to go so um I don't think it feels realistic to have safe space and yet I completely agree with you that without that feeling of safety it's hard to think straight and not just be kind of I do workshops where I ask people to notice in their body what they're feeling and with white people it's like just frozen sweaty palms churning stomach red face um so it is hard to have a process in an interracial space that takes people of color and white people to what you're referring to as this settled space so I see it as a a big challenge yeah a couple things come up for me um um in I did a piece called three fifths and we created a an actual theme park called supremacy land and in supremacy land there was an atrocity carnival where you walked into the room and it was a smorgasbord of of the the horrible racist carnage that has been perpetrated upon people who look like me raised and twisted into sideshow level experiences every night people came in um black people came in and were like oh no I am out of here I can't deal with that white people every single night a white person came up to me said I'm so uncomfortable um as if they've never been uncomfortable and um not been able to get out of it and we we we we designed that into the experience and whenever somebody came up to me a white person said I'm so uncomfortable I said I'll get to a fragility nurse and it was basically someone who did a little silly dance and pushed them deeper into the experience and not a sadistic way but I mean I just walking my shoes was the kind of thing also in disposable men I was um I am I was not a seasoned actor that was my first performance so I didn't know what audience would do audiences would do and I didn't know that they could opt to not do what I asked them because I was ignorant and there was one part where I pulled from my zipper in my pants a little hook with a string and I handed it to three white women and um I did the show for four or five weeks and every single show I did not let this woman off the hook I would stand there until she took it except one white woman and I'm not you know I can't read minds but she started shaking and her her husband or boyfriend was there and I was like if she takes this this man is gonna beat her her later you know so I let her off the hook but she's the only one and when I backed up the string went to inside my pants and I pulled out a dildo and we were talking about the the tension that has historically lived between white women and black men and if a white woman and a black man man we're alone in the room um and a white woman screamed that black man will go down no matter what so I really wanted to explore that tension with a literal line you know which was which was interesting and again they didn't have to take it but they did and I think there's something really um important about my my state at the time because I was not a seasoned performer and I actually thought they were like everybody's gonna take it and everybody did except this one woman but um yeah I um uh I I am fascinated by um engaging uh engaging audiences and although Katrina's piece is a film and it's not there's not a direct dialogue between it but it opens up you know with a story and she's a person in a white family and she's doing this and then we find out oh shit her family was a largest slave holder what must that feel you know it's just like I just think it's just so cool that you know that that film was done and I wonder what kind of pushback that you got Katrina I mean I got a feeling your family didn't pull out pom poms and we're like yeah let's do this that is true um but it was the whole spectrum from you know those who came on the journey to those who were usually um secretly upset and not telling me because of a whole culture of politeness um so I would hear through the great fine about those who were most upset um except for one person in particular who had the guts to tell me directly yeah and it's so even fascinating games to you know that this person struggles to engage with you and and and I'm offering that it was probably more somatic than even thought because of this experience of how the bodies register or don't register together and so then having that deeper understanding of that is there a way to actually use that in art or art or especially the dialogue around it not the art but the dialogue around it is there a way um to be able to to use that because understanding that Shane digs us in you know and so even allowing folks tools and Katrina's piece to especially when it becomes to the shaking and quaking of white folks I too have had to say to you know white women don't worry about these white men they're okay you know not check the room anybody need your support no okay you're off duty because it's literally like in the literally like in the bodies you know to just move towards that um and so beginning to name those things and offer people settling tools so that they can actually engage their thinking before their shame and their fragility sets in but it's a one thing it's we we become very nimble at naming it can we provide tools that help folks have a way through in these race art dialogue conversations I don't know I think that's just a question that I'm um posing and uh I'm understanding that um that in this provocative conversation uh another provocateur name Andrew Assef would like to pop in and um be part of our conversation so as Andrea's coming in didn't know right but come on in come on in didn't know if there was anything that you all wanted to respond to what my offering was around how do we in addition to naming offer folks tools to actually be able to receive and process and metabolize especially okay there you go Katrina and then Andrea I have to jump in wearing a different hat which is um that of a dancer and um a practitioner of interplay which is a participatory incremental accessible way of moving and telling stories um in the present moment and um a couple of us a group of interplayers people of color and white folks have been working on how to use interplay tools for unpacking and moving through issues related to racism and um another woman and I had um a great time conceiving of a tool where white people figure out how to switch from upset of whatever kind to a calm or state in the dance in the workshop and then the idea is to think of one gesture that is a mini gesture that you could use to self soothe to remind yourself that in the workshop you had figured out how to move from upset to calm in order to be present to people of color specifically so like you might end up with a little reminder like a gesture like this that no one knows what you're doing but it's your secret message to yourself to breathe breathe some more shake a little while staying present in a conversation that's wonderful thank you for offering that tool Katrina and and that's partly where I wanted to go in responding but really the the provocateur part since you named me that Kim I want a t-shirt is uh just to add to this conversation yes to all the things that you're saying about the somatic responses to fear and fight or flight and the things that prevent us from having deep dialogue uh or or that we might that audiences might be feeling when we see the work what I want to offer is I think that that intersects in a very complex way with who is in the audience and where they are in their journey or process around uh confronting or talking about race and racism so I think a connection that I have with James is that we both like to do work live performance that is that can be considered confrontational or or provoke difficult emotions and I've seen such a broad range of audience response to that some people are fighting that shutdown response or perhaps even defensiveness but some people are so relieved and I have to say but I was actually in that room with with a performance of the clip that James showed of disposable men um and the audience pulling that laser trigger and sitting there in the room and how difficult it was to sit through that moment with all the questions racing through my head about why are they pulling the trigger right do they think they're helping the show do they actually really want to pull the trigger uh are they just following orders like what what's actually happening but I have to say that those moments in the theater are some of the most memorable moving and transformational moments for me as an audience member and in my own work I have experienced people audience members coming up after with a great sigh of relief that they had a space to mourn that they had a space to feel because we so often don't have those spaces especially publicly in this white supremacy culture of the united states and so you know it also brings up then who is the work made for like Katrina's very specifically making work for white audiences to address white history and the role of whiteness in the transatlantic slave trade um what kind of responses are we hoping for and what's going to happen to the audience I do think depends on who the audience is and who are we're primarily making the work for so I just want to offer that and then just support what Katrina was offering about tools and what you've been offering Kim and how important when we know work is traumatizing that it is to offer the audience tools and ways to process um either before or after the performance and also in the process of a dialogue so I know we need to move toward closing soon uh Barbara just mentioned in the chat that we're giving this session a little more time to give space to the conversation but I will stop talking now and let uh James Katrina and Kim wrap up and then we'll pass it off to Pam and Barbara for closing but thank you so much for this amazing and important conversation and what thanks for your comment Sandra provocateur and what I'm really you know what I'm really loving and want to hear your your final reflections but I want to lift up that it's I'm not advocating for either or and I don't think you all are either but like the more tools that we have and the more that we know and the more that we understand even if we choose to be provocative to then understand you know what might be needed on the other side of that to allow a way through towards our shared liberation um so yeah I I I love the richness and the evolution of this and may we all continue to be nibble in our evolution you know and and learn and grow as we move through so love to hear any reflections that you all had from um from uh Andrea's comments when she came in as well and I I just want to also say there's something so powerful yes like Andrea said about being in the room that I know I'm craving I haven't been in the space in a minute so yeah when she just said that it reminded me of what it's like to sit close to people yeah yeah I can uh I can jump in here um yeah I'm really grateful for this conversation and I feel like uh I want to state the obvious is 2022 and it is still kind of radical to have a conversation about race with a mixed race group which is where these conversations should really live but I think we we sequester ourselves in our little bubble and we talk about it there and we we tend to I think most people tend to not be comfortable in in sharing that and just one other thing about like comfort and theater and to be honest I just don't care whether you're comfortable you know um and it's a horrible thing to say to somebody who's so somatically centered as you can you're probably like oh god it's god james but we had we had uh we were doing okay but timeout said it's the most uncomfortable you're ever going to feel in the theater and then we sold out so there is a notion that people are interested in feeling something there was a part of the show that most people didn't know whether it was real or not and because I'm graphic I'm gonna be graphic now so get ready um there was a guy uh uh uh uh the the uh the mascot of supremacy name was Jim Crow and he told nigger jokes and nigger jokes are funny to black people and within a white black and white audience is horrifying then a white guy started telling nigger jokes and things got really crazy and people even theater makers came up to me afterwards and said is this real and I loved that the blurring of the lines to be in a situation where you know it's theater but it's like if this is this real and if you think it's real do you process it differently how does that work I don't know I'm just uh that's that's what interests me and I wanted to state that it's still radical to have a conversation about race with mixed a mixed race group sad but true um I was thinking while Andrea was um offering her thoughts um about audience and intentionality it always um stands out for me one particular screening we did at a seminary in Philadelphia and it was one of those incredibly rare occasions when it was like half and half half black um audience members and half white audience members um it's usually always majority one group and a minority of the other group on both ways um and there was something like electric in the air around the power of that sort of you know equal representation and um a white woman asked she said I'd love to hear from the black folks present how they would define reparations and the first person who was moved to come up to the microphone was an elderly black woman and uh she came up slowly and she said there's many different definitions of reparations as there are black Americans and so that was taken as a cue for everyone else there of African descent to give their answer and you could have heard a pin drop the whole time it was a really moving important conversation um and the other thing that had popped to mind was um about your all's draw to live performances I think it's true that those live performances can be like a ritual and James looking at um some of your work it feels very much like a ritual and a procession as you had the immersive pieces pieces um so that kind of public opportunity to grieve together and to just things that are beyond words um be in a collective prayer together all of that I think is very much needed so thank you for creating those spaces beautiful yeah and uh Andrew just dropped in consent to morning um in the chat as well and and James I think you know maybe one of the things too that you lifted up is that you named that this would be the most uncomfortable and you're right when folks consent to to attend a piece of art you know we we do consent to be provoked or made uncomfortable and hopefully that's that's what we're there for you know and again to honor John O'Neill's work again and and Joe Carson's and still how do we do that and find a way through do that and find a way through towards our shared liberation yeah any closing comments before we invite a breath and just allow folks for a moment of introspection before we move to closing James or Katrina I can't believe the time went by so fast can y'all we could have done this for days and days we really could um yeah just briefly I want to talk about what's to come for me um I'm working on two projects one is called off the record acts of restorative justice I've been doing work for a long time about look what they did to me and I'm moving into what can I do about it and with off the record we are going to identify several um BIPOC folk in New York Florida and Boston who have misdemeanor records pair them with attorneys and actually get their records expunged and do devised work about that process so I'm really interested in moving moving into actual um like blurring the line between theater and social justice you know because I'm doing a piece off the records a theatrical piece but actual criminal records will be expunged so um that's that's where I'm headed and thank you for for this and thank you Kim and thank you Katrina thank you James how about you Katrina what's what's what's percolating for you right now um well I would offer a resource for those who are interested if this applies which is a dialogue series based on a whole spine of documentary films looking at the history of race racism and whiteness and not just black white but indigenous and Latina Latinx and Asian American history as well um that's called sacred ground and it's something I was able to create for the Episcopal church but we have licensing such that other spiritual religious communities can access it as well so if folks are interested that's called sacred ground and it can be found on Episcopal website um and I just want to end with a shout out um definitely obviously a big shout out to the two of you for being in this conversation together and um for the genuineness of it um which I really feel um and then a big shout out to the animating democracy initiative because they took a risk on me for which I am forever indebted because I was a first-time filmmaker this idea of a white woman making a film about history and legacy of slavery was controversial and they and the advisory team um took a risk and we we couldn't have done it without them they they really made it happen and my deep gratitude for the both of you for your open hearts for our new found friendship and relationship like I said before and like I'm saying to all of you on howl around I love you we don't have to know each other to love each other and we're going to need to love each other to make this transformation so just take a moment to think about reflect what was really activated or curious for you in this space today and as you're doing that I'm going to turn it back over to Barbara and Pam and thank you very much for having us today. It's uh it's it's hard to follow all of you uh but I do want to add um huge thanks from Barbara and me for um for going there honestly for going there and um I I do also feel that we could have had a second session following up on this especially to explore those uh sort of movements forward around rep reparations and reconciliation but we will watch your work from now on barb yeah and we we issued a pretty challenging invitation I think uh to have this conversation and so we want to thank him and James and Katrina for the grace and the spirit that you brought to it and to this exchange which is why it should continue and could go on for quite a long time. Also Andrea and Gaby for being our co curators and co and producing partners and for the heart and head work that you put into this series. Thanks Barb so um as you see we've got websites for Kim and James and Katrina so if you'd like to learn more about their work please visit them and I'll just say a quick note about the final session of our series on November 18th which uh inspired by Grace Lee Boggs who's been mentioned a few times today by Kim will delve into the relationship between the artistic imagination and civic social and political action and how both artistic strategies and emergent strategies and sometimes those being one in the same can bolster movements and make progress toward change. It's going to be an exceptional session I do believe because Jaula Zahler, Adrienne Marie Brown and Sage Crump have so much to say about this topic and I think there may be one more slide with some yes there we go with our websites feel free to check them out and I think on that note the final thanks is to DJ Cotton for the music that we're hearing at the beginning and end of these sessions and thank you and to Tanya who has managed an amazing amount of technical prowess behind the scenes today so thank you all and have a good and reflective evening. crowd and honor to present