 I'll proceed without the mic for the moment. My name is Brian Quirt. I live here, in fact, very near to here. This is my neighborhood. My office at Night's Swimming is just over in the Distillier District. So for those of you who have traveled here, welcome to Toronto and to my neighborhood. I am the artistic director of Night's Swimming, a commissioning company here in Toronto. I'm also the director of the Banff Center Playwrights Lab and the board chair and past president of LMDA and also the board chair of SpiderWeb show. And it is a real great pleasure to have all of you here in Toronto and to have LMDA back in Toronto after 11 years. And an interesting statistic, the previous Toronto conference was also 11 years before that. So I look forward to seeing all of you again in 2029. Probably back here in this neighborhood, which would be very convenient for me. So that gives me something to live for. He is, just so you know. I also wanted to thank Phalen for the land acknowledgement that she offered and she offered much more than that actually this morning, both in her session but in her introduction and her land acknowledgement, which I thought was fantastic and apt and beautiful and a wonderful way to begin our sessions over the next couple of days. I also want to acknowledge and thank and say how impressed I've been by the Joanna and the programming committee based on what I've experienced here today already and the sessions that I've attended. Congratulations to all of you, particularly to Joanna and the committee that put this together. Having run these before myself, I know exactly what's entailed and I've had an extraordinarily productive and thoughtful experience in the sessions that I've attended so far. We're here to end today to talk about and to hear about the Bly Creative Capacity Grant Program in its fourth year. We have five extraordinary dramaturgs who have been the recipients of grants through the program over the course of the last season and we're going to hear from each of them about each of their projects and Mark at the end of our line over here. We'll also speak towards the end about kind of an overview of the four years of this program and what really has been for him and for a number of us who've been on the committee that have managed and established and adjudicated the grant over the past four years. It's really been a six-year journey, I guess, Mark, perhaps longer even from the conception of this granting program, which I'll describe for those who are not familiar with it in a moment, but really six years since it was imagined, I guess is the best word by Mark and others, discussed at length through LMDA, established, launched, and then adjudicated through four rounds of grant proposals and a total of 16 grants that LMDA has been able to offer through this program over the last four years. And before I go any farther, I want to acknowledge and express an enormous thanks from LMDA and from our communities to Mark Bly, who's sitting here at the end, for as a vision that you have to... I don't even need to finish the sentence, Mark, that everyone here and so many parts of our community at LMDA and the dramaturgical worlds beyond in both of our countries have an awareness of both of your work, but really about what this grant offered. So for those of you who are not familiar with it, the Bly Creative Capacity Grant, and I'll only speak briefly about it and Mark may elaborate at the end, was conceived as a way to, as Mark has said, to infuse some oxygen into our landscape, into our world, to highlight and fund projects that were expanding, exploring, shifting the boundaries of dramaturgical practice. And it was a remarkable compliment to the other awards that LMDA offers each year, which you'll hear more about later in the week and at the banquet on the weekend, and funded by Mark, imagined and funded by Mark to the tune of more than $100,000 over the past four years, we've been able to use that $100,000 to offer grants, or grants each year between $25,000 and $30,000 to do exactly what Mark imagined, which was to offer dramaturgs and projects driven by dramaturgs, the funding to realize something that they probably would never have been able to accomplish without this sort of funding, or certainly not on the timeframe that the grant has made possible. There's only two people I'd like to acknowledge in addition who have been a huge part of this and have worked very closely with me on it. I've had the pleasure of being on that original committee that helped establish this and have been on the adjudication committee for the four years. One is Liz Engelman, who many of you know, past president of LMDA. He's been on the committee since the beginning, and then worked very closely with me in terms of devising and drafting the guidelines for this grant and has been on the adjudication throughout. Liz is not here this week unfortunately, but a huge thank you to Liz for all of her work over the past five years. And Cindy Sorrell, who is here, and Cindy has been fundamental to this program, to the idea of it, to founding it, to the original conversations with Mark more than six years ago, and chaired the committee that adjudicated it over the first two years and has since been working towards, there you are, Cindy, towards documenting and capturing the impact of these grants as they complete and so that we can have a sense of just what the repercussions and reverberations and waves of these are as they move into the future. So a huge thank you, Cindy, thank you from all of us at LMDA for everything you've brought to this program over the past six years. And another person who is here is Yvette Nolan, who's been an adjudicator for the last two years. I don't know if Yvette, you're still in the room, but if you are, a huge thank you for joining us on that journey. Today we want to hear from the recipients of this year's grant, grants. We were able to give out five, which has been fantastic. We have Mia Amir here from Vancouver. I was going to go alphabetically, now you've switched it on me and I didn't catch that. Amy Brooks, you just put it in your hand from Kentucky. Rose Osler in the middle from San Francisco. Hannah Ratner here from DC. And beside Mark we have Hailey Nelson from Dallas, thank you. It's wonderful to have you all here, both because you're all together and also so that Mark and I and everyone else can meet you because we've met you through your applications. And to meet you in person now is a wonderful full circle moment. What I'm going to ask each of our recipients is to take about 10 minutes to speak to the idea that they proposed, where it's at now and where it's heading in the coming months because many of these projects are the very early stage of their process and we are dramaturgs and process is everything. We heard that in the session that I was just part of. So we're getting a snapshot of where it is and where it's heading and we will look forward in future conferences and in future opportunities to hear where each of these projects ultimately leads and lands. So I think we are ready to begin. I'm going to start alphabetically which conveniently is here with Mia and if you want to introduce yourself and take it on. Great. First of all I want to extend great gratitude. I'm really honored to be part of the crew of people who received these grants and extend great gratitude to everyone who's been part of the process of making it happen. My name is Mia Susan Amir. I was born in Ramadan, Israel, occupied Palestine. I've lived most of my life on the unceded and occupied territories of the Musqueam School of Mission Slavery to People which is where I live and work now. I am a Jew of mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardic descent. I am disabled by chronic illness. And those are things that are important to the project that I proposed. I want to acknowledge that we've been in seats all day and if your body has other needs while I'm speaking it won't be an offense to me if you get up and move around. I want to normalize different ways of listening and being together as part of the next 10 minutes that I have. This project comes from my own kind of deep longing, need and confrontation with mainstream theater and my kind of the barriers that I've confronted as a disabled artist and trying to find my way in. It also comes from long-term relationships and collaborations with a number of people. All of the questions that I'm seeking to ask are probably not the right questions, first of all those questions will be redefined through the actual work of the grant but they are possible because of the relationships that have informed my practice as a whole. And two people in particular, Crystal Smith and Toysthanasi Swice have been really integral to this work. And I want to acknowledge that they're not here, they're in Vancouver. I'm going to read off pages because Crip and Fibro Fog and being real about how I'm doing and I hope that that's going to be interesting enough and if it's not, move around and I won't know. So the project that I proposed is entitled Unsettling Dramaturgy Crip and Indigenous Process Design in the studio, on the stage and in the street. It's going to be probably an online colloquium that's going to bring together disabled and Indigenous dramaturgs and some allies from across the Americas for a year-long collaborative project and programming. And the questions that I proposed were the following. What defines Crip and Indigenous dramaturgical practices? What are the intersections? How does centering these practices provide critical interventions to capitalist and colonial methodologies for theater-making which inform, in large part, mainstream North American theater ecology? What unique innovations and representation, aesthetics and content emerge with the application of Crip and Indigenous dramaturgical process design? How are relationships with audiences, places, bodies, this historic moment altered through the application of these practices? How can those centering Crip and Indigenous dramaturgical process design use digital and web-based media to extend leadership and innovation? And how can these media best be used as platforms for exchange of inherently land, place, and body-based processes and practices? And lastly, not lastly, not lastly, how does centering these approaches reveal new conceptualizations for or maybe dismantling of funding and institutional infrastructure required to support the creation and presentation of work by Crip and Indigenous artists as well as opportunities to propel our leadership? So, oh, and lastly lastly, what is the application of all of this to work the work of grassroots movements right now? So, they're really fucking big questions. Maybe I'll start with a make about what dramaturgy is and how that connects to this project. Yeah, cool, everyone okay? Remember, you can get up, it's all good. So, find dramaturgy and we can talk about this. Please help me in this definitional process. I don't come from theater, I'm not trained as a dramaturge. I came from community arts and community organizing and somehow landed here in this which is a great honor but we come from different places to this work and so I'm interested in a variety of ways of defining our work in the world. So, I propose dramaturgy as the practice of supporting the truth of a piece of theater or political action, emerging in terms of content, aesthetics, context and considerations around presentation. Oh, my grammar is really funny. At its heart, the work of inquiry. So, dramaturgy at its heart is the work of inquiry, we'd probably agree with this. This requires that we listen deeply beyond the concept, beyond the page to what lies hidden beneath. So, the kind of inquiry that we as dramaturges are able to offer to work is immediately configured by our positionality which I define as our relationships to our society's structures of power. Our positionality shapes our perceptions of and assumptions about what the work being developed is. It's creators, but the spaces and conditions within and under which the work is being created and the land upon which the work being created is being created and presented. So, we're working through our own filters and the ways that we've been socially informed to understand what we're working on based on our position and relationship to systems of power. It's just real, that's how it is. So, our inquiry as dramaturges is therefore inherently a politicized act which has real artistic and social impact and consequence. It calls us to invest in the work of understanding what shapes our perceptions and in pushing those limitations out. So, the co-opium that I'm proposing aims to drive theater forward by generating a critical platform which acknowledges the political nature of this work. It proposes Crip and Indigenous dramaturgy practices as methods through which this can be considered and to simultaneously reconfigure dramaturgy as an embodied and land-based practice. They're inviting us to center modalities which view the body and the land as sites of narrative production and collaborators in creation to challenge empty vessel approaches to creation and production which require that we leave our identities and our histories at the door of the studio or the stage and instead centering relationships, self-determination, intervulnerability, responsibility, reciprocity, spiritual and cultural practices as core principles of creative practice. Am I making sense? Yes. So, it also asks us to engage with and transform systemic and interpersonal dynamics of power towards equity as part of the work of creation and production to travel the ways in which hierarchical approaches to creation and production can and often do to reproduce broader systems of power than our work. It's about self-reflection, very deep self-reflection. It asks us to expand our understandings of a relationship to time and space in the context of creation and presentation to shift from processes that prioritize product to approaches and aesthetics that take their lead from our physical, emotional, spiritual and cognitive access and culture needs and the political and socio-historical contexts that shape and surround our work. They're about making space for artists and audiences regularly excluded from mainstream practice. It also asks us to address that we make work in places that are undergoing ongoing projects of colonization with direct bio-impact Indigenous communities first and artists and that we often do so supported by governmental institutions or private foundations engaged in maintaining and benefiting from this colonial project. This introduces critical questions about responsibility in relationship to advocacy, resource distribution, leadership and representation at all levels of creation and production and attention to protocols within our work. So the work of making theater, I think, is much like the work of political change. Nurturing a seedling vision of something that doesn't yet exist into existence. The inclusion of CRIP and Indigenous Traumaturgical practices in the space of our work can be viewed as prefigurative experiments connected to the discovery and eventually implementation of new social and political modes to impact change. I know it's kind of lofty, but we have to remain hopeful, I think, right now, especially about our work. Can I say a few more things? Or am I done? Where are you at at the moment? Two minutes. Jesus. Well, where am I at? I'm still in ideation. Everything is still in ideation. I'm writing on CRIP time. So I spent the last six months that taught me that I can only do one thing at a time if I want to do anything in the world that is meaningful. And the consequences of trying to do more than that have been very deep. There have been conversations that have been had with many possible collaborators. This work will begin in the fall. And I can tell you some of the things I'm planning to do today. Oh, and I always mention too, if you feel compelled by any of this, I am looking for more people to participate in this online colloquium. So I would love to talk to you, exchange contact information, and to find ways to connect over the next couple of months as things are coming together. So a couple of things that may happen that I think are cool. Process presentations. So these are monthly performance lecture series featuring collaborating artists. Unsettling discussions. So this is a dialogue series featuring collaborating artists engaging in the most difficult questions at the intersection of CRIP and Indigenous Dialogical Practice. Practice space, which is a potentially monthly chat room, training room, open to the public, facilitated by myself and a collaborating artist in approaches to CRIP and Indigenous Dialogical Practices. And a knowledge exchange, which is a library where all these things will live for eternity or until the internet has developed. At which point, they won't be relevant anymore because we would probably walk the earth. That's it. Thank you so much. Thanks, Mia. The Blygrats are a very patient grant program as well. So the activities will take off in the fall and continue into the subsequent years is in fact part of our interest knowing that projects take time. In fact, we talked to one of the recipients earlier today who was saying from the first year, four years later, only now is the sense of the impact of the outcomes of that project that we funded four years ago, really coming to the fore in a way that can be articulated. So totally understood. Amy. But you've got to keep it iterative during those four years. I think that's the trick. Yeah. All right. So, RFBQ, really fucking big question. Church. All right. My name is Amy Brooks. She, her, hers. And I also am going to refer to my notes now and again. I'm just 41 and tired. And if I don't keep to my notes, I'm just going to end up talking about like the new season of one day at a time for the Minneapolis record, which if you don't know about the Minneapolis record, Google it. It's the great drama of our time. Okay. So I want to start by telling you a little bit about my theater, which we're loosely calling theater, a project called Theater Building Community. And then I want to use a little bit of time to just hang that work around a little bit of philosophy asking why community-based and grassroots arts and why that might be attractive or useful to you and us as dramaturgs. So I want to begin to by acknowledging my colleagues in this project. This is not my work alone, not even close. All of our language, all of our labor and all of our love in the grant proposal that I put forward to the Bly Manel contained language from my artistic director, David Koch, from the head of Apple Shop's Organizing Wing and the Lenture County Culture Hub. We'll tell you a little bit more about in a moment Ben Fink and Bob Leonard, who was the artistic director of the late Great Road Company based in Johnson City, Tennessee, and is now the head of the directing program at Virginia Tech. Three institutional dramaturgs working together to ask how arts and culture can drive equitable development in communities with histories of economic exploitation. That's really a mouthful. So I work at Apple Shop, which is an Appalachian arts and humanities institution based in White'sburg, Kentucky. It was started in 1969 as part of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. Today it has a 24-7 streaming radio station, WMNTFM. It has a record label doing Apple records. It's got the Youth Documentary Film Training Program, Appalachian Media Institute. And it has a theater way, which is roadside. Since 1975, roadside theater has used store circles as a tool for building empathy and communication and making new place-based and culturally specific plays among working class and poor rural and urban communities and people. And a few years ago, wait, better not, I can hear myself. A few years ago, out of one of these community-based playmaking projects, using store circles as a tool, an organizing project called Electric County Culture Hub arose. And today, the Electric County Culture Hub, Okay, is this working then? Do I need to be under a boom? No, it shouldn't be. I don't know. If I get closer, does this help? Is that better? Okay, cool. We'll just play musical tunes. End of the day. We've got to float fast and lift fast. Keep the mic nice and close. Alright, nice and close. Alright. Just hold up an arm or something if you're having trouble hearing me. Okay, cool. So the Electric County Culture Hub today is... Electric County Culture Hub today is a loosely knit coalition of like 19-4 and non-profit community organizations, government organizations, fire stations, farmers markets, and all different sorts of people in Electric County, Kentucky, working together to improve their community. We work with Roadside Theatre. So my organization, Roadside Theatre, works with Electric County Culture Hub right now to use Arts and Culture to help drive these questions of economic development. Alright, so that is the basis for the way that Arts and Culture are coming together with organizing in Central Avalachia. Sorry, a little thrown now from all the commotion. Brian? I think we can hear without them. Yeah. If you're cool, if you can hear it, Brian? Yep. Okay, yep. Alright, groovy tunes. Remona, will it wreck the video if I step forward a little bit, because I'm just... I felt very plant in that chair. Okay, cool. So, a little while ago, we started talking with a national partner, Imagining America, which is a coalition of about 100 colleges and universities using community partnerships. And relationships to help advance conversations about equity in their Arts and Humanities and Design programs. And we started coming together, doing this work together. So now we are a national network. We're about to take the Letcher County-based work and take it national, which I'll tell you about in a moment. And we're using that question of how Arts and Culture can drive equitable development to coalition build in communities facing economic issues like ours across America. Recently, we've come into conversation with Virginia Tech and the Virginia Tech Artworks website program that is going to use projects like Theater Building Community and the Letcher County Culture Hub Roadside Partnership to model how Arts and Culture can kind of span disciplines and work on community-based projects as part of a website model that will feature other projects like Talking Bands Marcella Shale project as kind of a central communications hub and a platform for public dialogue that picks up a lot of where... Did y'all remember the Community Arts Network? That website now defund, it worked until, I think, about 2010. But it was a repository for knowledge. It was a knowledge-sharing platform. And a lot of our work is going to live on that and we hope to connect to possibly other projects and other websites like Black Theater Commons and the technology that it is bringing in to really span communities and conversations, cultures, geographies, and disciplines. All right. Some of our upcoming work that I'll be doing includes an organizing trip to Union Town, Alabama to meet with Black Belt citizens, which is a really great community organizing an advocacy group, and a lot of national partners will convene there from rural and urban places to talk about bringing this next stage in Theater Building Community or whatever you want to call it, forward. I will be starting, we hope, a residency in Newport, Virginia where the Mountain Valley Pipeline is scheduled to go in directly adjacent to a community center that the entire community has deeply invested in, and now the economic versus the community center issue is kind of tearing that community apart and they need things like story circles and public dialogue to help them solve problems together. And in White'sburg, Kentucky, the home of Apple Shop, keep your fingers crossed for this one, y'all, because I'm so excited for it, hoping that it really happens, but it looks like it's going to. I have been in conversations with a partner to bring in Rachel Chavkin, the original director of Natasha here in the Great Comet of 1812 and some actors from National Theater of Scotland and Rachel's Brooklyn-based theater company, The Team into Central Appalachia to lead a week-long, devised performance workshop that will be co-led by Central Appalachian, Brooklyn and Scottish artists that will help showcase the diverse populations within Appalachia that are not usually visible, like our community of color, our Indigenous people, our queer population to help them understand so that they can take back out into the world what diversity within Appalachia looks and sounds and feels and tastes like. So that is some of the work. Can I ask how much time I have left? Two minutes. Okay, so why community-based dramaturgy? Do we have any West Virginians in the house? It was Juliana, but she's the one that I met today. Do we have anyone who grew up in a house under the poverty line? We've got a couple people who come from low income. So I'm fifth generation West Virginian and being Appalachian in American theater, I came up through the mainstream. I went to all the right places. I did my internship in the right theater in my New England cohort, along with ART in Yale and Columbia at UMass Amherst. And I found out there that I would always kind of be a fish out of water as an Appalachian person. I would always be serving people who understood not much about the place that I'm from and would be embarrassed by it. I would always smack faintly of white trash and people would expect me to be ashamed of the so-called backwardness and the contradictions and the messiness of the place that I'm from. And then I realized that I didn't know how to combat all that because I had left the place that I'm from. So I went back to Appalachia and when I did that, I faced some realities about myself and I'm just going to leave it with this. It's a metaphor that I've been evolving. Alright. I've been trained to see the American theater, and please excuse me Canadian people, I speak only of the American theater and not me need to exclude that because it's my reference. So I've been trained to think of the American theater as something like the crown in the Statue of Liberty. Alright. You take those like 354 steps having paid the same admission price that everyone else pays and if you put in the labor and your resourceful me of stamina you get to the top and you are in a superior platform with a great view of our culture which is New York. And with one eye I still see our American theater like that and I love it very, very much and I also am seeing what it could be. But since I came to Central Appalachia and started working with the organizers there who are always fighting for anti-racist education for reproductive justice healthcare and needle exchange, clean energy and environmental advocacy and equitable economic development I've started to see it a lot more the way they do sometimes, which is as a penthouse in Trump Tower. If you're people like us you're lucky if you get to take the service elevator up. And if you get there you're in a really amazing rarefied kind of gilded place with wealthy company and it's a shrine to glamour, it's a shrine to capital and it's a place that people like us can almost never access and if you do and I'm going to pick out one particular show here because I think I'd exemplify some problems you pay $200 to see Miss Saigon and you're scrubbing a gold-plated toilet and that's how most people experience the American theater. So the question is even if I could get there to the top what values would I have to assimilate to belong in that company? So how could I go back to where I'm from when people do different work and change that status quo instead from where I am leading with the work of the people in my own region. So that's where I'm going to leave it and I'm going to pass the mic now. Thank you. Who's next on the back? Me. Do you want that one? I don't know. This feels like it's more trouble than it does. Yeah. Okay. Well, hi. I'm Hailey. I along with Kitchen Dog Theater down in Dallas, Texas, received this grant so thank you to Mark and thank you to Kitchen Dog Theater. I'm really excited about this. I'm really excited because this project really seems to touch on a lot of the issues that have been brought up just today. So thank you for educating me and inspiring me and validating me in this work. Dramaturgs are gifted with the ability to listen and to ease conflict to map out problems and find solutions. We are researchers, champions and friends. We all know this. So integrated dramaturgy, our project quite simply is the idea that these skills particularly suit us for community engagement as well. What happens when you put a dramaturgy in charge of community engagement? Our project examines the impact of a dramaturgy through a blend of textual and civic dramaturgy, reading our community like a play, attempting to understand the basic structure of our city, the key players, what they need, what prevents them from getting it, how we can help, and in doing so, making our theaters work better, harder and smarter for our communities. The dramaturgical response to reading our communities like plays would be to help make that play better, to give those characters clearer, louder voices. We believe in this way that theaters should also be town halls. And to do that we need to figure out how we can better reflect our rich, warm, diverse community in our audiences and on stage. This directly reflects Kitchen Dogs' mission of justice and exploring identity and humanity through our plays. And this was the main reason we undertook this project. Another reason we wanted to tackle this project is because Dallas is a dramaturgical desert. I am one of the only dramaturgy in the city and I believe I'm the only one to work in my field full-time. Kitchen Dog and I believe that dramaturgy is integral to creating excellent new work and excellent new work is integral to promoting underrepresented voices. With our rapidly diversifying city that is busting with new work we think it is important to spread the word about dramaturgy and find budget justification for dramaturgs to do justice to those voices. We wondered if there was a way to use the unique skills dramaturgs possess and wrap them into other roles in hopes of finding funding pathways for vital positions of theaters. In beginning this work we have a few tools already at our disposal. We have an existing free ticket initiative it is called Admit All in which we reserve 20 free tickets at every show for audience members in need. We also have an unfunded interactive lobby display this is something that I introduced to the theater in the 2016-2017 season so just interactive displays in the lobby to engage audience patrons with the work as soon as they walk in. We also had a baseline for what our audience demographic breakdown was due to demographic surveys we took a few years ago. We use these existing tools as the starting point for our integrated dramaturgy work which we began applying in January 8 to our already in progress 2017-2018 season. Our goal was to use this grant and integrate a dramaturgical practice to be more thoughtful and more specific with our existing community engagement work. We wanted to challenge ourselves to think bigger. We thought to increase our Admit All ticket usage so we had this program but we wanted it to see capacity at every show. We wanted to prioritize lobby display development and our much bigger goal has been to achieve parity between the people on stage, the people in the audience and the people in our community. This is part of this larger civic dramaturgy work we're getting at with this project. And thinking dramaturgically about the point of parity it seemed important to me that we focused not just on the container but on the content so making sure we were not just quantitatively aligned with our communities but qualitatively. If we're going to be a town hall we need to represent not just the faces of our community but their voices and their values. So once I unlocked this piece the real work sort of began. So, the work. Our grant came in the middle of our 2017-2018 season so we really had to develop this methodology and practice it on our feet. The project is all at once very massive and very multifaceted. It's very nuanced but also it's so obvious to be doing this work. In some ways it feels sort of like a complete system overhaul so while it was really daunting to begin I'm glad that we're getting the ball rolling. My work so far has really been to begin it all. Learning what we don't know has been the name of the game. I developed a new audience demographic survey which was included in programs in every show and I also created a community inventory survey which was sent out automatically with our thank you for coming and post-show emails. The first survey looked at capturing quantitative information about who our audience is overall and who's coming to each specific show. The second survey captures qualitative information about what our audience's values are and what communities and cultures they identify with while auditing the efficacy of our theater's mission and our community engagement tools. The information collected from these surveys will be used in future engagement initiatives and also it will be informative to our season planning among other uses. I've also become the boots on the ground person and point person for Kitchen Dogs community engagement. Most of my work has included publishing and emailing local nonprofits, interest groups, clubs and organizations specifically aligned with our shows in order to spread the word about admit all but also to set up meetings with them and to listen to their needs, capture their narratives so we can work together to advance their missions and get them better access to our work. I've also been putting some miles on my little station wagon. I've been driving around the massive city and getting FaceTime with these people, bringing them admit all flyers, going to local community events, just trying to spread the word. I also created three new show specific interactive lobby displays this season including our first ever new work accessible display. That was this past month. I also was able to try some new community engagement tactics within our theater. For our world premiere musical Pompey, we had a post show talk back with experts in ecology and art that were able to directly respond to issues that the show brought up within our Dallas community. Our post show panels like we were given specific action items from these groups and experts in order to help support Dallas ecology and artists which is very true to the mission of this grant. Also true to the mission we created a blog on the kitchen dog website that has these action items there for the audience to look at. And from these panels we were also able to schedule a meeting with our district city council member which was huge because we're now able to continue having these discussions with him. I also received a lot of really positive feedback about our lobby displays and their ability to bridge gaps in education and set the tone of the show. Patron feedback is that these displays made audiences feel empowered and understood which I believe is a direct reflection of dramaturgical skills being brought to the table in this capacity. Having just completed our final show of the season we're still crunching numbers from our surveys but anecdotal evidence from the kitchen dog staff illustrates that we are and that more people are aware of it. Also that many of those using in middle are first time theater goers if not they're attending the first ever kitchen dog show which is a big win for us. We have of course encountered some challenges in this work and we're not at all done and we're hoping to resolve these issues and we have a long road ahead of us but one of our largest issues has simply been institutional conflict or miscommunication. In our current temporary space kitchen dog is considered a homeless space or a stray space. This is a big issue in Dallas where performing companies do not have reliable venues in which to perform including kitchen dog which has a 27 year history in Dallas. So in our current temporary space there simply isn't room or money for me to physically be in the office full time. So establishing new programming while working remotely has created a lot of infamous communication about logistical issues such as survey distribution or the priorities we admit all. We also had to as an institution reckon with our own conflicts. Free tickets are often in direct opposition to making money and between introducing new programming and a new marketing member to our team we have really had to clarify our need to meet the bottom line while prioritizing community initiatives. Overall our biggest challenge has been gaining community trust in order to fulfill part of our civic dramaturgy practice. Simply we're not getting people to respond to our outreach. The lesson I've learned with this time and time again in this project is that just because we have free tickets doesn't mean people want them. Just because a theater is reaching out to the community does not mean the community assumes that we will welcome them and just because I say I want to help does not mean that people will believe me or want it or find it helpful. What we're doing is a cultural change and this is necessary for both our community and our company and change takes time. We are listening to our community's hesitancy and just as in dramaturgy we have to remain conscious of decolonizing our community engagement processes as well. As a result I'm switching tactics slightly and we've started approaching local community leaders outside of the arts but who are already familiar with KitchenDog and its staff and we're letting them introduce us softly to their communities and listen to their narratives in that way. So next steps are pursuing this tactic change that I just discussed as well as calculating the data we received and planning community engagement work for the next season. I'm also planning a round table conversation with other community engagement leaders in Dallas Theater and we're hoping to discuss sort of what they're doing and the benefits and challenges of their specific tactics. We also as a KitchenDog team plan to discuss some institutional changes that we can make within our own company to allow this work to flourish and continue. The biggest challenge in all of this is funding, that's always the problem. KitchenDog is a five-person staff, four-person staff. We're considered a mid-sized theater in Dallas so without funding this work may fall through the cracks which we don't want to happen. So our biggest issue right now is trying to find funding to keep this programming happening but we're very hopeful and we're very grateful and we're just beginning a very long journey so thanks for your support. Rose, I'm going to pass it to you. Hi everyone I'm Rose Dozer She, her. I'm the Associate Artistic Director at ZSpace and the Co-Artistic Director of Fault Line Theater. Both are based in San Francisco. They were stupid enough to give me this grant to do a problematic play festival. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. So I started at ZSpace last year as the Literary Manager. They never had a Literary Manager. They really hired me to be their Grants Manager and I was like you know what would be subtle if you were a Literary Manager to that title and they were cool with it. So I became a Literary Manager and I thought we should have some kind of open submission policy because hooray for access. So we did an open submission policy and one of the first scripts I got was a play about two homeless black men who fight with each other and it was written by a white guy who worked in tech. So he was persistent and really wanted me to produce it and I said no we have responsibility to produce work that has been researched and work that wouldn't be harmful to the community and work that acknowledges the community and we had a bit of a back and forth and then he retracted his submission and saw what I was saying and apologized and I was thrown off by that for two reasons one because I was like oh I'm a I'm a good liberal and I just told someone they couldn't make the story they wanted to make and they listened to me and they didn't tell that story and that's an interesting feeling of power that I hadn't felt before in that kind of way. Would anyone else have said like hard no to that person? Hard no? It would have done like a hard maybe no maybe would anyone have humored it like checked it out. Okay yeah we know this is a hard no but it also got me thinking about like what my responsibility was as a producer and what kind of conversations we're maybe scared to have and whether there was a place for the kind of work that we've decided is a hard no and what does it mean for us to draw a line and these aren't just questions about identity and representation I'm also talking about topics that are off the table for some reason and plays that gatekeepers have for whatever reason decided is a definitive no. So we decided to do this festival, the problematic play festival and the festival was really about asking questions because I don't know if I should have humored his work and I'm still maybe wondering that and through this process we've done an open submission it was we received 167 submissions we kind of loosely defined problematic plays as topics that are off the table or not otherwise be produced by other theaters and we asked people to write cover letters explaining who they were and why their play was problematic and also submit the script and any rejections from other theaters So yeah though Neil rejected a lot of these so we got yes no they didn't I will say there were also quite a few people who thought of problematic in terms of production that was like there's a 30 person cast and a dragon and everyone's under water and no one's going to produce this and while that is also true we were more interested in conversations that we're not having perhaps and part of the cover letter was trying to figure out if these people were open to discussion because we did receive quite a few cover letters that made me cry and then other ones where they were really asking like is it okay for me to tell this story or is it okay to talk about incest in this way just to give you a sense of like the breakdown of the kind of work we received it was a lot of a lot of work about sexual assault or sexual violence that had different framings maybe narratives that were very ambiguous raising questions of whether or not to trust the victim that sort of thing a lot of narratives about the holocaust where they were either comedies about Nazis or maybe framing the Jews as bad people very what I think is unconventional a place that either lacked a moral center or didn't have any kind of ethical message or stories about marginalized groups where the marginalized person was maybe not in the right or there was questions of whether that person was doing the right thing questions where people make mistakes people don't apologize and nobody learns a lesson that is scary shit to produce that's scary so in this first round we brought in a bunch of readers we've been narrowing it down to 10 finalists we've been evaluating these plays based on what kind of conversations we can have in the room so for some of them there may be good plays for whatever reason but we don't feel like there's a conversation to be had maybe I didn't say this before the festival itself will be a staged reading of three of the places three of the plays with discussions before during and after I like the idea of audience members having a sign or something that says like shut up or like stop that we are able to respond to everything that comes up in a very facilitated way and the playwrights will be present in the room and must be open to discussion so it's not about like offending for the sake of offending it's about like discussing why we are offended and what that means one question that has come up a lot just in the evaluation of these scripts the difference between offensive and problematic the difference between problematic and hurtful, problematic and harmful what it means to provoke for the sake of provoking and how identity fits into this conversation yeah so we just narrowed it down to well we've narrowed it down to 15 but we're trying to narrow it down to 10 and then we'll notify people of their finalist status and then we're doing one on one interviews and bringing in another group of readers to read the scripts to narrow it down to 3 and then the actual festival will take place in October at Z-Space in San Francisco and we're going to get some really kick butt director facilitators to help make this happen because I'm asking a lot of questions but I don't have any answers and I'm not the person to answer them anyway but I am interested in seeing what kinds of conversations we can have around this especially all as literary managers or dramaturgs or gatekeepers in some whatever capacity we make decisions in our head about what's okay and what's not okay and I think that's fine I think at the end of the day we have to be making those decisions but at least for myself I want to better understand why I am making those decisions especially if I'm saying I'm a literary manager and I get to decide that would be good that's everything I need to say about that I was really excited about the question and answer part of this but I'll come later thank you Rose I'm going to stand up also for sitting in my ankle such an honor to be here thank you and hearing all of you and being with all of you and these processes and these structures that are being discussed I think are really important and give me hope that this decision I've made to be in theater for my whole life is the right decision and will lead to a continued life of theater so I guess a couple of things to know about me I work full time for the Shakespeare theater in Washington DC as the audience enrichment manager so I do a lot of this and asking questions to the audience so I want to ask you all a question if you can just do a hand raise if you agree or if well I'll ask the question the question is do you think that playwrights have to be writers is there anyone who thinks when they think playwright they think writer there are a couple of like but no one is full out like yeah a playwright is a writer so that's great because I've had for a long time this problem of the text as the ultimate piece of what makes theater because as we all know theater is collaborative theater exists in time and space and it's not just about the words and the playwright frequently is the genesis of the piece but isn't always so I'm also a producing playwright with the welders the welders is a playwrights collective and since a lot of people did shout out to their helpers to get this grant written I have to do a special shout out to two of my fellow producing playwrights Deb Spigney and Annalisa Diaz for pushing me and pushing me to do the grant and helping me out with it so I am a producing playwright and when I took that title on when I was invited to join the company and what we are is a collective of playwrights we produce one play from each member and we are modeled off of 13p but instead of dissolving at the end we pass the whole company on to a new group of playwrights so I'm part of the second generation of playwrights we took over the company in 2016 and Woody and Sullivan will be here tomorrow was part of the first founding generation and we are actually in the process right now of applications for the third generation so a friend who is a playwright came to me and said we are forming a group I think it would be great to have a dramaturge as part of this group and started talking to me about all the ways the dramaturge could help both with dramaturging productions and dramaturging systems and all of that and I was like well if I'm going to do it I need to have a play I'm not going to become a member if I don't get my own play and then after I became one of the producing playwrights I thought about the times that I have served as playwright in a text based fashion and I've had some experience with that and I've had some experience with devising and the challenge that I've always had with the text based is I think the reason why I'm a dramaturge it feels too much like my ego and myself on the stage feels into words that I wrote and I sit there so I had to realize that what I needed to do as a producing playwright was create a piece using my skills as a dramaturge instead of using my skills as a writer so that is what I am doing that is the project that I have embarked on with the welders and it will be produced in November and that is soon so there are a few things I knew going in I knew given my the amount of time I spent thinking about Shakespeare in classic theater and the amount of time I think about decentralizing storytelling from a white perspective to a range of perspectives and I knew I was interested in what storytelling does with audience and how we create community being in the room together so I came back to the play Pericles, Shakespeare's Pericles how many people are familiar with Pericles? Pericles is a crazy play it does not have a straight line through it and there are it's like a series of vignettes really with little bits of Shakespeare lines gone through it and it has a narrator and the narrator is based off of a real writer who came who was born 400 years before I think 400 before Shakespeare John Gower and this idea that Shakespeare created a play that put someone else's narrative out front whereas usually when we look at Shakespeare's plays we can deconstruct all of the sources and all the things that he took from to create his version this one actually says here is the source and that was really interesting to me because I think what I've seen with audiences and what I try to do in my day job is get people to take Shakespeare down from the pedestal and look at the play for what the play is in this moment so I'm thinking about that Pericles thematically is about storytelling everything is told through a lens of storytelling the amount of time people are expressing themselves and given stage to tell their stories which is very present in the text so I'm starting with that and it's called in this hope a Pericles project and the way I'm thinking about it is that there are three layers they're to people in a performance there is the layer of who we are as individuals our stories our histories what we are bringing into the room there is the role we are playing within the parameters of the situation you all are right now my audience I am the speaker and then there is the character that we put on as an actor and take on elements of to tell someone else's story so I'm letting all three of those kind of live in the same space I have a cast of five incredible female actors who come from various countries and among the five there are I think six languages spoken including a couple including three who have English as their second language and so I'm really interested in what happens when you have someone performing in their own language without translation and especially when you're doing that with the storytelling of Shakespeare and the seating is going to be an audience circle with the action happening all around because I want to get the audience involved from the beginning in this process of the figuring out how these steps to welcoming them in and then getting them to the endpoint of the production which is going to be the audience finishing the story and through that there's space for them to tell their own stories and I've been thinking a lot I'm thinking a lot right now that is the stage I am in I've been thinking a lot about how in Jewish tradition when someone dies you say may their memory be for a blessing and that idea that memory and story brings someone back to life in a way and Pericles ends with Taisa Pericles' dead wife being brought back to life so I'm thinking a lot about how we as a community in the room everyone there can bring the people we love into the space with us to share that with the rest of the audience with the performers so it's a lot going on and I'm very excited so right now where we are we've got a cast we've got a design team, got a director and I've got a structure for rehearsal and creation that starts with individual conversations with the actors to talk about their stories and what about the play interests them and that will help frame the direction that we go in it's not devised in a traditional sense I'm not looking for them to create specific text we're not creating new characters it's all going to be within those three levels and it will use some Shakespeare texts, some of my texts and then some moments of open storytelling that the actors can really just tell their stories and one of the things I did in the audition process, how am I doing? One of the things I did in the audition process was ask the actors to come in and teach us something and the people I cast were the people who took us from behind the table, brought us onto the floor with them looked us in the eyes and taught us something that wasn't just a random tidbit but was about their personal history that is the experience that I think the skills that I have as a dramaturg can help push through and I don't know if the end result will be a play but it is certainly going to be a theatrical experience Thank you We come to the end of this year I just wanted to offer Mark an opportunity to speak to the journey that we have been on and then if we have time we will open up to questions Mark? A couple of things This was fantastic. Thank you Thank you The first thing I said this earlier to someone I looked around and this is and I'm a new face to you too so I'm going to make a point of coming up to you and introducing myself and you make a point of coming up to me and introducing yourself so do that and I'll do that I'm going to do this rapid fire just collapsing this not being rude because this is all online you go online and it's fantastic reading because some people have done a lot of work in the name of this Philip O'Kelly Jadis Perrin Heidi Taylor Jan Darbyshire Katelyn Chazinski Sarah Ekeshev Kelly Kerwin Sarah Stanley Rita Ramanan Allison Cary Kate Bredesen previous recipients to read the copy online it's fantastic if you have the time some of these as Brian was alluding to email them get in touch with them find out the evolution of what has happened in the case of of my goodness Sarah this is an amazing follow-up Cindy can testify to this about this amazing astronomy project that she got involved with with a Nobel Prize winner the things that we were funding was just fantastic about the expansion of the universe the drama terms we paid to get the drama terms in the room with this item yeah at any rate go online look at this follow through email them find out more sort of be so brief going on because I do want to thank a lot of the people in the room the adjudication committee that odd word is so funny it's a group of people I can't begin to thank enough the hundreds and hundreds of hours these people have given Beth Blicker former president I'm sequentially working through this Jeff prole people always say the drama terms of the conscience well my god I'll be dead in 100 years from now he'll still be talking to me why that was such a bad idea but I mean he's he's amazing I my fondness of admiration for this man Thicky Stroits I'm doing this sequentially Yvette Nolan I have such admiration for this person Jackie Lawton Ken my god such a blessing Martin who is she doesn't know what's in store for her yet and then I want to make sure I had talked about the administrators who've done a tremendous amount of work Daniel Carroll Lindsay Barthes past year and Jesse Hutchinson who filled in at a key moment for us and then the two people who have shoulder and Liz Angleman my god who has done so much work so much work who's been such a partner in crime for me in so many ways over the years on this and then but the two people a grind for it my god I mean nobody will know how much she has given and given and given and articulated and and dealt with my emails and emails endlessly and my god indeed I can't thank him enough but and then I want to talk about Cindy because Cindy and this gets to something about the philosophy of it at one point a few years six years ago I guess it was six years ago my mother died and this is Genesis six years ago my mother died and it was actually it was longer than going now I had a heart attack this is connected to the oxygen I had a heart attack I nearly died I mean two arteries are 90% full I was told by my doctors and used to I should have died they told me you should have died why didn't I die they said because your heart was in really great shape I came out of that thought about a lot of things my mother was dying at the same time I was not allowed by my doctors to go visit her and that was very hard on me and at any rate I came out of that I inherited some money just to be very honest about it and over the years I worked very hard as a dramaturg everybody knows I worked 80 hour weeks to the point that I did not look good I looked like Willie Lohman most of the time with the suitcases on that cover in that book so I saved a lot of money and I inherited some money and I remember calling up Cindy one summer and saying there had been a conference that had not gone so well that's the most charitable way I could put it and it had gotten back to me and I called Cindy and I said Cindy you know I was one of the co-founders of this organization a long time ago and there had been different points along the way this organization nearly died I mean in 92 it nearly died if Jeff Pearl and Mark Lord and some other people in Philadelphia had not revived it a fact and in 1998 at the University of Puget Sound the same thing over the red case had not happened this organization has many times nearly died it's very healthy now but it's nearly died several times and I stopped and I called Cindy I said Cindy I think this organization needs some oxygen and I want to do something about that and I said you know I think it needs an artistic spike and I want to talk to some key people I want to talk to you I don't know what it is yet but I want to talk and I got some people on the phone some other key people and we came to an understanding of what it could be and I didn't quite know what it was everybody kept saying well what is it what is it I kept saying I don't know but these people will help us figure it out we don't know what it is yet but it's over the horizon and I said I know what it isn't I know what the NEA grants are it's not what the TCG grants are I know I know what I want the results to be I want people to do a Linda Blair you know I want people to say a dramaturge is that that's what I want and that's what the 16th had been and our guiding principle in the selection committee the people I brought on have all had that at the center of their thinking and their vision have all been people I trusted that way and our selection is always oh my god did we fight sometimes over the phone sometimes and that was also part of the selection committee these are people I knew I could fight with tooth and nail and we still have good answers always always at the center always for me was I would say I always believed my hero a lot of times when I get most depressed you know what I do I live in Upper East Side of Manhattan I go to this little place this little bar lower part of Manhattan there's a grease crisis it's an apocryphal tale that that's where Thomas Paine lived and died apocryphal who knows it's a little bar where theater people can go have a really cheap wisdom five dollars and somebody will sit there behind the bar this place and play show tunes and you wander in have a couple drinks sing along and you think maybe Thomas Paine is there the ghost Thomas Paine is my hero not Washington not Thomas Jefferson because he's the one that ignited everything and I remember last summer I went to Philadelphia and I wandered around went to Independence Hall I went and saw every god damn thing Benjamin Frank every two steps you bump into some fucking thing and I kept looking for something about Thomas Paine nothing I kept looking for the sight of where Thomas Paine's common sense was printed and finally at 10 o'clock on this lonely street I found this little sign that said on this site common sense was printed it was the saddest thing I've ever seen and hearing earlier today that group of people talk and Amy you at the end of this group of people talking about it's really hard it's really hard it's really hard this is top all I can say is you know you can be remembered 200 years later by somebody standing in front of that sign so that's worth hanging around for this work matters this work matters tiny last thing earlier in the year I called Brian Liz I have a tiny idea about next year it's still formative just as six years ago it was formative about celebrating the work of the 16 and that is in some city my flying in the 16 for a day a long celebration of you're all gathering doing this one more time but in a very very celebratory way videos demonstrations and then having other experts from other fields come together on panels and everything and we use it as a recruitment tool in that city and it wouldn't necessarily be New York because that's kind of boring so we're thinking about that yes yes yes Marky yes Marky so stay tuned I think that's all thank you Mark I think there may be a lot of new customers that raise crisis over the course of the next year I know I'll be there maybe we'll bump into all of each other we've partly put this session on the first day so that these five projects could be revealed and illuminated and so all of you would have a chance to meet these remarkable people and so that the conversations about their projects which are clearly ongoing and by design and in the best senses are continuing over into that season so that the conversations that are been generated by these five projects and so that those of you particularly Mia who spoke to it directly who needs and wants to engage with the people who are here to continue to build your particular project but so that the ideas of all five of them can reverberate in both directions for your questions to them and their curiosities can take advantage of the huge brains in this room so that's why we wanted to put this on the first day at the end of the first day so these conversations can continue to reverberate over the course of the next couple of days and of course so that we could hear Mark speak and to really end our day. We're after six so I think I'm going to close our day on Mark's words with the thought of Marie's crisis in all of our futures I want to thank Mark enormously once more for the idea that led to all of this for all of those here and elsewhere who have been part of this process so far and mostly to the five of you for our fantastic projects and as Coriana comes to the front which means there's a bit of conference housekeeping to finish our day