 during that time as well. Impact on New Orleans, impact on the Gulf South region, but also impact on community-engaged art in general and on African-American art in general. So it's a lot of thanks for running this panel. So we have really, I'm really proud to say that we have so many amazing voices here to talk about this subject. And for this panel, our panelists are gonna start with some opening statements and opening reflections. So what I'd really like to do is give a lot of time to the audience for audience questions. So as they're talking, please be thinking of questions and I expect a lot of people to line up at the mic and engage with us and towards the end of the second half of the panel. So if you take the notes and I hope everybody has some questions, I know you will because there's so many experts on this topic in the room as well. There's some here on the screen that we'll be back here with us. So we'll start by, I have a little introduction for each panelist, so that's what I'm gonna offer you guys today as we think about the FST's impact. The first panelist step here is I'll introduce you and then kind of let you give your opening thoughts and then after that I'll introduce the next panelist and so forth and so forth. That way we'll be a little cohesion with who they are and what their statements are. So our first panelist is Colombo Yamsalon. Colombo, as you know, is an FST alumni and was the co-director of the Black Bart South Performance and Writing Collective which is part of the Three Seventh Theater in its iteration of New Orleans after a new from Mississippi to here. During this time, the FST Colombo wrote numerous plays including Mama, Black Love Song No. 1 and The Destruction of the American Stage and many others. He was also co-editor with Tom Dent of Encombo, FST's Literature, which they published for several years. In the years since, Colombo has organized and led numerous writing workshops building on the FST's participatory aesthetic including Students at the Center, a writing program in New Orleans Public Schools of which he's currently co-director and the Neo-Brio Workshop, a Black Writer's Workshop focusing on text, recordings and videos. Colombo also served for 13 years as the editor of the Black Collegian Magazine who is the co-founder of Run a Gate Media, a publishing company, leader of The Word Band, a poetry performance ensemble, and moderator of E-Drum. A lot of you may be on this. It's a list served for Black Writer's, and he's also a co-moderator with his son, Tumay, of The Breath of Life, a conversation with Black music. For several years with that, Colombo is also the executive director of New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, and he's published numerous books and anthologies such as The Blues Merchant, the 1969 poetry collection, What is Life? Reclaiming the Black Blues Self. Tarzan cannot return to Africa, but I can. Our women keep our skies from falling, six essays in the support of the struggle to smash sexism and develop women. Our music is no accident, and the poetry anthology, 360 degrees, a revolution of Black poets, and of course, also The Magic of Juju, an appreciation of the Black arts movement. Colombo's traveled around the world as a journalist and music producer, and has published more articles than it's possible to count on topics ranging from New Orleans and African diaspora and music and culture to African American literature to oral histories. He's also known for his numerous films and spoken word CDs. Colombo serves as a mentor for many, many creative writers and scholars in New Orleans and around the U.S. and the world, especially me, so that's why I wanted to really give a good introduction to him here. If it weren't for the thousands of hours that Colombo spent patiently training me and guiding me in my research, my teaching, and my writing, I would not be here today. Currently, Colombo's editing The Tom Dent Reader, an anthology of Tom Dent's little-known and some unpublished works. It promises to be my absolute favorite book ever. You should know when I'm up there. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. I joined the Presum Theater in 1968, a good member, all the way through the early 70s, just like to mention briefly three things, and hopefully hear from the other panelists and the members of the audience. Yeah, it's the same. First, this question of art. What are we doing and what is being done and the impact of the FST? The question is a policy question that is put out by Teddy Bruce Wysley in the careers. Yeah, I'm gonna go there. Boo. John, don't laugh at your friends. I don't see them. You see my ears. Cutting off. Who have to find a way in their own minds to justify being artists full-time without being involved in the political struggles of the day? Period. That's what that shit is about. We came through the movement. We were active. We intended to stay active, as we also made all of it. And our art, of course, would reflect that. But if you didn't come through that, if you've never been a part of political struggle, then this just seems completely out the box. And that remains the question today with art, with the art. Who are you as a person? And if your life off the stage ain't about shit, your life on the stage ain't gonna be about shit. I bring it in the hard way like that, because that's the only way it sometimes gets understood to come through a lot of the obfuscations, to use one of the words, the obfuscations that are inherent in a lot of the theoretical discussion about the nature of the arts. As though the arts have a nature. Arts are not in nature. Those are ideas that come from human beings. That's where the nature is in those human beings. Ideas don't have a nature in and of themselves. There's human beings who think of those ideas have a nature. And if we want to discuss aesthetics and so forth and so on, basically what we're doing is discussing the human beings who are putting forth those notions. There's no such thing as beauty in and of itself. Yeah, human beings who think some things are beautiful and some things are not. All right, second thing I wanted to talk about, let me just finish with that. I am, I am, the second thing I wanted to talk about in terms of impact, nobody in this society, the American society, and it's been made crystal clear this past couple of weeks, nobody wants to pay for something being relevant and questioning society. James Ball was told us that long time ago, society really educates us to be compliant, does not educate us to question it, and to the degree that we begin questioning society and ourselves to that same degree we become a problem. Well, for many of us in the free summer theater, during the late 60s and throughout the 70s, we were asking questions, posing questions to ourselves. Sometimes the questions were suspect, we used to say in the block. They might've been some of the questions were suspect, but we were always asking questions, and yes, we were proud. Question where we're gonna get the money from the fund this remains the major question. Major question for the Hawks. Major question for anything. The reptiles in charge in Washington, DC. These motherfuckers, look what they did. They said, we do not have the votes. This is a democracy, we do not have the votes. So how will we deal with this and still be a democracy? Simply we'll change the rules. We now change the rules so we don't have to vote. How the fuck you gonna have a democracy and the rule is you don't have to vote? Anyway. This is where these issues are right now. This is where these issues are. So this issue about how will we fund the arts? How will we fund the arts? Damn, you just take one missile and fund all the damn arts that you didn't fund it for the last 10 years. And I'm telling you what I know, because when I was in the army, I was nuclear missile, electronic repair person, all the nuclear warheads and all that shit, I don't know what it takes to do that stuff. I was trying to do that stuff. And I know they got more nuclear missiles than they know what to do with. And they can take one of those nuclear missiles and pay for all the arts programs that NEA has done. So that's, I'm not allowing for applause, but I'm just telling you the facts of life. The third thing is that we were trying to bring the arts into the community, not understanding that careerism, that is making a career out of being a professional artist, does not go, look out if you're all picked up in a house. What does not go hand in hand? You cannot develop an art that asks questions on the dollar that wants you to provide only answers. Now you may not understand this, let me repeat it, so you can get it. You cannot do this, develop art that asks questions on the dollar when people only want you to provide answers because the assumption with providing answers that you know what's going on and you therefore cease inquiry into the community, the one who asks questions of everybody in the community to find out what's going on and what needs to be done. If you go about it that way, then you're gonna end up being against the status quo because the status quo is making money off of the oppression and exploitation of the community and the people who's asked are getting kicked, they know that they're asked to get kicked, they may not understand exactly how it works, but they know that and if you keep asking those questions, you won't be sitting there too late having a conference. You'll be having a conference someplace else and that was always a problem with FST. Where will we be housed? I'm zero. Okay, thank you so much. Building on that, our next panelist. I'll take it to the next level. I'll push you all to sleep and take a little nap for a while. Well, pulling back a little bit, we have here historian, Jim Smithhurst, who's done a great deal of research, really grounding himself in the details and the ideas behind organizations like the Precision Theater, but not just the FST, the Black Arts Movement as a broader whole, but he's been inspiring to me because he was one of the first scholars to really recognize the Black Arts Movement wasn't anchored only in New York or LA, that it actually had a very strong anchor that was very grounded in the work that was going on in New Orleans in the late 1960s. So Jim Smithhurst teaches Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He's the author of The New Red Negro, the Literary Left in African American Poetry, 1930 to 1946, as well as the Black Arts Movement, Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 70s, which was the winner of the Organization of American Historians, James A. Rowley Prize. And he's also written The African American Roots of Modernism from Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. He's the co-editor of Left of the Color Line, Brace Radicalism in 20th Century Literature in the United States, and Radicalism in the South Century Construction, which is some great chapters on the FST in it. He's currently working on the forthcoming SOS, Calling All Black People, a Black Arts Movement reader, with historian John Bracey and poet, playwright, and activist, Sondra Sanchez. And he's also working on a history of the Black Arts Movement in the South. So with that, I give you Dr. Smithhurst. Okay, being the academic after a good afternoon, by the way, and his afternoon, yes, yes. I'll bore you all. You can take a little nap for a while after C'mon was worked his way up. But I just wanted to, I mean, I actually have to say I'm really honored and honored kind of to be here. It's kind of to talk about the Free Southern Theater and its legacy, its importance with all these folks from the Free Southern Theater in the room, seems a little presumptuous, but I'll do the best I can and then get out of the way and let other folks speak. I, you know, a few things, you know, to basically a couple of things that I wanted to say, is, you know, obviously one way in which Free Southern Theater is really important is simply chronologically. You know, I think you can make a pretty good case. I mean, there were radical theaters, black theaters before the Free Southern Theater. However, I think you can make a pretty good case that the Free Southern Theater was really the first black radical theater of the 1960s with a wide sort of circulation out of the black liberation movement. So I, you know, this is before the Black Arts Repertory Theater in school. This is before a lot of stuff. So I think that, you know, strictly in terms of, you know, chronological primacy, you have to say that this is an incredible, you know, you could, if one was gonna say, when does the black arts movement start? There's a lot of answers to that, but you know, one of those answers could be one of those places would be the free, even though they weren't thinking of themselves in that way was the founding of the Free Southern Theater in Mississippi and then moving to New Orleans. So I think it's incredibly, we can't forget that. I think that that's something that's worth remembering just in terms of historical primacy. But the other piece which I think is the more important piece, at least in my mind, about the importance and legacy of the Free Southern Theater with all its contradictions, all its conflicts, all its discussions of which you're hearing a lot today, which would be true of almost any radical organization trying to do stuff in the world, any kind of movement that at least was thinking about revolution, is how the Free Southern Theater, in my mind, changed the whole landscape of theater performance in the United States. What do I mean by that? Is that if you look at the Free Southern Theater and the organizations that develop out of the Free Southern Theater, its workshops, you know, led by people like Tom Dent, and I agree with Catherine, the idea that there's going to be a Tom Dent reader is really so exciting to me about what, because he's so important in this, but Tom Dent and Big Daddy costly, and then morphing and then bringing in younger people like Kalamu, like Nio Watkins, and then sort of morphing from that into Black Arts South, the rise of the journal and Combo. And eventually, again, a lot to the initiative of Tom Dent, working with people like Jerry Ward, who was on the last panel, Wendell Narcisse in Miami, a whole range of people create the Southern Black Cultural Alliance, which was probably the most consequential, in my mind, the most successful Black Arts regional organization. For those of you who, I mean, some of the people here were in it and remember this, but for those of you who don't, this was an organization that had theaters affiliated with it or inspired theaters all over the South. They had two conferences a year. I mean, as I recall, I can be correct here. One was basically a showcase of theater. One was basically an organizational meeting. They covered the entire region. It went on for a long time, well into the 1980s. So this, I think, changed the face of the South, the performance in the South, Black performance in the South, and really changed the center of gravity for Black theater performance in the United States. Now, it may be true that the theater industry is still based in New York City. It may be true that the sort of TV and film is still Los Angeles, but if you're talking about Black theater, where is the center of Black theater, with all its weaknesses, perhaps, as Jerry Ward said, all its weaknesses in the United States? I would argue it's in the South. It's in places like Atlanta, especially, but Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, Houston, just to name a few. They're zillions. I mean, there are many, many Black companies all through the South. How many are left in New York City? I live in Massachusetts. There really isn't a consistent company that functions year in and year out in Boston. It's an entirely different story down here with all the problems, with all the contradictions, with all the weaknesses, so I just want to say that if you want to say, well, how did this happen? Where did this come from, especially moving these theaters from their focus on campuses, Atlanta University Center, Dillard and so forth, into communities? Well, you have to go back to the pre-Southern theater and everything that came out of the pre-Southern theater through John O'Neill, Doris Derby, Denise Nicholas, Tom Dent, Colombo Yassalam in Houston, the late Lorenzo Thomas who came down from New York, but found his way into these networks. Jerry Ward, Chaljua, you know, you could go through a lot of different people and that, I think, is something that, you know, we're thinking about the legacy of the FST. It changed, again, whatever its shortcomings or contradictions, it changed a lot. The way to segue into a little bit of history of the impact of the FST on the Black Arts Movement and African-American theater, the FST also was connected to a global network of community-engaged radical theaters. And so our next speaker, Jan Cohen-Cruz, has written extensively about that and also done the work herself as a theater maker. So I think what you're saying just really segues well into what I think Jan can tell us about the impact and the relationship of the FST to global forms of radical community-engaged theater. So let me tell you a little bit about Jan. Jan is the editor of a public, a Journal of Imagining America, which had its first issue just this past month and I highly recommend everyone checking it out. It's called Public, A Journal of Imagining America. She also directed Imagining America, Artisan Scholars and the Public Life from 2007 to 2012. She taught at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts from 1984 to 2006, founding the minor and applied theater there. She produced a community-based performance on community gardens, directed Cornerstone Theater's Sabrina Peck and another Cornerstone Theater's Sabrina Peck and another piece on gentrification, co-directed by Urban Bushelman's Javelin's L.R. and then my youth, Rosemary Quinn. In 2006, 2007, Jan co-conceptualized and co-initiated Home New Orleans here in the city with faculty, students, artists and other residents around New Orleans looking at art's role in the city's recovery from Katrina. Jan's written a book called Engaging Performance Theater as Call and Response and another influential book was talks a lot about the embassy as her work local acts, community-based performance in the U.S. She's edited Radical Street Performance, another book and playing Bois Theater, Therapy and Activism as well as a Bois Companion. Jan's currently a university professor at Syracuse University and she recently received very well-deserved reward by the Association for Theater and Higher Education's given an award for leadership in community-based theater instead of engagement which is a small testimony to her really big impact on that field across the country. Thank you. It really is an honor to be here. Thank you for who are gonna be to participate. I'm gonna try to make five points in five minutes which is why I have a piece of paper in front of me. Five points of some of the ways that I see FSTs influence on theater for social equity. One, FST manifested the power of people speaking for themselves. You know, there's a whole tradition of actors as interpreters, not real artists. FST is an example of a company where y'all here were speaking what you cared about so clearly and what mattered to you and this was part of a kind of progressive culture at the time. So I also wanna just put FST in a little context in the early 60s. So the Living Theater, which by its very name is saying, we don't want this division between, as Kalama was talking about, who we are and the rest of our lives and what we know on the stage. Bretton Puppet Theater, it was the Vietnam War era and a lot of the people in that company were very young and either they were about to be drafted or their friends were. El Teatro Campesino along the West Coast, of course, many of those people came right off the fields or their families were still in those fields doing this kind of theater. So they were speaking for themselves, about themselves and their allies were speaking with them too and this just snowballed and it just came to this on and on through the 70s and 80s and 90s and even today. Number two, an extension of speaking for oneself is that expression is more important than technique. Technique can be learned. I mean, I remember this Lerman saying something like, yeah, it is great if a dancer takes her toe and touches it to her nose, but for her if you see somebody 85 years old run across the stage into the arms of someone 18, that's kind of thrilling. So, and what's that about? What are those relationships? So what is it that besides technique makes for a meaningful theater and it is this expression and therefore it seems very close when I look at what FST did and the solidarity obviously when people struggling for civil rights and doing the workshops as well as plays because for many years, my sense in the US is people thought theater meant plays. So that was radical that theater also meant workshops that meant the kind of educational projects that Doris was describing, that that was all of a piece and so it expanded for whom and where theater can take place. This story Roscoe told, we heard earlier this morning of making the play with the actors in Jonesboro, being ready for that moment because recognizing what John also spoke about as this is about a dialogue. That's so much a part of something that's entered our culture that we have so much to thank FST for. Number three, there's a link between expressing aspirations and acting in the world. Having directed an organization called Imagining America, we thought a lot about what's the relationship between imagining and action and not wanting to live in a world or do work that left either one out and I think FST is just a great example of a company that didn't leave either of those two out. Number four, that theater as part of partnerships that if you, there's so much idealism in theater from all kinds of theater and yet it's always kind of wacky to me. Well, if you really wanna make those changes in the world, why do you think that just getting up on a stage and saying it is enough? I mean, it's great, it's important, it's part of it, but the brilliance of being part of SNCC, Doris and John yourselves and working with SNCC and how could you possibly have the kind of movement connections to get into the communities where you needed to perform? How did you have the analysis of once people were thinking critically, what's the next step towards action? How to make sure people could read so they could register to vote? That takes partnerships and it's these partnerships with people who come from different fields, none of us can do it all. And I just look at FST as a very great example of recognizing that and acting on that. And then number five, that being in theater does not get us off the hook from everything else we are. And that, it's like, we are still mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and witnesses and victims and fighters and everything else. And again, it's very much echoing when Kalamu said that, you know, you don't leave the rest of your life behind, it's not like, oh, I'm an actor, this is how I contribute. I mean, it's gonna be thought out a little better than that. And it's just been endlessly inspiring to me and it's given me a lot of hope. And even with the kind of the way you especially, John, I've often heard you also cop to things where you didn't do everything the way you wanted to. And I think that's really important too, because if we wait till we're gonna do it all right, we won't act. So I love that. I love that you'll talk about, you know, the things you're also not the proudest of that you've done but you kept on while we run this race because we don't wanna do it in vain. So next up we have Carlson Turner, who's a real example of Powerful Radical Black Theater today, working out of the blues and hip hop aesthetic, you know, inheriting the FST legacy. Carlson's Executive Director of Alternate Roots, a regional non-profit arts organization based in the South, which John helped to start back in 1976. And definitely. And definitely, see it? In the second half of that. Yeah, amazing organization. He's also co-founder and co-artistic director, along with his brother Maurice of the group Mugabe, men under guidance acting before early extinction, a performing arts group that blends jazz, hip hop, spoken word poetry, and soul music together with non-traditional storytelling. Carlson's a published writer of poems, plays, essays, and editorials. His work has appeared in literary journals, Black Grand Filias, Bridge Conversations, Up From the Roots Journal, and many others. Carlson's on the board of Apple Shop, on the planning committee for the Association of Performing Arts presenters. He's a member of the Free Southern Theater Institute's planning board named the Phoenix Squad, and a member of the We Shall Overcome Fund advisory board at the Highlander Center. He's also a member of the Planning Advisory Board for the Parents for Public Schools in Jackson, Mississippi. Carlson served on panels for Theater Communications Group, Arts presenters at Life Awards, the National Endowment for the Arts, Mississippi Arts Commission, and Alternate Roots. He's currently participating in the Chief Executive Officer program run by National Art Strategies, a two-year professional development program for 100 non-profit executives. And recently Carlson was awarded the M. Edgar Rosenblum Award for Outstanding Contribution to Ensemble Theater by the Irondale Ensemble Project. Thanks Carlson. How y'all doing this afternoon? Yeah. So I just want to say I'm thrilled to be here and be a part of this conversation, especially with people that I know and admire, Jan and Kamamo, especially, that I have had history with that learned from. So I really wanted to come to this conversation that is responding to what I hear the other panelists talk about because this is the history, this is my lesson, this is my education to learn from these people who've been doing the work for so long. I want to pick up where Kamamo left off and elevate the conversation a little bit to talk about our values. And the work that we do in space is all about our values. What values are we bringing to the table as human beings? And how does it show up in the work that we do? So like Kalano said, if you ain't about shit in your regular day, then what are you gonna do you're gonna stage? I mean, that doesn't, you're just gonna act like you're about to shit, you know what I'm saying? So like, what really are you bringing to that space? And so I think a lot about values and the organizations that so many of us hide behind. We talk about organizations the same way we talk about ideas as if they exist on their own and that they can run around and that they're people. They're not people, organizations aren't people. They're only as good as the people who occupy the positions that steward them. And the values that those people possess. So one of the things I wanna talk about just for a brief moment is that this week I was reading an article in The Independent which talked about the CIA and its usage of abstract expressionism art as a tactic in the Cold War. And you know, not that I found that, you know, revelatory, but what I found was really interesting is that the second line of that article said that the CIA has had an arts and culture policy since its inception in 1947. So I will take your money for the Nuke and the NEA and ask how much money has the CIA spent in the arts. Give us that, let's see what we can do with that. Because if an organization that powerful and that strong that is working across the world sees the importance and the power of the tool of art and culture as essential to its ability to shape policy and culture around the globe, then the fact that they don't fund the NEA is an intentional act. It's not an oversight or a fact that they don't know and understand, it is a very intentional act to say that we will not support the public using this tool to the same level which we wanna exploit. So I think that's really important for us to think about. Some of the names that came out were people like Naya Watkins, Hollis Watkins, I wanna bring him into the space, people like Linda Parris Bailey, Alice Lovelace, Dr. Bernice Johnson Regan, you know, these are the people that included John in this patch and Colombo, these are the people who helped me to shape my understanding of how I could use my art as a tool and how I was really integrated me into a process of understanding what it means to engage community. And as John says, all artistic work comes from community. But it goes back to what values are within that community that you're dealing with, is there transparency there, are there values of inclusion and diversity that exist in those spaces that allow you to really do work that is important in uplifting. John has informed a lot of my work personally with my brother, my group is called Gavi and we do work, we do whatever we need to do. We don't call ourselves anything in particular, but we do whatever we need to do. And I think learning from John about the story sort of process and how we can employ that, not just as a tactic to develop and create artistic work, but as a framework to build democracy within communities, that we've used that in all of our work for the last decade has been a tremendous tool for us to use. Most recently, we were privileged to be in a space at Grand Makers in the Arts Conference in which we had program officers from foundations across the country engage in a two-day workshop on race in which the story start was our primary tool of organizing. And what was really interesting is that we found this is a project also that was mentored by June Work Production, by John specifically and by Dudley, that is done by Mando Vasaro and Mugabe. And the fact that we were in this space with people who control billions of dollars of assets, literally billions of dollars they move into the arts and that we were having a conversation about race with two Southern companies was really, it's due to the work that John and Dudley and other people in this room have done for decades. And I think that's an important thing to acknowledge and the legacy there. I just wanna call out a few names from some contemporary artists that I think are doing work that is very much steeped in the aesthetic. Sonny Patterson, who I think is commissioned by Jim Bucket due a new work, who was on the Arsenio Hall show a couple of weeks ago performing with two chains. That's just, that's real. She comes out of this community. Sonny Collie, who travels the world as a photo journalist capturing the beauty of African people and the people of the African diaspora. And using that as a conversation starter to bring beauty back, ownership of beauty back to the African American community, realizing that there's so much self-hate and that self-hate is such a root cause of our inability to come together and create collective action. Of course, think about people like Millicent Johnny, also another Louisiana sister, a choreographer who's also trained urban bush women and is doing amazing work. She's currently working with the Crigley One work here in New Orleans with Mono Bazaar on art spot production. I think about people like Progress Theater, which is, you'll see some work from Progress tonight. I'm working with them on current production. And I think they are embodying the African American theater aesthetic to its fullest, not dodging hard questions. They're taking it on full force and the work is carefully thought out and well devised. I think about people like Universus, who did a piece here in New Orleans about violence and about hurricane Katrina called Bearville. But what's interesting to me is that their ability to get a commission to do a project at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and got $300,000 to produce a play about the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. I look at that work as an extension of the Free Southern Theater because the fact that these stories are being acknowledged on that type of stage to get that type of budget is really important. And then I think last, I would just say, people like Mark Bartlett and DeGelso, the Astor Gates, and just the myriad of students that have come through the Free Southern Theater Institute all give light to the continuing legacy of this work, that the work isn't dead, it's not dying, it is very much alive and well. And the fact that it's not more robust than it is is an intentional act of under-resourcing and divesting of resources from communities of color and communities that are asking the real hard questions. So we have to ask ourselves sometimes, what is our response to that? We continue to push down those roads and push the hard questions even though we know that we then end up on the watch list and our conversation being recorded, or every conversation we have being recorded, every transaction we have with another human being being stashed away and stored to be used against you in a further date. It's a really important time in our history and we need more organizations like the Free Southern Theater, we need more communities of color working together with their communities to tell the stories that are not being heard and elevating the voices that have been left behind. Thank you. So we can just, two ways, we can go back down and see if you guys have any, want to respond to each other, or also if there's all these members who have pressing questions, I'd love that a viewer just come up and help us get started with the dialogue. So what I'm really sitting with right now is the fact, I'm here in Amherst, arts and artsy project, how we heard about the theaters that were no longer in existence in the first panel, what you just said, Carlton and Coloma, what you said about when you speak the truth, you don't get the support. So how can we support work that asks the hard questions? Is there a way that we can support one another more financially as well as in spirit? What are your ideas about how we can't do the kind of work that we need to do that speaks the truth and support in a way that is more authentic to the work? Well, it's no mystery. I'd say, for instance, take a bear with me and go around the block and answer the questions right across the street. There are people in this society that argue that classical music is the highest form of musical expression. Classical music is dying right now because it can't get divided in the audience to listen to it. They can get support from the powers that be, but they can't be closed, you know. We always used to say, if classical music had to survive like jazz survives, it'd have been dead a long time ago. The question that you ask, Karen, is an important question, but it begs, where do we put whatever legal resources we have available? What do we support? Whoever we may be. Those of us in this room, I bet you, taken as an aggregate, myself included, we supported more bullshit with our dollars than we have true telling. Because in this American society, that's, we need drugs of one song, form, fashion, or another just to make it through the damn day again. And art becomes just another drug. I've said I'm going around the corner. Y'all see this way around the corner, but check this out. Now, we will spend money on bullshit and then talk about we need money for real things. That used to be the recipe for talking about me grows. Right? They buy what they want and they pay for what they need. Y'all remember that? Hello? If we need real, if we really, really need it, we will, right? Rather than buy some of the clothes we buy, rather than support some of the ministers we support. I mean, I guess this is a sort of cultural historian have, I'd say one thing that's worth thinking about, which is, and it's not something that you can manufacture easily, but what was, and I don't want to get into some kind of old school base and superstructure kind of thing, but one thing that was different is there was a mass political movement or a number of interlocking mass political movements, which as people said in the first panel, both inspired, helped inspire people to do stuff in a certain kind of way and engage and struggle in a certain kind of way and also help provide audience kind of circuits of transmission, of getting it to people in a way that at this moment, there are different people doing different kinds of things. We don't have at this moment. So you know, I don't think that theater as a rule is going to produce a political movement, but you know, political movements, mass movements, where you have the potential for mass audiences, changes, that changes things and I think that that's something that's at least worth thinking about historically if you're looking to create the kinds of theaters, performance groups, poetry, collectives and you know, really, all of the above, I think I really liked in the first part saying, well, why'd you get into theater? It seemed like a place where we could do everything, generically, and they did. And I think that that would be one other sort of key is like thinking about, okay, I mean, besides the fact that obviously we need some political changes if you want, art that does the kinds of things that FST did or tried to do or wanted to do or aspired to do, then you need something, you know, the social basis on which to do it. Thank you. You have another question, Dr. Ward? Is there one person in this room who's under the age of 16? Well, thanks for today, Friday. No, I asked this because I think I asked this because I know very much what Paloma does with students at the Central and it seems, it wasn't, I don't know, it's something I'm agonizing over perhaps, needlessly, but I don't know how we're going to do anything meaningful with whatever we can do. If we don't involve someone who is 15 and above or even younger, I mean, as if we're thinking, oh, this is wonderful, we're getting the history of FST, but I think this is fact. But where is the brilliant young woman, a young man in New Orleans today who could profit from hearing the elders and the youngsters talk about FST and not hear. And I'd like to hear how each member of the panel feels about that. I mean, what does it feel? I mean, that's the reality. The question is, do we agree with the reality and if we agree with it, fine. That's always been the question. I mean, that's the fundamental question we have to ask ourselves as human beings, right? And for those of us who consider ourselves audience, that's the fundamental question of all. What is the social reality? Do you love it or change it? You know, how you deal with it. And one of the questions that you're asking has to do with the very structure of how this conference is set up because it was not set up to bring into the conversation people who are students. I'm not saying it was set up to exclude them, but it was not set up specifically to make that happen. We talk all the time about how you're going to do certain things, but you have to, you want certain outcomes. You've got to create certain in-goals. So how do you access certain things? You want to see certain things come out? How do you set it up so that those elements that are necessary access that? And I think that the question, Jerry, you just being provided, you come out of Tougaloo, you know. I come out of Tougaloo. You come out of Tougaloo, you retire from Tougaloo. Don't try to distance yourself. I'll work in China. You're not all the way to China if you want, but you don't distance yourself from that question. It's the same question for all of us. I want to take the steps I've got to make. John, I want to publicly thank you for one thing. And if anybody knows the history of FST, you know that John and I often ended up on different ends of some of these battles we had. But what we did in codifying the process that we developed that later became known as the Story Circle, that process came out of a conscious effort for how is it when we have discussions after we do the plays that we can involve everybody in the discussion and not just have one or two people doing all the talking. And that was a conscious effort made to develop that. And John was the one who figured out how to codify all of the results of the efforts we had over the years at that. And there's one single thing that I think FST should be remembered for is the Story Circle. All other stuff, everybody else can point to they did something like that here, they did something like that over there, so forth and so on. They put plays and mobile into the cotton fields and the coal mines and all like that. Ain't nobody else did Story Circles develop that whole technique. And I think John, thank you for that. And just to add about that, I want to thank Dr. Ward's question is I can't tell you how many hundreds of times I've been in the Story Circle with youth. So it's a way in which on a daily practice here in New Orleans and many other places the values are being shared in classrooms and in all kinds of other ways with not just high school students but college students, new teachers. It's just kind of everywhere, so thank you. Yes, since we asked everyone to respond, yes, it's totally important to have younger people and we know how important it is to hear first-hand what it is to actually hear the people who went through it that's invaluable. But since that's not how this was set up, in a way I'm echoing you in saying there's all these multipliers in the room. And that's really important that we have distributive leadership as Ella Baker said that we go out into the high schools, we sit in the Story Circles, we work in neighborhoods and that it is being passed on. This isn't the only opportunity as rich and important as it is to hear first-hand but there's so many other platforms now that's part of the legacy, where this kind of work can pass on. There are many, many different kinds of organizations. I would just say that the absence is definitely felt and it's important for us to make sure that young people are in all spaces that we're in. And I recognize the hard work that was done to try to put this event together and working on a less than shoestring budget to produce something. And this is part of the huge chunks of what it should be and consistently have those gaps over time because we don't have, and the resource is not even about just money but it's about human capital, it's about having the time, having the partnerships and the relationships to where we're at a university. There's tons of teenagers running in and out of this building all day, most of which have no idea what's going on in this room or even the people that are in here or even how important this is to the history of New Orleans. And part of that is about marketing, part of that is about having partners at the university that can help to steer people in here. And so there's just a lot of work that it takes to do all of that. And I think we're just recognizing that it took a lot of work to even get this part done and it's unfortunate that it is what it is, how do we make sure that the next time we do something, whatever it is, that we don't miss the step. And maybe, again, if I could be the academic historian type, thinking back in the day, this might be the Marxist movement coming out also in terms of the kind of dialectic is, if we're talking about Free Southern Theater in 1963, 64, we're talking about young people. And what we're talking about, we heard John, we heard O'Neill, we heard George Derby, we heard a number of folks saying that the sort of just do it philosophy, we're in the movement, we see a need, we're not going to wait around and do it. And that was one side. You saw that politically in the moment, you saw that culture, or you couldn't separate the two, but both things going on at the same time. I think that was one side of the dialectic when it worked best. The other side of the dialectic is that there were a lot of elders around. They weren't all hostile, but a lot of them, people like Langston Hughes, people like Sterling Brown, people like Margaret Walker, people like Gwendolyn Brooks, people like Dudley Randall, these are all people from an earlier generation who got involved in the movement to one degree or another, Theodore Ward, and they set themselves up. I think they were supportive, but as critical supporters, they thought it was very, in many cases, the young folks that things didn't start in 1963 or 64, 65 or 66, but there was a long history of struggle. Some of the younger people were more cognizant of that than others, but they reminded it. I think that that was the dialectic that had worked best. So what Kalama was saying was like, it would be great. How do I feel that there are few young people here and certainly not many college-age people here? I feel bad. But that was at its best. The other thing that I think that's worth remembering though as a historian is the problems that we have now, there was a mass movement that are not unique, and again, it requires some conscious work to do it. If you go back and look at the first Fisk Writers Workshop, which was an important event in 1966, I guess it was, at Fisk University, that was organized by John O'Killings. There were no young people there. William Melvin Kelly was the only person of the younger generation of black writers. There are people like Leroy Jones and Mary Baraka, all these new folks who are coming out much less the folks in Free Southern Theater. They simply weren't invited, wasn't until the next year that they got there. So the problems that we're facing now are not unique to this moment, and it required a certain kind of conscious effort in 1967 and 1968 to bring these younger folks, Hakimaru Udi, to a lot more, those folks to these things. Questions? Any other questions? Some of the theater back then? Monique, can you come up to the mic just because we're recording, it's live streaming, so it'd be great if you could say it into there. So the dialogue so far has been about the fact that theater has been created. Can any of you speak about the content of theater, either in your generation or the contemporary moment? Thank you. I'm not sure, when you said content, what do you mean? What are the plays about that? What were they about then? What are they about now? What should we be creating more about? I'd also be interested in hearing about form as well. One of the things that FST had an impact on is not just changing the content of what was written and who was writing and producing plays, but the form in which they were produced as well. It's still the best I have to get to a funeral, and I would like to see if you could give me a minute to speak to my friend Jones and say thanks to my friend. I remember one night we were in Carl's Dale, Mississippi and we were rationing with the latest folk about content. Use the mic up. I don't like the dancing but I tried. But I want to speak about something said. Theater, as a word, is a perspective turn that came as generated in the dictionary that we had nothing to do with. The turn compromises our existence as creative people. Now one of the things that I was impressed with that we put our hearts and feet in the dust and we made an emotional discovery and on that night in Carl's Dale, brother Jones gave it a form. We did not have a language because the language was prescriptive. The techniques was born out of another definition of value. See there's something about our existence that transcends certain details that we have to do with about creating. I think when he made those steps in that mud in Mississippi and other places, we made a discovery of self and he was able to use a foreign instrument to speak to originality as it relate to the symbolic definition of word movement and shape. And that did not come from schools that certified and that's wrong with initials. It's not there. It comes from a ritualization of spirit that's not defined by the word ritual because we don't know the word but we do know the feelings. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. So built on that excellence or yeah? Yeah so I think in terms of the content of the work the people that I'm talking about the content is about it's about building deconstructing the negative connotations of who we are and identity, elevating culture restoring a sense of value and restoring a sense of understanding to the stories that are not being told in the mainstream. There's spaces for all types of stories but most of that broadband space is being taken up by the dominant culture. The stories that are happening but are not being elevated to that level are the stories that I think the people are telling. So it frames a different narrative of the black experience of the Latino experience in America it uses in terms of form it's all forms it's dance it's theater for the stage it's community engagement people like Ebony Golden who work with Body Ecology it's about radical transformation of the female body it's form and how it looks in public space it's poetry it's photos it's all types of forms of communication I think the most important part is that the content is rooted in a love of self and a love of their culture and a love of the community they come from and a desire to engage and work with other communities so that they can understand how to use those same tools to love themselves as well. I just that question about content opens up a discussion that some of us were deeply engaged in in the question of aesthetics as a whole what do you mean by beauty what do you mean by good the content is going to be whatever we are thinking about what will we be dealing with at any given moment but how we express that becomes the aesthetic what form does our content take what form will we deem as sufficient or desirable to present our content to our audience who will be the audience to receive this content and how do you go about doing it so one of the things I can tell you from the period I was with the Free Southern Theater we very quickly came to the understanding that the American stage was dated and that plays as they were being taught to us was not what we wanted to do so we would often I mean we had all kinds of battles about this we didn't necessarily really understand it much as what I'm saying to you now in retrospect I can see more clearly because I'm away from it a distance from it but we wanted to come into a space like this and we look around check out the audience and shape whatever we were going to present given what the audience was we didn't feel that there was a content that in and of itself was so excellent that everybody had to dig it or was capable of digging it you understand what I'm saying so we would say hey if our work is about working with people then we need to look at the people you're working with to decide what kind of work you're going to put it out there and how you're going to present it this may have seen I don't know if you fully understand the technical stuff and the aesthetic questions that are being reared by this but this made a big ass difference in terms of what you do so in Blackout South was to do a production I mean do a presentation here at the time we were coming here we look around and we say that's who that is okay we'll do this part and that and so forth and so on and if we were in a different space with a whole different audience we'd have to tailor it that well you cannot you cannot you cannot develop the immediacy of now with an Aristilian memetic logic you cannot develop what we used to call the jazz aesthetic the immediacy of now working in the now with the audience that you have the instruments that you have the ideas that you have working in the now the alien notion that what you're simply doing is perfecting the reflection of something that pre-existent what we wanted to do could not exist before we did it we couldn't put that shit on paper because it had to have part of it had to meet an interaction of the moment this was a radical change that's why the version of slave ship that Gilbert Moses mounted on Broadway never had quite the impact that slave ship in Clarksdale, Mississippi had tell them John never and some people said what was the difference it was the same player it used some of the same elements but it was not the same player it was a different aesthetic at work and these aesthetic questions I haven't seen many people want to discuss them or get deep into them and now is not the time right now because you know I mean this conference you know this panel is not set up to do it but at some point it might be nice to have some of these discussions because some of us prepared to intellectually challenge the Aristelian notion and you know you might have called it the cold train you know but you know this is another you know my favorite things the same song but it's got some different things I'm afraid to say you know do you all really understand the impact of that you know I mean it completely changes everything and that that impact so that for us theater and duck was getting to it theater was no longer doing a play it was a call and response that's right it had to be in the now it had to work with and you had to use forms that your audience could deal with because the master's tools will never dismantle the master's tools well any tool can dismantle it I agree with all of your law I'm saying if that's what you're going to do just go up in the house but believe me give me a hammer I don't care whose tool it was give me a hammer I can use it and how you use the tool is critical right the master's thinking will not allow you to dismantle the master's house once you dismantle all you're going to do is build another master house until you change your whole approach to what's living maybe we don't need house maybe we need compounds or whatever it's that master's thinking and that thinking see they always told you that we didn't have any theoretical development what it was is the theoretical development we had was totally deconstructing that bullshit that they were trying to tell us was theory some of us were ready to engage on that level but you're not going to hear it you're not going to hear it bring me somebody who wants to talk about theater bring me somebody we don't have a discussion about the logic of drama and tragedy and such where's the tragedy we do not have fatal flaws just by being beyond human that is the ultimate aspect of tragedy they always told me man you're doing some Breckling shit I said I'm Breckling I didn't know who Breck was I subsequently learned who he is and have a lot of respect for who he was and what he was talking about but what I was doing was coming out of a community of people and see when you understand that what your people is doing is hit them than what they're doing on Broadway already you have a different view of all of this shit it changes your mind I mean any Broadway got nothing for New Orleans on a Saturday night I don't know if this is a question that there is an answer to but maybe that's good I just in this conversation about culture in New Orleans and resistance in this history and seeing everybody in this room people who are coming from out of town to support this history and celebrate it and people who have been a part of it I'm just sitting there thinking about somebody who really tried to do some do some education justice work in New Orleans there's 50 some districts right now in New Orleans kids are being dismantled from their communities there's a choice district here so schools are there aren't any community schools left there's a quota you can't go if you live next to a school in most cases you can't go to that school you have to get bused across the city so the kinds of relationships and community power that are so much a part of the culture that we're celebrating right now are being totally destroyed right around us and campuses like this are fueling projects putting people who have no training essentially in education no legitimate training five weeks of training I know it because I was one of these teacher-american teachers and they're most of the classrooms in the city so there's I don't need to go on too much but there's amazing young people and thankfully there are some projects like students at the center but there's tons and tons of kids who are just dollar signs just dollar signs tons of people in the city who are coming down here and making money and I just felt like I need to put that into the space for people who are excited about celebrating this history and thinking about struggle if you care about this we really need as much support as we can and I know there's already support in the room but I just want to make sure that we're talking about it's beyond a human rights kind of violation it's like ethnic cleansing right now for moving or pushing entire populations of people out of the city and making it into a completely different city city and it's it's disgusting and disturbing and I just I want us all to be really talking about what's happening with these young people and I mean it's okay so I'm done so let's figure that out that's your question just to turn to add to that I'm so glad you brought that into the room because that's the reality and that was kind of the only question that I had for you guys today was you know what given the state that we're in now especially in New Orleans where communities are being from every possible angle dismantled African American communities in this city dismantled, pushed out colonized killed the jail made it what's the relationship of theater to that today and what can theater do can't theater do anything some of my theater friends have never forgiven me even for saying I'm a theater I've done theater in a wrong time I've never looked back I've not written a play and I might point out that I'm somebody you can tell by my personality by presentation that I don't give a shit about whether I make it or not within the system but I'm somebody who had that opportunity put out there like I remember talking to Mary who said after Dutchman came out they opened up this young boy and they had a mountain of money with a white naked white woman on top of the scene all you had to do was laugh laugh laugh and that's it that's essentially what they want us to do to get caught in the trap I don't care about theater I care about people and I understand that their theater once you start caring about their theater you are on a pathway that leads you away from the people so theater was not the issue I didn't get into the theater for the theater of it I got into the theater because I wanted to express certain things in the context of my people right? and I refuse to spend even one second figuring out how to defend theater how to keep theater anything, thing going it's about the people we keep putting people at the forefront and that's why that is why as far as the aesthetic goes, poetry lives while theater dies. Why? Because the poetry remains in the now this theater stuff is caught up in the past and in every community in the United States you can find poetry going on in the live sense and theater is dying and if people in theater you need to look at that to me the thing about theater that does sustain and contribute to the kind of situation you just talked about it's when we apply the skills we use to make theater but the product doesn't have to be theater so like for theater we know how to do story circles that doesn't have to end in a play we know how to get people to participate and everyone has the authority of their experience or equal we know how to use theater as you so well said to see that you've got something and that you're perfect you come from a culture that has something and so I think we need to separate theater as plays the product from the theater skills and craft which I find endlessly valuable and I find them especially valuable in partnerships. Who is it who knows something I don't know who's doing work I think is really worthwhile how could I bring these skills to work with them that's what I'm interested in yeah I would just say that in terms of theaters like Columbus and any other art form they're all part of the capitalist structure so the outcome is tethered to a bottom line as tethered to your finances whether or not theaters have died not because of the work they're doing because they have not found the business model that works for them to thrive in this economy so it's about the dollars and the dollars is what turns the wheels and makes sure the doors open and all that stuff and there's a very clear structure that's supporting theater on a tremendous scale that is alive and well and doing great but they're not doing anything to change that structure so you know one of the great examples people say well black folks don't go to theater and I'm like you must be out of your mind I mean Tyler Perry had black folks sitting at home watching theater on bootleg DVDs bootleg DVD bad copies you know folks that don't ever go to theater sitting at home watching bad bootleg DVDs on chip and circuit plays written by Tyler Perry because they found something in it that spoke to them so it's not that the art form is dead it's just that all of these art forms are tethered to a business model that is a representation of capitalism and so it works for the capitalist you know those people that are willing to make huge investments and build spider-man's and build you know these huge Broadway shows that can get people to come in at $240 a seat it works for them you know but in terms of is it transforming our communities how are we using the tools that we've learned in any art form whether it be poetry theater, television, the web mass communications, photo journalism any of those things how are we using them to transform our situation that's the question that's anything how are we using these things to transform our situation so you know I don't call myself a theater artist I don't really call myself a musician or a poet you know I do whatever it takes to get a point across so my aesthetic is is whatever the medium I need to tell the particular story I need to tell it that moment and it comes out in many different forms and I haven't made a whole lot of money and I guess that's why I guess the part that I'm interested in I mean when you start talking about education and the destruction of public schools and so forth here in New Orleans which you know in a lot of places there's a lot of things you can say about but what I you know was taken away from that and hearing some of the other folks is thinking about the question of cultural memory of historical memory and community and what what does it do how important it is I mean one of the things you have to say about what's happened in New Orleans you know from post Katrina is that in New Orleans something happened very dramatically very tragically certain kind of destruction of community disruption of culture and cultural memory happened here in a very dramatic way but the fact of the matter is all across the United States particularly in African American communities this very same thing is going on even though they haven't had a hurricane I just got was down in Jacksonville, Florida a few weeks ago a place I used to live in and well they do get hurricanes in Jacksonville but there was no catastrophic hurricane the flooded the villa that centered historical center of Black Jacksonville but it's just as destroyed as you can possibly imagine just like Beale Street has become a kind of theme park just like Auburn Avenue is a shell of its self just like West Baltimore is the subject of what I consider to be kind of dramatic pornography and the wire or what have you and that sort of a certain kind that would be Black people still live in those cities but when people are dispersed when the institutions are destroyed and so forth it does something so I don't know about theater I mean theater is just one possible way but there's all kinds of expressive culture could be bouncing which is trying to think about how does one maintain something capture something get a hold of something of some kind of cultural history historical memories or like what Kalama was doing a few years ago though it's more thinking to a different project but his listen to the people project of trying to think about well in the destruction of so much here in New Orleans just not just Black New Orleans but especially Black New Orleans try to tell young folks well what was it like to live here before someone said significant parts of the city were destroyed or ethnically cleansed which actually only continued a project a process that had already been going on here and has gone on in all kinds of places where they're like I said like in Jacksonville LaVilla wasn't knocked down by a hurricane LaVilla was knocked down by the city Jacksonville one of the complications you're going to be in our last comment one of the complications I never wanted to and I don't think any of the artists who I worked with wanted to be put into any box any one box even if it was a revolutionary box because sometimes we felt like being silly like sometimes I feel like I'm done sometimes I don't and you wanted that freedom that's what you really wanted that freedom to be able to express the fullness of your humanity which includes sometimes being silly you know so I hope that people understand that from my comments you know I take the hard line that's not the only line I can jump on some other stuff and do some other things too and welcome those other things being done and that's what is frightening about United States today is that whoever is in charge they're always trying to give you one line to walk and that's not human you understand what I'm saying whereas I might talk about the immediacy of the noun and so forth and so on I also make movies and there ain't nothing immediate about making movies that's a different aesthetic and it has a different value and it has a value in and of itself that can be useful but it's not the same as theater we just happen to be talking about theater I just don't want people to leave thinking that you know Kalamu was saying you know all it's got to be this way so forth and so on because I do some other kind of stuff and I understand that and it all has value and we just need to be not afraid of freedom whether we're talking about gender freedom right putting women in charge and that's the issue that I wish we'd bring up you know in terms of FST out of two dudes outvoted dars and said we got to go to New Orleans you understand and why and so forth and so on and why dars didn't want to go to New Orleans and to talk and really investigate that and so forth and so on I'm glad they came to New Orleans I got hooked up with them but don't misunderstand but there's a reality there and people talk about it all the time but I think we should need to investigate it directly the role that women play in the development of everything has often been they've been major attempts to erase that erase it because the American system of capitalism the superstructure that we live under does not want to have women in charge of shit that's the perfect segue to our next panel which is the women of the FST and the white people so thank you guys so much for being here we'll see you in a few minutes but not very long so stretch it we'll see you right back