 Hey, how are ya? My name is Kenny Natsvich and I'm the founder of No Passboard with a core group of artists some years ago, and so if you don't know who's talking to you, this is me. And our next session is called Can You Cry on Cue? And it's being made by Patricia Angelin, Alba Technique Master Teacher, in collaboration with Kevin, and I don't know how to say your last name. Sureing, who's an actor and singer. I'm standing in for Randy Jenner, who is stuck on a train, and so hopefully he will appear. But I want to graciously thank Pat for coming on board and being part of No Passboard 2016, and take it away. Thank you, Karen. Mr. Randy Jenner will no doubt be joining us as soon as the R train allows. I see that we are definitely in New York City by the fact that we are almost always a sea of black. This, to my right, gentlemen is Kevin Sureing. Kevin is an equity actor and singer and excellent mover. And is also involved very greatly in leadership and in bringing together communities. So we're very conscious of this wonderful conference and of dreaming the Americas and No Passboard. When Randy arrives, he may break in or may not. He and I have created something mainly him. You can definitely tell that he was a senior editor of American Theater Magazine for many years. He has created this beautiful class notes for us so that you can have a couple quotes and maybe just be able to stick with us for this half hour or 20 minutes or whatever we still have. And in addition to letting you know since we're probably going to have to cut things pretty short so that we can move on to the other wonderful things we're doing, I'm going to be hanging out at Panera Bread the day after tomorrow for about an hour, seriously, up in the balcony, in case those of you who are local would have any further questions about this and want to know more about what we're talking about today. This is experiential. It's body. It's totally somatic. It's not a psychological technique and we'll tell you a little bit about it now. So I am Patricia Angelen. I am a master teacher certification level five, which is the highest certification possible in international alba emoting, which started in Chile. So this really is a dreaming of the Americas and a, oh goodness, a furthering of universal humanity through the emotions is what this is all about. And I think that we have Mr. Jenner here. Do you want to jump in, Randy, or do you want to sit for a moment and catch your breath? You'd have to. It's being live streamed, Randy. No, no, no, I'm just going to do it. It's a seven block set. The person that hurt in 1994 in Chicago. Please follow this with me. Come up here to do it though, Randy. Just live stream. No, no, no. This is great. This is great. I can't see. So he's breathing is what he's doing. He's breathing. That's how she felt versus on the left. I did. I met her in Chicago many years ago. Thank you, Randy Jenner. Okay. Can I do it again? Hello? Yes. No, we're good. Directional. Got it. Okay. So I want to thank you for coming here and rain. In New York, people tend to be stuck when it is raining. We'd like not to go anywhere and stay where we are. And we are at Alba Technique. Do you want to cry on cue? Now, do you want to cry on cue? Started out as an ironic blog post because people kept asking me since I'm dealing with universal human emotions. And even recently this came up, can you make me cry on cue? And my response was internally, well, yeah, if you've got the time, but do you want me to? Because so many scripts now with playwrights are saying breaks down in tears, you know, cries. And the directors are asking the actors to make sure that they can, boom, get the market to do it. And of course that instantly puts the poor actors into the state of fear, naturally. So I'm dealing with human emotions. That is what I do. It is about emotions. It's about authentic emotion, real in the body. So we're going to just talk very quickly about kind of the what, the why, and the how. Going ahead, Kevin. The originator of this. Doc, can you see around my head, should I get out of the way? Okay. Is Dr. Susana Block, Karen. She goes by Susana Block. And we have just finished a revision of her Spanish language book, Al Alva de las Emociones. It is available on Amazon for those of you who want to read Al Alva de las Emociones. And it's one of, it's kind of her seminal Spanish language book. Most of her publishings have been done in Chile, in South America. And the studies themselves originated in Chile. A lot of stuff comes out of Chile. And I think we're going to be hearing more from Chile and Chileans as the world moves forward and becoming more and more global as Brandy Jenner's organization is in the culture of one world. And I think that's coming into fruition. Kevin has been doing a lot of work in this area as well. And Susana Block is a neuropsychologist. Not a title we hear very much here in the United States. It means she's never practiced clinically. All of her work has been researched. It started out in Chile. She is an associate professor and in the School of Medicine at the University of Chile. And she is also a full professor in the Department of Neuropsychology. So what happened was that they started doing research, not just on visual fields for which she became famous with pigeons, but also behavioral motivations of animals, et cetera, et cetera. And finally, somebody in the medical school said, would you do a human emotion study? And then she said, sure. You know, I had hoped to become an actor when I was an undergraduate. But I realized that it wouldn't be healthy for me to become an actor because I wouldn't be able to handle my emotions. And knowing her very well, she was right. She wouldn't have been able to do that. But it's a little bit ironic therefore that she's pulled together both sides of her sort of Janus-headed self at this point because she started these studies and emotions with her colleagues. And of course they needed naive subjects. And they decided that the naive subjects would be actors. And that's how it came into the theater world, because actors, because we are the next best thing to children. And of course you cannot ethically experiment on children. So they decided they would use the actors. And in the studies, the actors were used, and then they realized that this was really great stuff and they wanted to be taught how to do it. So the studies marched along starting in Chile and then the latest studies were done at the Sinares in Paris where Susana became the director of the research lab. She could set them up any way she jolly well pleased and did. And the French were absolutely appalled. You know, calderous Susana. You know, emotions, emotions, messy, messy things. You're going to lose your reputation. But anyway, so she marched ahead and now we have what she calls all the emoting. So I'd like you to take a look at the screen too well. I will get out of the way. And just notice what you see in this camera. I can't just see anybody. What did you see? Fear and surprise, anticipation, pure joy. Absolutely. Anybody else? Brief terror, you said. Yeah, absolutely. For our purposes right now, and of course that's obviously right, we were all able to see it. We were all able to feel it. Our mirror neurons started to go ourselves. It's very hard not to see that gorgeous little boy giggling away and not to want to start to laugh ourselves. But the most important thing for us in the theater, I think, is that the emotions did not overlap. The emotions boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. As we become adults, I mean very shortly after Emerson's age doesn't matter, things start getting mixed up. They start getting wonderfully complicated. This is not a bad thing obviously, but we lose touch with our core, our neurologically core emotions with the pure response to stimuli. So usually, you know, when you're a little, there is a stimulus, there is a response. And that is what we saw with Emerson. And it's true in the moment. When all the 20th century modalities were trying to get actors to be able to do, to really be able to hear and listen and be in the moment, that child had. So that's what we want. So there were absolutely no mix-ups. So to go back to the studies, the neural studies, what they discovered in their neural studies was that there are six core human emotions. Now this is a theory, of course, to which I obviously subscribe. But that theory is one among many. The ancient Hindus had 10. They would put wonder as one of them. They would put, let me see, there are, I can't think of the brasses right now. You've heard of brass boxes. I'm using Hindu theory of emotion. And so Susanna has six. And they are anger, fear, joy, sadness, erotic love, and tender love. And she and her colleagues believe that these are the neurologically basic for standard human emotions. Coming from the almost the most primitive part of our brain. Coming from the limbic system. And I want you to look at another piece of video here and see what you see in this video. It takes a minute to kill itself off. There's nothing you can do about it. This is from the label we inside out. And they don't know we only have a half of them. If we were on television, this would be dead air. You helped me before, my little characters. And there was also disgust, which is not in Susanna Block's theory of emotions. Now neurologists used to think that disgust was a core emotion. And, you know, emotion, reactivity, it is now pretty universally held that disgust is a reaction. And then the emotions that we have are in that. Less than a nanosecond thereafter, we feel about it. In Susanna's universe, it would be first fear then anger. Boom, boom. You know, it would be disgust. And then whatever else one would feel about it. So there are the effector patterns. Are what this is really about. And the effector patterns are the patterns that create the subjectively felt emotion in the human person. And this is absolutely universal. It is the same in Belgium as in Borneo. So as far as our experience as actors and what we produce in the spectator, it's equally important. In Susanna's work, they strove very hard to have the naive observer's experience in identifying the emotions seen by the naive subjects to be of equal weight, which is very important for us in the theater. So what you feel in response to what I'm doing as a spectator is equal to what I am producing. And I think the most important thing of this particular, well, there's two really important things that this work does for the person engaging in it, whether an actor or perhaps a director trying to understand emotion or whatever. And one is that it puts us in contact with our core humaneness in a way that no other work I think does that I have ever engaged in. And I didn't come to this until 1994. And I am a dame du sartonnage, as you can see. So I've been around the block a few times, and I had already done some useful work in the theater and a little bit of film and television, et cetera, et cetera, before I even came to this in 1994. And it was just an absolute revelation, not because it would replace in actor training any of the other modalities that came out of Stanislavski in the United States, and it was a lot of Adler and Hagen, of course, and Meissner, Strasburg, et al., especially Chekhov. It's an excellent, excellent, excellent addition to Chekhov. But it's an add-on. One of my students said, Pat, I think this is the final puzzle piece. So it's good for the individual because it's no thyself, carved over that window of the Temple of Delphi going into that oracle, no thyself. So this gives us a tool, a mechanism to know the body as the body, as there's been nothing available until this that would enable us and power us to know our bodies quite in this way emotionally. It strips down our complicated adult emotions to get back to the Baby Emerson era emotions. So you know that, and you know it somatically in your body and you're not in your head. So the effector patterns do that. The effector patterns are comprised of breath, breath, breath, breath, as Randy alluded to when he came in. A postural change, a specific posture for each one of the emotions, and muscular tension shifts for each emotion, both large and small muscle groups and facial muscles as well. And so there is a specific, very, very specific, like a cog going into a wheel and you know when it clicks in because you feel it subjectively. And then one is said to induce in the emotion. Now initially this feels robotic because it is very, very, very, very technical. But as it sinks into the body you just get to know yourself, all the complications come in and it frees the person. As a matter of fact, I was sought out by a speech therapist who came over on a Churchill grant last year from Oxford. And I went back and visited her in September and we're going to do a study on the uses of ALBA technique in speech therapy. I'm going out in April to the Mayo Clinic out in Rochester, Minnesota. So this is going to go on now. You guys are really at the cutting edge of this right now in the dreaming the Americas because not very many people know about this. And Kevin and a couple of other of my students have basically told me, Pat, you have to stop keeping this a secret. I initially wouldn't teach people that I hadn't already interviewed in this sort of thing for a number of reasons. So it's very good for the human person. It is absolutely universal and it is simple, simple, simple, simple, but it is not easy. Kind of like T.S. Eliot said, quoting one of the mystics of the 14th century, a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything. So it's something that needs to get into the body in order for the fullness of the freedom of it to come to the fore. So breath, posture, muscular tension and let's just really very quickly. I would like everybody to just take a, I'll tell you when, everybody please just take a quick breath. Please take a quick breath now. Internally assess, let it out. Do it again, quick breath. Now, let it out. Internally assess yourself. What are you feeling? You've got to say it out loud. It doesn't do it. Circulation, okay, really good. Can you tell me what orifice you took the in-breath in? You took it in your nose. What did you exhale through what orifice in your nose? Okay, anybody else? Everybody do nose? You didn't get in? In for my nose out through my mouth. Bad. Most people, if you tell them to take a breath, they have no idea where they took it in and they have no idea where they let it out. And so this is a kind of an awareness thing. Now, please come to the edges of your chairs. Now, everybody here is in the theater so everybody is trained to manipulate another. But let's heighten your own personal awareness. Feel the sits bones. There was a doctor's sits, I believe. SITZ sits bones. And look out on an imaginary horizon line right in front of you. Now, please breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Please elongate the spine. Please release hands or feet or whatever you are observing might be a little tense. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Okay, good. Good. At ease. Any changes, anybody felt any change from the way they breathed before when it was just queued to sudden. More from your diaphragm as you were just doing this. Yes, anyone else? A more conscious breath. A more conscious breath, yes, yes. This is the beginning of a neutral breath. There is, in addition to the effector patterns, the breath, breath, specific breath change, specific postural change, specific muscular tension changes. The researchers noticed that when the actors got into the emotion of sadness, you know, one of the six emotions and that was all quantified and graphed and blah, blah, blah, like neural researchers will do, they couldn't get out of it. There was an emotional hangover of this which any actor knows is very, very much present. And often we will be in an old fashioned class and somebody's done a scene say they've done a serious scene in, it's just a one on one and it's an angry kind of scene. And then whatever the convention is in the class, they say, you know, scene or and or they bother whatever it is that they do this convention. And then they stand there and maybe they'll shake out a little bit and then they'll be ready to listen to what the teacher or coach has to say in response to the work that they just did. So, but you will also notice that those actors after it has said perhaps they'll even say go to neutral and so they will stand there and they'll be like I asked, you know, am I neutral? What am I? Anything else? Tense, anything else? I'm tense, I'm slightly agitated I am so far from neutral. So, they had to decide to find out a way to step out of the emotion. Now these were clinical situations. Neuro research situations. So it's a definite protocol. And so she developed a specific step out protocol which turns the blessed emotions off like a valve. It's absolutely fabulous. Now of course that doesn't do it in real life. It gives you an awareness in real life. But it doesn't, you don't want to turn your emotions off in real life. A lot of people say, can I control my emotions? Since mostly I've been teaching men, when they ask you can you control your emotions they usually mean can I get rid of them? And the answer is no, we don't want to get rid of our emotions. We want to be aware of them so that we can decide with our prefrontal cortex, with our executive brain functionings what we're going to do with those emotions. My family is intact because I have done this work. You know, I almost can't be drawn at this point into an anger reaction which is of course wildly useful and I'm wondering whether it might be helpful for post-traumatic stress work for poor people. So eventually we'll be talking to psychiatrists about that kind of thing. So we as actors need to know about the how to continue and to finish up so we did that and oh, let's listen to that, that's fun. This is Alison. I just want to tell you because I'm so excited. I just had this audition where one of those auditions where I say she got her eyes in one of those things and I never get so available in my entire life. I just took a breath and there it is. Like I'm so freaking clever. So awesome! Whatever it's doing is working. So thank you, thank you, thank you. That was after about her third class. So initially what it does is it opens up the person and makes the person more available to herself or himself. And then as it gradually gets into the body and you know very, very clearly what your anger universally feels like what your fear, et cetera, et cetera. It just creates a tremendous emotional freedom that there's just no other way to get. And so it's universal. It's specific. Eventually it becomes a tool. You put it in your tool box. Your box should bring it out. Some people have asked me you know, well how can you reduce me to only six emotions? Well, if you know anything about pigments, there are only three basic colors. So we've got twice that. It's light colors. Out of basic pigment colors. Red yellow blue we get the work of Picasso and Rembrandt and Brock and Degas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it doesn't reduce us as actors or as human beings. It enhances us. And the Chileans were really onto something because the basic human emotions are basic to each one of us. They don't change. We are absolutely individuals, as individuals as Rembrandt's work from Michelangelo's work. And yet it's the same tools underlying it. So it's wonderful. It's healthy and I love doing it. I love teaching it. And I think that that really is about it. Randy had a question. Oh yes, it's non-psychoanalytical. Yes, it's not a psychological. You do not think something in order to produce the emotion because we know with the James Lange, Thierry William James and Carl Lange, all the way back to the 1880s, it's counterintuitive to us though. We think that we think something and produce the emotion. That's very 19th and 20th century. What actually happens to us is we have the emotion and then we think about it. I mean it absolutely is true. That is accepted neurologically now. But it's so counterintuitive to us as human beings. So yes, it's not psychoanalytical at all. Although we do come to know ourselves and that is a patterning kind of an activity. But that comes after you feel the emotion in your body and then you identify it after all. But it breaks all the labels. It breaks every label you've got and what you think your emotions are right now, doesn't it? Do you have anything to say? I would say this tool has basically connected the dots for a lot of things that I've learned over the years in many different acting techniques. It creates an awareness of yourself and other people that makes things like listening, all these basic acting tools that we use, it sharpens them to the end of the degree. And what it also has created for me is a world of endless possibilities when it comes to emotion. Because for me I look as painting kind of emotion. The emotions are very much like colors. And also going back to the basics thing that emotions are survival instincts. So nothing's really positive or negative upon them. We put a connotation upon them and that's what kind of mixes them. Thank you Kevin. Yes, that's absolutely correct. We are naturally gifted and oriented to put things in labels and put things in boxes. That's a human trait. So naturally as we've gone through life we have put labels upon our emotions. When my sadness feels like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh no, I don't do that in my sadness. Well, my sadness is mixed up and it's different than his sadness. For one thing I've lived a hell of a lot longer. And everything gets patterned into our bodies. So to be able to have a freedom to have a mechanism to deconstruct that and to get back to the Emerson sadness is just such a gift it does not decrease me or you. It just gives us as one of my students says it takes you from an 8 crayon set to a 64 crayon set. So that's kind of fun too. Also one thing I'd like to add too is when you get to really extreme emotional states that you have to dive into for your work sometimes it's hard to step out like you wear your character home almost. This gives you a tool to always step out and be in a place where you're not going to attach emotion that you have in your own life that might be damaging to yourself or to your work. Others. Kick the dog. Seriously. I mean one of our very great current method actors. Who's a fellow at play? Daniel Day Lewis. He has said at one point in the interview, I'm not a good human of actor not to be method. Now of course he's a brilliant actor but he does in order to do what he does. The way he does it is he has to immerse himself and he cannot come out until he's done with the project. He stays. He lost one marriage over it and the wife was an actor so it wasn't that she didn't get it. It's just he was playing difficult characters and came home and metaphorically kicked the dog I have a feeling. It gives actors as well, I'll make it sometimes I'm beginning to think beyond acting as well but it gives actors a tool to understand the emotions as they are in the body and then once you begin to understand your emotions and feel them and it's where are they where is it stuck which muscle is contracting so what we're about is observation we're about know yourself in a whole new way. Okay I think we have to move on and I thank you so much for being with us. I will go to Panera bread between one and two on Wednesday in the balcony for anybody who might be local and want to ask you more questions or of course by email or by telephone. Thank you Randy thank you for that. I thought there was only one. I live such a circumscribed life in Allah. 7th avenue between 28th and 29th. Final note for the people who can't join us, this is actually available online. This is actually available online right now. Class notes. Yeah class notes. Thank you. If anybody's not here looking just tell them cultureofoneworld.org is right up there. Cool so we're going to do like a question for you. Thank you Randy. And this is now we're going into the speedy mode. Back to back to back things happening. And our next session begins in about three minutes. That takes call upstander or bystander. It's moderated by Bianca by Gatorian. It's our media and dramatic art alliance session. And the panelists include Eric and Greg Hittleman and Leslie Amazian. And I'll briefly just say this if you can make your coffee or whatever you need to do at the moment short please do because this is a quick turnaround. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So we're heading back in. So if you're out there getting coffee or whatever and you want to sit on down or stand it's fine. Whatever you want to do we're starting our next session. As soon as Mr. Mr. from the back of the room basically. And I'll hand it over to Bianca in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12. Hi. So we're here at Nope once again talking about atrocities and people and theater and my wonderful guests today are Ray Wright Leslie Amazian who also teaches at Columbia University Greg Hittleman from The Enough Project in Washington DC which we'll be hearing more about I'm sure. And Eric N. Head of Playwriting at Brown University and I don't think I need to introduce him any further. So I just wanted to say a couple of things. I wrote something, well my name is Bianca and I'm a playwright and I run the Guards Alliance and the $10,000 Williams-Roy and Paul Human Rights Playwriting Contest. I have been to Rwanda a couple of times with Eric who takes groups over there and done a lot of witnessing and it's affected my work as a writer profoundly and I thought this might be an interesting topic to discuss today. What sort of moral obligation do we have as we witness someone's story or we hear it firsthand so that's kind of what I wanted to talk about and also whether the role of theater and drama can actually be effective, isn't any way effective. So what I experienced myself was that witnessing actually gave me knowledge and sometimes knowledge of harrowing horrific atrocities, incomprehensible facts about all kinds of massacre slaughters and once you possess this knowledge whether it's firsthand or the stories of survival, you come face to face with some kind of evil that is behind this and this just it really touches you on a personal level and it doesn't leave you and it stays with you and whether your skill is writing or filmmaking or painting or drawing it kind of goes there and that's been my own experience anyway so I just wanted to start maybe Eric maybe we can start with you and you started to take groups of playwrights, directors, students to Rwanda over 10 years ago now and what instigated you to do that, what was the instigating factor and how do you feel this has been effective in the real world. Some thoughts. I think the act of witnessing or socially conscious art is sometimes useless sometimes minimally effective and sometimes substantially effective but never wholly effective so sometimes it is distilled water, it's lifeless it's irrelevant, sometimes it's like plankton and sometimes it's like a whale but even a whale needs water so Uncle Tom's Cabin or famous examples of cultural products that have substantially shifted the conversation having shifted it in a vacuum it didn't come out of a vacuum in the heritage of Stowe's life and it made its changes in the culture in the context of other changes that are going on. That said, so this is part two and then there will be other part two part two is an example of why we shouldn't give up on it despite the variable degrees of effectiveness say there is a person in a hospital bed dying of cancer and this is a germane hypothetical I think a lot of us have been in rooms like that but say there is a person dying of terminal cancer and you watch them die and nothing can be done then there is another person in another hospital bed who is dying of cancer and there is nothing that can be done they pass away but that second person passes away singing a Beatles song and maybe their hearts are slightly elevated with joy that song does nothing to prolong their lives but I think it's nicer that they died with a spark of joy in their hearts or even if it wasn't even if it was a sad Beatles song if they died with their heart inquire with a cultural conversation with every other person who moved that Beatles song I just think it's better so regardless of effectiveness it's better that we do what we do a priest pointed out to me once that every single person that Jesus brought back from the dead eventually died that there was no cure for death but there was a kind of quality of life an arena of realization that made things just a bit nicer so lastly the ideas of witnessing that I think there can be other helpless witnessing that can be practical so you go to a place knowing that your art will fail or be irrelevant but the fact that you are present able to hear stories or to see what's going on allows things more space more creative space you're actually a negative space in a way but you amplify creative potential in the community you enter because of your negative capability I guess there is dispassionate helpfulness so let's say you do enter a circumstance and you cannot help but advocate for what you see even though you're remote from an experience of a particular kind of poverty or physical suffering even though you may be or may think yourself safe from it you have to enter into the dialogue you have to say that's wrong or hey everybody look that's wrong I think as long as you understand your position that you're outside of the experience and own nothing of it and can take no credit for anything going forward then I think that's alright and then there is helpless empathy and I think the work I do sort of falls into this category where in the second category there's a Buddhist saying that you will not always feel your compassion compassion isn't necessarily an emotional experience compassion is a position rather than a position but sometimes you can't help but feel and feel your way into a thing I hope I'm unable to restrain my feeling in certain circumstances so in working with child soldiers or people who are homeless in the province of Rhode Island I can't help but get emotionally worked up about it and write works that are meant to get people emotionally worked up in that case I've got to really remember my helplessness my basic helplessness and write plays that are so damaged in form or so duration and experience that they can't be objectified that the satisfaction of the play can't be in the emotional response but that emotions themselves become a way of tripping forward into some kind of activism so in bringing people to Rwanda and Uganda our first goal is to do nothing our second goal is to do something without ownership and our third goal is to do something and fail for Thank you, that was very succinct It was interesting also the form following the function Thank you Leslie, I wanted to address your work and being Armenian and from a family of survivors I know that's affected a play you wrote 20 years ago that we all know about and now 20 years later you have gone back and written another play that came generations after and how that pain and suffering has still trickled down throughout those generations Do you want to address that and say how being a first-hand witness to your grandparents' stories affected your work? Sure My family lived in Turkey in 1915 the Armenians were slaughtered by the Turks in a massacre that has never achieved actual historical clout It isn't in any single history book anywhere so this massacre of a million Armenians still is referred to as the alleged massacres Now if you grow up with that you grow up with insanity because if your history is denied it creates insanity So my family struggled with silence struggled with not being able to speak about their past or refer to the family members that were killed in front of them My grandmother's father was shot in the face at the pulpit and was a minister and he was speaking So I came from stories like that that sounded untrue to me because how could that be true? So I chose to write out of desperation to try to make sense of the sadness that I lived with and the despair and the number of suicides and the drug addiction that existed in my family I did it for really selfish reasons and not very important reasons and I didn't expect the play to be particularly important My goal was to put something on stage in a main stage kind of fashion not just in a church basement of Armenians who listen to their same story over and over again and if you know any Armenians you know that they have one story they have this story this is the story we write about because every generation since then feels beholden only lives in us so since we've been chosen to tell the story we have to live with that and a way of telling it a way of expressing it is through theater because it has such a sacred and emotional relationship with the audience so yes, 20 years ago I wrote a play which luckily had some traction and created some conversation and it's the first time it was referred to without using the word alleged I got scared after I did that to be really frank with you because I suddenly became a spokesperson for the Armenians which meant that they asked me to carry all their grief and not only that they had demands do this one and do that one and don't do it this way and there's too much food and I don't like the language so via and and and so I found myself going around and getting tired and getting mad at the Armenians and getting tired of the victimization of the Armenians and getting tired of what they wanted from me I was a young mother I didn't want to do that all the time so I pulled away from the subject for a little while but I came out and what I have to tell you is that I've just written a new thing which is that I decided to write something that was distilled as anything could be it has absolutely no production values it's just me on stage telling stories and I did it for the first time yesterday and one of the things I just stand on stage and tell stories as a woman, no woman has done this men have done this, they have opened up their manuscripts and they have read their stories women do the lot a lot a lot a lot they dance it up and present it and make a big deal out of it stories women make it a dazzle razzle and I now am doing this thing where I'm just standing on stage and telling a story, it's an amazing thing to do and part of the story I'm telling is the Armenian story of course and in the audience last night was my endocrinologist who knows me really well and has seen all my stuff and he said to me afterwards everything you said about the Armenians sounds rote that's what happened I've been saying the same things in the same way for too long and so this morning I woke up and thought differently and so it goes thank you yes I forgot where your question was that was perfect great I would like to hear a little bit about your organization and the work that you do and sort of as an outsider looking into theater and drama and writing how you look at its effectiveness and what it's role in play so last night just by chance my girlfriend took me to see the performance of a really interesting interpretation of 1984 the optical done by the headlong theater from the UK in Washington DC the Shakespeare theater great if you have a chance to see it it's powerful and shocking and interestingly conceived and deconstructed and very dramatic as we left the theater knowing that I was coming to this panel I turned to my girlfriend and said so do you think that the people who saw that play tonight would stand up in a moment of total futility in the face of injustice at the risk of their own lives and she said I have no idea but probably no more than anyone else like having seen or not seen the play so I think that touches on this idea of the futility of the act let me go back to another kind of analogous experience that I had when I was young I was about 11 years old and my father took my sister and I to go see the Anne Frank House and in a way Anne Frank House is like a kind of interactive theatrical experience you walk through this story whether you had read her diary or not and experience this first person point of view of a genocide and as we were walking out of the very crowded Anne Frank House narrow stairwells you're really packed in with all these tourists who are fed through this machinery of the house and at the very end this was in the 70s there was a display about something that was going on in South Africa called apartheid which was a racist government structure which segregated black people from white people and was very oppressive and violent and in many ways resonant of some of the issues that were totally relevant to Anne Frank's life and everyone just walked by the display and didn't even look at it no one even paused my dad political and bossy grabbed us and pulled us over and made us read the whole display and talked to us about it and we left but again this idea of futility all these people came out with this sort of virtual experience of moral rectitude but when it really came down to it here was something that was live and present and they didn't glance twice at it so again this sense of futility years later though here I am actually I clock in on my daily job which is the communications director at an organization called the enough project which is headquartered in Washington DC but we also have people stationed in some of the areas where we focus on some of Africa's deadliest conflicts and our work is around prevention of atrocities and prevention of genocide very specifically so places like South Sudan and Sudan are for the Central African Republic the Democratic Republic of Congo Somalia and I'm working in that space now so did that particular experience and that itself in me and did it empower me and did it open up an avenue for engagement I think it was a piece of that so that's one person I don't know how many people went through the Anne Frank House since and I don't know how many people actually moved along some kind of ladder of engagement towards activism but some percentage that's really interesting and I wonder about this whole futility of it what it did was the Anne Frank House influenced you personally and the work you're doing today I've been to Rwanda twice now I think with Eric and I learned something that affected me personally which was the most I think profound thing I learned there was that there was a particular people behind the genocide in an atrocity in Rwanda as there was in the Armenian genocide and that this whole thing could be stoppable and it could be soluble and that was the thing that I learned so for me that was quite profound by going there and witnessing and being in person that I took away and maybe years from now that will affect my work so maybe it's not actually the work that we do and the effect it has on the audience and the effect witnessing has on us as artists and eventually hopefully that will seep out yeah I mean I think that's one dimension I mean there's sort of this pat kind of response oh if I can touch one person you know it makes it all worthwhile and I think I don't know if that's really satisfying honestly and I don't want to just rely on that I think there are other pieces in my work as the communications director in that project where you know people who are working as dramatists, as playwrights as screenwriters whatever working with the word you have some some outputs that are very functional for my work and can help me so you know one example is you know you're putting people out there in the world who have experienced some kind of virtual moment in live theater where they face if they're drawn into it in a way that's not handed to them on a platter and the theater plays in like a kangaroo court where everyone's on the same side and cheering but it's complex and difficult and there's a certain moment where people are challenged to think what would I do with that crossroads of moral choice that's kind of like a muscle memory everyone in theater has the opportunity to experience and muscle memory and sports you know it's like you practice your shot or your swing or whatever it is and you do it enough times when you get up there in the moment you don't have to think about it you just do what you practice doing and you know how to do it you know it's possible and you do it and you do it accurately and often well if not you might face a moral crossroads in your life and it's new to you it's unexpected and you might be a great person who makes who takes an action that you later regret and you regret it because you haven't practiced it you weren't ready and when it came you just didn't think it through or you didn't have the opportunity to really feel it and you made the wrong move when you have thought about when I think about 1984 think about an act like Winston Smith takes where he writes something down that probably no one is going to see that says down with big brother and he's being watched and he feels that you know it's very likely that in that very moment of writing it down he's going to be instantly incinerated crucified liquefied and no one will ever see that paper if you completely mad act actually he takes it so there's also this opportunity to say to yourself you know in the extreme case in the worst case scenario if history doesn't bend towards justice or you don't know whether it's going to how are you going to act in that particular moment and that's an incredible challenge that allows people some people maybe who have been deployed out into the world having gone through that muscle memory experience to be like moral sleeper selves they're out there, they're waiting they're waiting to do the right thing moral sleeper thank you Eric you did a play called Maria Casita which we heard a reading of I think in Uganda and for this you went to Belgium to hear the nun who had burned people in the genocide give her testimony in court and you were witness to that tell us a little about that and what effect that had on the play well responding to some of what's been said I think we're moving in a good direction here it's right to start with futility the world didn't get life right for many thousands of years so futility is an okay starting place now we're beginning to move into some of the positive effects of art for social change or for compassionate art and this relates to Maria Casita it seems we're onto two things the one is that theater can inform energetically and incompletely so there was information I needed to digest and engage with in Maria Casita trial transcripts in the first draft was hundreds of pages long and had all kinds of data in it but I could never really get to the end of the data it was all too complicated and I'm not a data guy so I tried to put in a play the idea of getting at information so that the vector of moving towards information would carry on into conversations and the play to whatever extended ever work led to some conversations where people got to recontextualize the best and the other is this idea of practicing habits of virtue where if you see enough movies and people are kissing each other all the time maybe you're a young kid and shy the moment comes when it's time to kiss somebody and you've seen it done a thousand times so you can kiss somebody you can do it and that leads to bliss and communities and all kinds of things cast here I think the number one virtue that theater can practice kissing is one of them is the idea of strangeness and that goes to what you were saying with the problem of the road that at least in my faith tradition the heart of good tradition is welcome the stranger and be the stranger who will be welcomed love the stranger as yourself which means to be a stranger to yourself so a thing that theater can do is create a strange place in which you can enact and ideate your strangeness and yet move forward I can be strange and move I can be strange and create so Marie Casillo was attempted to be constructed in a way that was perpetually strange and off-balance so that you would lose track of suspense or character or some of the conventions of theater Emily Mendelson is in the audience she did a bang-up job of directing at least when done properly the play is not interminably long so you don't have to stay in a strange place forever but it's meant to be a place where you can practice being strange and that means being in common with every other being on the planet together we're all strange so incomplete information and the practice of strangeness can I talk to that I just think that what a wonderful thing just to use the word strange and how inspiring for anybody to be in theater to identify what is strange and embrace what is strange about yourself and give yourself the opportunities to experience that and I think one of the things that I find about being a writer I was an actress before I was a writer and teaching playwriting at Columbia is that I really encourage my students to think about the words we use in theater because they can get tired and we don't know what we're saying and we think that we're actually moving forward the kind of boldness but I shy away from words like important I shy away from words like heroic I definitely move toward words like strange but even that is word you need to think about and one of the words that I think for instance like I'm very much in love with what both of you do I'm not really a witness I'm too scared to do that and I'm not a traveler I don't go to places I came from an Armenian family who came from Armenia and never went anywhere outside of 10 of line it just didn't happen we didn't travel so I witness things very personally my experiences are very emotional personal and in my social life one of the things that I urge anybody who is interested in the arts is to think about what voice means just the word voice because we use it a lot in the theater and I think it's a word that needs to be earned when we say what is our voice what is your voice and how do you learn that and to me what it has become is what are my questions and if you can actually think about what are my questions it will take you to that strangeness it's a way to go so thinking about strangeness also I think one of the services that writers can do to support our work in activism in pushing policy change in research work that educates in our in our communications work that builds communities is for people to also use the power of reporting and I think that goes to asking questions you know a play can be about something that is very personal to you but it can still include things that aren't just within that category of right what you know it can be something it can be right what you are learning or what you want to know or what you're trying to find out and I think that that is very empowering in terms of writers who are struggling with that blank page what am I going to write about so often classes of writing people writing about things even in their own hearts they feel that they're banal there is no subject that is banal really if it's treated properly everything can be strange and magnificent and meaningful but I would encourage you to think about the possibilities of stretching to places that you don't know that are mysterious and doing research and going places and not even just physically going places intellectually going places historically going places and asking questions so that's something else that you can contribute to helping bring awareness around issues and also shifting discourse on issues that functionally is when you think going back to 1984 again there's this possibility as writers to empower a conception Orwell said something like one time he was thinking about music and thinking how a tune can be propagated beyond the life and presence of a composer into all kinds of future realms and other realms unconceived but that it lives on and in the same way that Richard Dawkins talks about the meme and this idea of a cultural piece that takes on its own virality and life and moves through culture and that's something that I'm always looking for finding a way to distill something that is very complicated like arcane or wonky like kleptocracy how can violent kleptocracy that is taking place in South Sudan for example or in Sudan and actually there's a great piece that I would recommend everyone read Nick Kristof in the New York Times this weekend when soldiers are more feared than crocodiles I think is the title please read it he goes to South Sudan and experiences this realm but what he's doing is he's creating an idea in people's minds a mini micro narrative or a microstructure that people can actually share I can take that I can take that think about a phrase like politically incorrect which I think is being deployed so violently to oppress people right now to shut people up from standing up against oppression and racism that's on the flip side a way that words and conceptions can become viral in a negative way but you can also deploy a word like genocide like Rafael Lemkin brought this word forth and now it's international law so you can all play that role you can deploy words that I can then take and further amplify and other people who work in my business can further amplify an activist can use to understand and can shape and shift policy even if only a thousand people see your play in a cycle of iteration or a couple hundred or a dozen people see it that conception if it has virality could potentially live on for years that tune continuing to play and being incredibly impactful we're moving into Mac Wellman territory I was just going to say Mac always says right what you don't know about being contrary as you so there's the idea of the strange but it also goes to Cornness and to Sponkmeyer and the Uncanny that there's the idea of the strange and then there's this idea of the right word but then there's the idea of X which is a Wellman concept that poetic language can be very firm formula for the unknown rather than the answers or the engineering it's problems that don't have the answers in them so a misuse of art a frequent misuse of art is that doctors want to get a community to take HIV drugs for example and they'll go into a community and say take HIV drugs and the community is not just not getting it the link isn't being made so they'll go to artists and say write us a play that says take HIV drugs so plays will come out and somebody will come downstage and say take HIV drugs and it's not working what might work better is the algebraic equation where a problem is posed whose solution is inevitably the taking of these HIV drugs but what you want to give the community is the problem the problem and a way of working through it that could lead to lower corruption or sobriety or whatever and I'm speaking in communities in where are they so genocide is a very good word very important word but it's also a quantity and it can be devalued in a way that X no quantity yet can't be devalued so classically it's something I've said before genocide became law became an absolute terminal line the worst thing possible and triggered international response then George Bush the younger uses genocide to describe what's going on in Sudan to demonstrate that he could use the word without any meaning that we could call something in genocide and no longer have to respond to it so that's where artists need to reintervene and create the algebra of atrocity what is the formula for a soul sickness that will result in ethical emergency action that's great and I guess I'd like to add to that I think we've talked about this on these panels before when you have atrocities such as war and genocide where people are stepping outside of the rules of society there aren't words enough to describe that atrocity and so you must almost like step out of the rules of grammar and language and create new language and new words which is the Matt Bowman territory to sort of be able to match the atrocity because there are no words to describe what happens when you kill a million people that is just so inconceivable so I think that's part of our I guess license we can take and some of the tools we have to play with I also wanted to touch on the just lightly on the subject of moral obligation I feel when I hear someone's story that I'm then carrying the weight of their story and I always feel like I need to pay back or do something with that and that's sort of a heavy weight to carry I remember I was listening to 800 hours digitizing 800 hours of Armenian genocide, oral histories and it was so depressing and you're carrying all these people's stories like what do you do and what responsibility maybe Leslie you can speak to that do you feel as an artist when you have your family's stories do you feel some sort of moral responsibility to deal with this in your art I could never have done what you did I couldn't listen to 800 hours I would be overwhelmed by that I'm a long stretch of time I would know how to get around that and get a close with you that would overwhelm me my experience is a small experience and keep emphasizing that because small experiences are a value too I'm not really grand I can't handle big numbers like that I have my family my family where my grandmother would sit in silence and stare out the window for a long stretch of time and it was so clear that she was looking at something else and just the image of her looking out the window is enough for me to write from and that my father was a physician along with all the brothers in his family and his father his father was forced to serve in the Turkish army taking care of Turkish soldiers when they returned to camp after a day of killing Armenia my father prepared them and as a result of that my father and his brother were able to leave Turkey and come to America and they came as broken people they didn't have language they didn't have a place they were persecuted and no one cared and that's all I knew I knew that I had some facility with language I knew that I was brave enough to try and so after working as an actress and having a modest career moving along just fine but not great I easily put acting aside I happily had a child and then I sat down and I wrote a play called Nine Armenians which was my family story and I also wrote that play after my parents died I wrote an entirely different play which was Vicious the first play was a happy family in a driveway who suffered sometimes the second play was in a psych ward with a man tied to the bed and that was my true story and it took me 22 years to get to it so we all have our all I want to say is tolerance of getting to know yourself and understanding what your limits are and then try to push them a little bit but there's a lot of information if you're willing to look at yourself and be with yourself and see what, in what way are you brave? I've come to think of myself as a brave person despite all my fears and phobias I've figured out the ways that I'm brave that allows me to write more authentically if that helps you or meets anything You were saying something interesting about the maybe you could just relay the story about the elephant poaching and working on something that helped actually change a law in Congress or something I mean that to me is amazing that you could have that kind of impact Well I think I can touch on that and I think what's what's important is we started at futility and I think that that's important I think coming at this if you want to write and you want to engage and you want to be an activist, any of those kinds of things you do have to on some level come to it with some level of humility, otherwise you're insane there might be moments where you get excited and you feel that the possibilities for change are imminent and enormous and sometimes that's the case I mean there are transformational moments in history but I think and the other piece of it is going back to that idea as a creative person you know the possibility of having anxiety around what am I going to write about an empty page an empty canvas and thinking about oh everything has already been written about Shakespeare it's over now after or something like that there's nothing on that grand scale that I can address there's nothing of that significance even close to it that I can engage with and so my work has to be marginal, it has to be constrained and limited and possibly narcissistic I don't think that's true at all I think that we are all living in a moment where all around us and within ourselves are dramas and situations and moments of and moments of moral crossroad that are as powerful, important, dramatic critical, urgent as anything in all of human history right now for every single one of us and I work on crises in deadly conflicts in Africa but I mean it's in our American electoral process right now it's in your house probably, it's in your neighborhood most definitely it's something that you see every day and it's there, your content is there are you willing to engage with it in a way that is courageous in the sense that it's honest to yourself and to your limits coming at it humbly with ambition I guess would be a way to think about it and then go back to what can happen so in the last couple of years we've been working on many different issues human atrocities but we've become recently more involved in dealing with the trafficking and poaching of elephants in particular in Africa because of the human toll we come to it from a human atrocity perspective and there's really incredibly violent groups that are funded and fueled and incentivized by some of the prophets in the ivory trade just for example so our group was drawn into some work in that space and we became involved in this last year in trying to help push some legislation in congress around anti poaching global anti poaching and we were able through our efforts to actually engage an activist community to advocate directly on the hill to do research in the field and bring original information back and share those stories work with artists and creative people one person that we worked with was Oscar winning director Catherine Bigelow who was incredible in helping with this with this effort who did a short film about it and the human toll and the human side of it and the empowering and profiting by armed groups in the ivory trafficking space and at the end of last year we were actually able to create to create such momentum that and I can say for once in our work often you can't say lots of different people work in these spaces but in this particular case we helped push legislation over the tipping point in the house a bipartisan group came together if you can imagine it Tea Party Republican to progressive democrat came together around a bill and passed in the house the global anti-poaching act which is now in the senate and we are now pushing hard to get that passed and once that passes in the senate we will actually have a powerful impactful law that doesn't just wag its finger at the others in another country but in fact looks at the international financial system looks at anti-money laundering and lots of things that the US government can do actually functionally to impede that very violent for both elephants who are teetering on extinction and human beings who are facing atrocity as a result of that trade so that had a lot to do with storytelling I would say half of what we did in that advocacy campaign was literally just sharing areas I think we are almost done but I would like to open it up are there any questions anyone has for our panelists to what extent do the playwrights think that it is important to implicate the spectator in the events that you are talking about in the whatever the atrocity is and to what extent do you think it's just important to tell the story of what happened I don't really believe in audiences I don't know that they exist I've never seen one I don't get that concept what an audience is a spectator, somebody is seeing it I think we are all making a thing together so that a play recognizes radical incompleteness and rely in humble parity on the energies of everyone in the room is vital to me to a certain extent I know what you mean but really more and more as I get older and crankier I don't feel an audience I don't feel like I'm speaking from myself to another place I'm only interested in harmonizing with energies that I perceive so I try to move myself towards heat and share in that heat I speak in a certain way or with a certain vocabulary but it's no more privileged than the silence of the audience if they happen to be a silent audience but a squealing of the audience if I'm the Beatles or whatever all together we're making the one sound and it all counts the idea of either a playwright or a play that's sort of thinnest or tips down from an elevated place and spills out into an audience that an audience then has to appropriate that I don't like that in Bearville I don't buy it so I'm just practically speaking I'm interested in forms like storytelling where anybody can join the story circle or that place that are so big and take so long to produce that they have a cast of a hundred so that it doesn't really matter if anybody shows up to see it because you've all made it you've all made it together are you using the word spectator because of the director Eugene Obarba are you referring to him or is that your one spectator I'm just using it as the person who observes what is happening in the space who didn't necessarily write it I'm just asking an intention and an interest in whether as a writer you're interested in implicating the listener or whether it's just an offering to them of something you think they should know about well what I find with the playwrights that I work with is that when we take in consideration what we think we want the audience to do or what we think we want to share with the audience or how we're going to inform the audience or how we're going to teach the audience immediately a shift happens to the work itself that makes it less sincere it becomes a little condescending many things but that's the word that came to mind right now it becomes a less innocent project and the wonderful contradiction about theater and everything about theater is a contradiction if we all know that you're there you must be there for this to survive but there is an importance to understand that what's happening is very honest and the investigation is a personal investigation I don't really think you can write plays with the audience in mind it becomes self-conscious segues become too long bat stories become too long things become, they start feeling like sitcoms which is a very different thing so I think that if you're telling on a story your spectators will spectate I guess I'm thinking about Holly Hughes and Karen Finley and people who I think spoke from a particular perspective in making their work that I think really did I think of Holly saying it's about who gets to tell their story and about how events implicate PTA and I'm thinking about this conference which is on spectatorship and so I'm thinking about how to address people seeing stories of atrocities and what effect it can have on that I would like to just recommend to everybody if you haven't heard of Eugenio Barba that you look him up he has the most wonderful book called Eugenio Barba and then in parenthesis he says burning the house he addresses much of what you're talking about right now which is why I thought you would just come off that book Eugenio Barba is his name Emily did you have a question I second that but just to follow up with my hand but I think the spectator in the transaction is the play the play is watching the audience and listening closely to the audience and reporting back on what they heard she handed it to me thank you Emily I just want to problematize that a little bit and maybe it's for the cultural appropriation session later but just in speaking to you I feel strongly about this because I make work that comes from communities that are usually international communities that are usually being shown to an audience that's not of that community so I think actually there is a setting in which who the audience is and thinking about that is extremely critical to the work and I've seen a lot of work frankly done that is highly problematic because it's not thinking about that so the difference between a work that's created by let's say an Arab playwright for their community about their community engaging with the political critique of their society that then it's brought here and shown to a community that has absolutely no knowledge of that society other than it's a barbaric place where people kill each other over sectarian whatever stereotypes we have in our mind so I'd love it if you could speak as people who are working in international context too whether and how you think about the way that certain stories either reinforce or problematize the ideas that a body of people who are not involved in the creation of the story and have not lived anything close to the story often witness that and how that affects their perception of places and particularly cultures that are already marginalized humanized and stereotyped in any transaction that the events must not be exotic or merely exotic and in moving a piece into different circumstances the exoticism has to be mitigated so a mantra over the past couple of years for me has been aesthetics as reciprocity are you representing your piece in a way where there's an equal exchange between giver and received so this idea of hospitality again which is our strangest mutual to each other rather than you're the authorized consumer of my exotic product and I think I would add to that first of all one piece just being giving agency to the constituency that is participating in that theatrical experience whether to bring people in from those communities to participate in the construction of it or the production of it or to find a way to open it up for that engagement I think for me just as someone who loves theater and enjoys has had a lot of powerful experiences in that in that space there's a difference I think and I don't know how to really define how it's constructed differently but sometimes a play that has supposedly moral content of some kind can really feel like I think I used this term before like a kangaroo court everyone in the audience is sort of told villain, hero, judge we all judge in this way this is the judgment everyone walks out with sort of this shared sense of rectitude but no one has been challenged to really understand or have any empathy for the real real problems inherent in that drama there is no there's no opening space there's no danger there's no risk it's not live it's can't actually look a play is written so in a way all has already predestined what everyone's going to do on stage sort of but when you're really experiencing either I guess on the as an actor or director or writer but also as someone in the audience who's there's a moment where you can forget that it's not happening right then in fact sometimes it really is almost happening right then and it feels so much on the edge of being truly live and present with every possibility that's when you have someone even in a movie stand up in the audience say don't go into the closet there's a guy with an axe as if the film real isn't already rolling out to have that sense of risk and danger where you really are challenged to feel that it could go any which way and what would you do it's a different then you're not in the kangaroo court anymore now you're in a place where people can actually build that muscle memory just on a very personal level I wondered about what it would be like to have an Armenian play happen in Turkey and this last play that I've been writing that is the vicious one the hard one the one that's really out there I've been writing that for three years and over the course of the three years that I've been writing that I moved back into New York City and I happened to move across the hall from a Turkish family exactly across the hall they're five feet from us they're an entirely Turkish family and I decided to knock on the door this is a completely personal one-on-one story and say I would like to ask you what you think happened to the Armenians in 1915 and we sat down and we had that conversation however she was a denier she said the Armenians instigated it and I had to listen to that I had to listen to it didn't happen we don't think it happened we don't agree with you and I'm on the other side of the wall writing all the stories that I know and yet it was a step it was an interesting step and what would the next step be after that I think I think I've wasted time though of finding your questions and I think they're really good questions so more time will be spent and I'd like to just close with writing the best story possible is what I found in my experience has transcended all the different sort of cultures and just to try and write the best possible thing you can I'd like to thank on my hands keep going but what I'm asking while the setup is happening is that actually there's a part of the thing that's going to happen in the schedule throughout the days and we've got these little what I call 5 minute pop ups and this one belongs to Eric oh no yes as soon as you're here you're on for like a little bit while a pile of stuff is happening behind you perhaps or you can stand here because you're going to have to 5 minutes what should I talk about my nicer good well I'll go to where the word sits in me so going back to this idea of a dying person sitting on a needle sign it's nicer I have a very it radically incomplete or sentimental understanding of Buddhism but to whatever extent I've been able to approach it I sense that it advertises detachment let go and I can talk about emotions in that term too I guess nothing means anything it's all illusion but feel a little bit happy and that's a philosophy that really resonates I go with that so in Catholic terms or certain Christian traditions that you're an utterly contingent being that you're you're not able to save yourself something else will save yourself you're completely helpless but you should kind of spend yourself in a matrix of happiness that worthless as you are you should probably be a little bit happy it becomes axiomatic and it goes to the idea of X so in the algebra of existence that the premise is that happiness is a little bit better to have than unhappiness and that there is a level of happiness which is optional so that you can actually choose to have so art is part of the optional happiness that's available to contingent humans hanging in dread over the canyon of duty that we can hang there seeing who I need your love be and maybe hang there it's a little bit better and going to and emotions I was thinking about emotions and experience that I feel I'm so my position as a writer is this idea of helpless empathy that I can't help but having these feelings that I have but understanding that I'm what I mean by helpless in that situation is that my feelings don't really matter or aren't really doing anything they matter to me I guess but they're not what it's really about I'm not moving towards an emotional satisfaction I'm not moving bearing my emotions forward I'm not moving through emotions when I crawl forward helplessly towards some evolutionary progress or towards some light that draws me on some happiness that I'm aspiring to emotions are the gravel underneath my knees the problem that I move across so I think theater can waste a lot of time trafficking in emotions because emotions like crack are saleable people seem to like them they can be easily reduced and rapidly transferred they're the bitcoin of human experience emotions or they can be virtual that way I think theater is better at helping us get past emotions to something that's really not private property it's not about our experience it's about that which experiences us or the big experience that's beyond all destruction Sam Shepard has a nice essay about that where where he was he was acting and he was on a motorcycle that was bolted to the back of a truck with a camera on it and he was like driving somewhere with real intent with this manly American intent and he had an earpiece in his head the director was saying more emotion experience more emotion and so he was trying to experience more emotion feeling all these things I'm really having an experience now and he started feeling really proud of himself oh I'm really wow I'm acting I'm experiencing things but then the truck hit like a bump in the road and his motorcycle uncoupled and he flipped and fell in the motorcycle crash and he's fine now Sam Shepard's fine this was a long time back but it was as if the universe said not that experience this experience there's gravity and serendipity and things like that so I like a theater that recognizes that there are forces in and around it that are superior to it and that it's it is most ethical when it's leading us to abandon emotions or rise above emotions in so far as their attachments that's my five minute interpretation so so in the spirit of moving past emotions or getting our own experience together so let's talk about something epic like epic plays so this is the epic plays panel this is the epic plays panel I'm just going to briefly quote what's here how does the playwright breathe in big today how does she break out of predestorial expectations and economic limitations to create something other new and original let's I know people got to do things like snack and embrace and use that and that's good we're going to take advantage of the time we have I've asked everybody to introduce themselves I'll start very quickly I'll start I'm moderating I'm a playwright I'm a professor at USC I'm a founding member of the Templars Hi, my name is Megan I'm also a founding member of the Templars I'll have several on this panel I'm a playwright and a screenwriter who lives in Montana I'm Tita Arter also a founding member of the Templars he's well and their fellow writer and novelist who lives in Montana Hi, I'm LaNora Champagne and I'm a solo performer and playwright and director and I teach here at Gallatin and I'm a senior actress and theater and performance Hi, I'm Jacanti Saxena Okay, thank you and I'm a playwright and one of the other co-founding members of the Templars which is a Los Angeles playwright's collective Hi, am I good? Okay I'm David Herskowitz I'm a director and I run a small theater company here in New York called Target Margin Theater So that was perfect and now I think we're going to engage in something hopefully that's akin to conversation although maybe there's something presented but for the most part I hope we're kind of bat the ball in the air and keep it up as long as we can and maybe you'll help us too definitely the theme of the panel is something that was inherited and it's a good thing to inherit Epic Theater I'm going to bore you for a moment with it's not boring but maybe some of the original definitions from Piscattor from Brecht I've tried to do a paraphrase to remind you, Epic Theater not necessarily anything with normal gladiators but rather could be, could be, but resisting a more powerful opponent No, I'm looking at my looking at Judo for those who were here earlier Here it is, so indeed Epic and sometimes called Dialectical Theater suggests that a place should not cause the spectator to identify simply the traditional terms with the characters or action on the stage but rather should provoke radical self-reflection for the viewer address issues of contemporary existence and provide a critical view independent from popular forms and or expectations so according to this vision of Piscattor and Brecht Epic Theater appeals to reason over emotion alienation and utilizes an episodic structure instead of that Aristotelian that we might expect but indeed definitions change and I think that's the most exciting part of being alive is watching definitions change and so we're here to possibly think about what Epic Theater means in our hands at this moment I've devised a few questions but I think I'll just throw it out to you right at the beginning and then just continue to spice the pot what's Epic Theater you guys and feel free now in your hands I don't think of my work as Epic Theater per se I definitely use episodic structure and fragmented structure for me the thing that's sustained in my work is a fragmented associative structure rather than a linear Aristotelian you know rising action climax, day new mall I don't really use that structure so I think for me what came from Brecht is the idea of making strange as a way to startle people and to learn or looking at it differently I don't think of my work as Brechtian per se but I think that I learn from some of his strategies and specifically from Walter Benjamin who talked about how in the modern era we experience life as a series of shocks or fragments rather than a sustained experience and I think some of that carries into my work I'm really interested with the Brechtian definition of Epic Theater, the idea that emotional catharsis makes an audience complacent and from working on a few different pieces recently the piece I'm working on now and my most recent play looking at wanting to enact theater that has some sort of social movement to it where you're exploring an idea with the hope and intention that that creates a thought process within someone's within your audience that might make them want to behave differently I think my personal aesthetic always just gears to the theatrical so I've always enjoyed breaking the fourth wall and playing with time and he's kind of larger what makes a play different than a movie just this really kind of theatrical aesthetic and with the Epic Theater kind of examining the idea that that aesthetic isn't just because it's fun it's because that really can potentially motivate a different kind of response to a play so that to me is really what I try to pull out of it I've experimented with writing episodically and failed miserably I like to begin with some like realism and complacency and then use different strategies to either slowly or suddenly subvert that like kitchen sink kind of situation once I guess the audience might be somewhat lulled because that you know that gives a bit of a shock and then you can at that point start to question what is like what is the everyday what is the more banal existence and what is sort of lying underneath how can it so easily easily be flipped what is constructed the first reality that you saw initially so just sort of playing with that from this initial you know this initial kind of flattened space I think I'm like you sort of veer towards sort of basic realism and I started playing with time by accident like it just came in the writing process and it scared the shit out of me and I was like where am I in this story okay what's happening and I kind of I don't want to make it sound like you know the characters talked to me and I mean because people you know playwrights sort of have their different process but as I was writing it I was really surprised and felt somebody was talking about the coming to your piece with humble you know the humble expectations or humble ambition and that's exactly sort of what happened and I wrote this piece where I just felt like I couldn't tell the story in that natural sort of not kitchen sink but you know real time space which is how I was taught at Sarah Lawrence just something has to happen in this 30 minutes and you know like what it's you know I was taught like it's more exciting minute one to minute 31 like keep it in that room what happens in that and that's a totally fine thing and it works for some things but I found myself not because I think that I was trying to shock the audience but more because the story needed to be told in a way that was bigger than that 30 minutes then you have to sort of listen to that and someone was earlier saying just write the best play that you can and so for me that was part of it it's just adding that epic idea and then seeing how far it could go I guess that I experienced this question in my working life primarily as a matter of difference that is to say it always seems to me that there are a lot of people in the theater who spend enormous energy and effort collapsing differences erasing differences or collapsing the space between things that are different and that just doesn't excite me the opposite thing excites me so for instance they take a play and they want the audience just to fall into it they want to do they're killing themselves to put whatever is happening on stage as close as possible to the audience and make the audience feel like they're in it that they all that and so then it becomes about standards of believability about like forgetting things and just losing yourself in that or the believability of the emotion that's happening on stage that we go with all that stuff and or collapsing the space between an actor and a role like we're really we're really gonna we're just gonna erase that and they're gonna become like one but that's just not how I live these things I always see both of those things or all of them and I'm always excited by the difference I'm excited by saying wow that's something I totally don't know and have never seen that's tremendously electrifying to me or when I'm watching an actor on stage I never forget that there's an actor there really and I still love allowing myself to forget on some level and say oh god I can't believe he's gonna do that you know because I get that they're creating some you know a putative fictive reality on stage and the game the rules of that game they're creating as so often the case are to get me to accept those rules and kind of indulge in and embrace that fictive reality and so I can enjoy going along with that but I never forget it and in my own work I'm always engaged with and that's not a project that interests me at all it's a project that essentially is inert it has its pleasures but it's it's a fairly base pleasure and the pleasures that I get from seeing all those difference those differences kind of flashing around on the stage that's what turns me on and so the moment that you do that then all kinds of other things become possible that I think circle back to connect to more traditional received ideas about what epic theater is in that original Brechtian sense that you're thinking of and so the work looks that way because it's not about saying come drown in this it's not about saying wow she's really crying or you know all those things what a great Polish accent you know the things that people I love these answers um so in a certain way each of you touched it and I wonder if we could just touch it a bit more you know and I think it comes down to our least our moment for the next 45 minutes or thereabouts but you know what's real to us and what is not real and you know real is a real and easy thing is it a very difficult thing is it an over full one train going downtown you know and stuck between stops or is it you know what is it and what is it on stage and what might it be pieces you're working on right now what's real and how much you push the real and as you're feeling the real in your work right now and then what is not real in a sense what are we creating what are we making um I'm working on a piece right now that's kind of inspired by the serial podcast the first one with Adnan I know a bunch of you probably addicted to that guy was um and a lot of my friends we were all sort of binge listening um which I think is amazing because people don't listen to anything anymore and so we're all like podcasts like they're no visuals it's amazing um but at the end of the podcast I don't know but I felt very um incomplete because I felt like was this real like was this whole thing trying to determine whether or not this young man was guilty of this murder and I was going along the along the journey with this woman who was my guide Sarah um and then she let me kind of down I felt like because I don't know and she seemed to be totally okay with like me not knowing I mean like yeah that's crazy I don't know if he did it or not okay so serial second season two and I'm like hold up wait a minute um we left him there like we left the story there and so I got inspired to write this play about what is our responsibility to that guide that narration um especially as writers like we're taking you on a journey um and throughout that journey as playwrights we care like we care about the story we care about guiding people to something um at which point are we allowed to let go of your hand and have you experience this and not have you as the person who's involved feel like we let you down and so that line of reality is something that we're always pushing but sometimes it doesn't obviously get pushed to the point where you know you leave a peace feeling sort of incomplete and I want to take that further and figure out like how can I not give you the bow tie ending right and then but how can I also not make you feel like am I supposed to clap now like is this the end like you know like when you go see a play and you're like I don't know if that was the end that would be great yay you know but there's a medium there right and as a writer I want to explore what that is I um I love this question about reality in theater because I feel like I'm a sort of fatally limited person in this regard because to me it's all real it's always all real it's like I always have these curious experiences where somebody on a production says do you want a real banana or a plastic banana and the only answer I ever can give is but a plastic banana is real I mean it's all you know that's what's so exciting to me about the theater is that you know ultimately finally everything on stage has the same ontological status you know it's all equally real and that's real um it's not always very realistic which is a different question film is fabulous at being realistic in ways that we never will be of course of course but it's always makes me think of the um I think this is a true story that a friend of mine told about having an oral exam at the school of social thought in the University of Chicago where he was being examined on Hamlet and the examiner said do you think the ghost in Hamlet is real and the student gave what to me is now the only possible answer to questions like that which is do you think Hamlet is real I mean like what are you talking about you know and of course of course I get as I said earlier I get that like yes there's a fictive reality and if we embrace that but what's interesting about it is that that fictive reality is challenged and crumbles and is contradictory at every turn at least if the play is good you know um that's so that's sort of what's inspiring to me in terms of making stuff um for me I'm really interested in reception and um I think that what you see and what you think is real uh really depends on where you're looking from and I think that has a lot to do with issues of class and culture and all sorts of things um and so I think it's hard to say uh to delimit what's real and what isn't because I come and look at things I come from and look at things with a certain from a certain perspective there was a production called D is for dog that I think was in New York for a while but it started in LA a few years ago and it was this like beautiful 50s style house with the house wife and she would direct this for her kids um the food was all fake you know they put like a plastic pancake on the plate and she'd pretend to turn on the water and like they'd act like there was water and about halfway through the play it's revealed that they're actually all living in an underground bunker and that there had been you know like this nuclear explosion that they're all under and the wife picks up a plastic pancake and has been like you know there's no food here and there's no water and they're getting all their you know vitamins from like these pills that they're taking um and it was just a moment that has always really stuck out to me because as an audience member you're you so buy into the way that they're fake their fake food is real food to you and to have the actors stop and go you know no this is fake was just this incredibly like goosebumps was a really good play um but this idea of playing with that reality um because it is all real and you know it's real to us and it's real to the actors but to to play with that line um I think is really exciting um my thought I write a lot of kind of magical realism so worlds that are very much not meant to be real um the play I'm working on right now it's kind of what happens after 12 tonight um and it's actually a climate change play so 12th night it's floods and waves and tsunamis and they're on this little island um and the the island worships the moon when our production is a pole dancer we have a great pole dancer in our class um so she's spinning up as the moon the whole time and then the moon decides to just leave everybody in a band and everyone and we talk a lot about like was this real is this symbolic I mean are we thinking this is a real place and the same thing is David which is to me it is all real and it has to be real but the idea that this reality is so different from the day to day reality is what I think allows the message to be projected in a way that really you know is more impactful I kind of talk about a lot with my work like the deeper you go I think the better your jokes have to be like if it's going to be really dark and you're really being you know or even just darkly emotional you have to balance that out a little bit and I think with some of my own work I've noticed it's easier to not push an agenda but to at least reveal a line of thinking that you're excited to explore with an audience by adding elements that are more fantastic that allows it to be accessible well I think about the older George Bush going to buy socks in the supermarket and he didn't have money like he didn't know he'd never carried money that's a different reality than mine you know not that I carry a lot of money so good um think about those guys who just got to her obviously Rick I'm correct didn't he have a train ticket in his pocket on opening night for a three penny opera and he always sat in the back depending how bad the reaction was he was heading to get on the first train out but you know he put his work together in one way or another you know facing beyond recession right depression in Germany brown shirts, black boots all that stuff politics and more than that one might say we're approaching moments where we have a lot facing us as artists and we have a response that we can give and I think to some extent some of the aspects of epic theater are ways of responding how are you responding right now I mean say it, say Trump how do you respond to Trump how do you respond to a moment a fractious moment how do you respond to an audience who perhaps in one way or another you know I don't know Martha Wilson says if he's elected she's going to perform as Trump and I think that is something to look forward to but another thing that my husband has pointed out is that comics say that it's hard to deal with Trump because he is ahead of them it's hard to imagine something more outrageous than he actually will say I'm not sure I first of all hope that we don't have to deal with it beyond the election and if we do I'm sure we'll all in this room be thinking of ways to deal with it I don't have plans right now I mean I can say two things about this you know the work that I do doesn't address issues in an explicit way like this I just find that uninteresting but I hope I always aspire to make work that is so deeply engaged with its context locally and in the larger sphere that those issues are present vividly are built into it it's just I'm never going to make a piece of work I don't think where somebody says you know to says a bunch of stuff about an election or explicitly or directly maybe famous last words right I will say you know what troubles me about Donald Trump is less Donald Trump than us what troubles me is let's say Donald Trump loses the election this is not going to go away I mean what is manifesting are things in this culture that are so I mean I think everybody in this room we can all pat ourselves on the back for agreeing for feeling this way I guess or if not speak up if you dare but the situation just seems so horrifying to me and just like day by day this morning you wake up and there's more stuff about things that just yeah I mean I don't know I don't want to get off track but my hope would be that the work that I'm making is going to express meaningful stuff about us and what is what is sick or troubled in this community or culture that we're in and try in some way to break those things open and in that way address them meaningfully. One thing years ago I wrote a play called Isabella Dreams the New World in which she's married to a man who I based on David Duke who went to LSU where I went to school I knew him and the things that I have him say people thought were exaggerated but they're all being said now the thing about Trump that's distressing is that he says what so many people want to say and now that he's said it it's given permission for more people to be outspoken about what they think those who are on the edges now that he has people beaten up it's okay to beat up people who you don't agree with because he's running for president after all so I think those things we are going to be living with for years to come and I think we really will have to address it maybe not explicitly directly in the theater but we'll have to come up with some strategies for engaging communities I think specifically as a black play right a lot of the instances that we're talking about now have been happening in my community for such a long time and it's now at this bubble where it's happening to people who are not of color so the play that I am working on for the tumblers has to deal with that like this reality is something that started much further back than Trump we're just dealing with something that's now been pushed to the level where they're actually white people who are getting beat up and now it's a huge huge deal but I think it's always great to deal with a story like this and go back as far as you can because just because you're now aware of it doesn't necessarily mean that that mentality didn't exist before and so that's why we use theater to be able to write pieces or do projects that you know like Lisa who I was talking about earlier for her piece and Milton and all the five Milton's there are these issues that have existed for generations and we're not done talking about them because we never really addressed them we never sort of put it out on the table I was listening to Courtney Vance talk about doing the OJ Simpson piece that he's on now and he was saying that he and Tony Goldblum were working on a sort of a show together and so when the OJ announcement happened they were rooming together in an apartment and they did the announcement of whether he was guilty or not and Courtney's like yes and Tony's like no and then they looked at each other like oh shit you have an entirely different idea of what this instance is and they talked about why they were coming at it from two different things but they both assumed that they were on the same page right and you know he talked about you know the history of black people and being you know sort of prosecuted and Tony talked about like you know domestic violence but that was such a valuable time Courtney said that we didn't continue this conversation we put it under the rug and so now we're stepping on the rug and all this stuff is coming back up again if you keep sweeping things under the rug then you step on the rug all the dust comes back up anyway and so we keep dealing with these kinds of things and so that's why I think you know when we talk about these realities they're not new we're just now figuring out ways to make them so relevant that everyone is still is thinking about them in new ways and having the conversation with other people without like you know of course you assume what I think you like of course you hate Trump they're people who don't you know I'm afraid to meet them but like no they I mean I didn't click on that little link on Facebook that says who are your friends who like Trump I'm like no I don't think we should do that right now I would I mean just to kind piggyback on that a little bit I think that theater in particular out of a lot of you know all available art forms has the opportunity for really empathetic you know mission partially because it's really people in the room I think that there there is a sense of like you're in the room with the other people watching the people who are who are making the story are in the room with you and I think that's something that's really important you know as as a political person and someone who does have a lot of very you know passionate specific beliefs I think as a writer it's really important to use theater you know to explore all different perspectives and I think that you know trying to write a play you know like let's say you did want to write an anti-Trump play I think the first order of business would be to talk to a lot of people who did really love Trump to like to really try to understand because I think you know as was said earlier you know it's not Trump it's what's created this space culturally and it's you know how we got to this point and I think that you know looking at a world that you're going into you know looking into the future and saying okay there could be some rough times ahead exploring every possible viewpoint and treating every viewpoint with empathy even things that you are horribly offended by or hurt by is a way to more accurately engage the world with your and not to alienate people with your own thoughts you gotta agree with me exactly I want to piggyback on the idea of empathy because like at the most basic we are all human and so I try to in some of my plays have those characters not necessarily David Duke but you know characters whose politics I'm diametrically opposed to and really struggle with not being didactic about it because I think the first thing once you present something in a didactic way that's the first way to shut things down unless it's using strategies that you know are kind of working in concert with each other and bring attention in that way but that's not really didactic so never mind but in order to yeah understand these scary people that are not only eliminate did I say scary people okay these people who are part of this country I think it's also important to draw connections with things that are happening in other parts of the world I mean sure this is very specifically a US thing that's happening but I just think of I don't know the word the word like evil comes to mind as an idea to explore and how that pops up and how easy it can be to be complicit in movements toward that and using very very simple stories like human stories on stage seems like a really good place to start I'm kind of conflicted because I don't think I don't believe in the word evil I think it's two years I don't really think empathy is necessary is always necessary I don't think didactic I think Tony Kushner is didactic in Angels in America which is a really powerful play on the zeitgeist if only there were another such play right now that could talk about the big issues in the culture all at once it's a different time and I don't I haven't read the person who has the insight into the whole picture as much right now but I don't think we have to always be empathetic to our characters and I think that we don't always have to well I'm gonna just stop right now but in terms of I just want to say in terms of time I think it's very valuable to have ranges of time in your play to suddenly go from one year to another year 100 years before to have a break where people change costumes and all of a sudden they're different I think those things a lot of the techniques we got from Brecht are really still enormously useful we want to hear from you but just maybe quickly I'm gonna try to add to the definition in a contemporary way when I think about epic what I would include that is of my own I teach with it and I think about it when I'm writing history and mystery and I think about history, back, data the stuff that's occurred and then I think about mystery and I don't know how you define it but I consider it the unknown not necessarily the unknowable and I try to balance those in the work and push myself as much as possible I think there's a history mystery that can work very well in world epic theater in the present moment that's me so I ask each of you if maybe you'd like to add to the definition of epic theater or if you'd like to talk about history and mystery for you however you wish well I think history is also something that's subjective right like a lot of people have a very different idea of a very historical fact depending on who witnessed what there are always different stories so I think when you do history mystery mystery is already built into the history and I like as a playwright to explore that sweet spot I'll try to take something historical I did write a play about indigos about the wife of a jazz musician in the 60s who like I was thinking about what do black women do in the 60s who are married to a semi-famous jazz musician because there weren't a lot of opportunities when you're like teaching or do you know what's this thing that we identify with culturally and socially class wise you still experience racism so doing a lot of research about culture and fan about facts that happen when you read a different a bunch of different stories about a factual thing like Coltrane's addiction you read Coltrane's version and then you read Miles's version you're like there are two different things that happen here and there's a sweet spot in here where we can weave in sort of a fiction that we hope will engage the audience and play with reality and time at the same time so I think the history and mystery is something that's amazing to watch on stage well I did research on Sarah Bernhardt for a solo called Sarah Bernhardt meets her Waterloo and that was very enriching and there were a lot of parallels actually except to have Moss my left leg but I also have done work on 100 years ago farming in the Midwest using Molly Cather's work as research and interviewing farmers out there and I think that history and Isabella the play I talked about before I started with Columbus's notebooks about coming to the new world because economics was a big factor in why they came here and how many is at the root of all problems American so I think that history does yield great material and I agree with Fornes that every play should have mystery in it so I never thought of a history as being a mystery but I think mystery and history both can yield something but I last year was working on a musical about Emma Goldman and it was really interesting to do research on Emma Goldman because she has a very public face and then a very private face and so getting to go through these amazing incredible speeches of hers and interviews that she would give where I mean she would say things like I want to kill all the policemen things that are like wow at any time in history but then you go to her diaries and it was like why didn't my boyfriend call me it was this totally different person and the idea of history and mystery that even a person's own history is mysterious and a person's own story is different depending on the decisions where they're coming from that day and I know personally I feel that a lot where it's like I have 8 different versions of a single story that's my own story that I was present for and so then looking at historical documents and looking at who gets to tell the story and who had access to the tools to make that story history and looking at the depths of that I think it's all a mystery and that's what's really fun about historical basis because you do get to pick and choose the narrative that kind of creates you know the part of it that you're interested in and the part of it that you're telling and there's also like how much history has been rewritten or again depending on who is doing the writing so that part is what kind of fascinates me as well like which is what's the true version and is there a way to ever know and is it important to how important is it it's important to know it's true but how do you get there and if you're dealing with a historical situation how important is it to make the unknown part of the story I think to question and it seems like this is also where we approach the way in which theater becomes like quantum physics which is to say that those competing histories not only are competing fascinating histories they actually coexist at the same time that particle is there and there now now now now you know that's exciting to me yeah and so when it comes to history specifically I mean I think of this because I've been working on a play by Eugene O'Neill a trilogy called Morning Becomes Electra that I'm sure you know and it's very much a document of American history and its barbarism and so folding that into the reality that we create on stage is something that's very alive in my mind and I'm very animated by these days and you know thinking you know the past isn't dead the past right I mean that's just the way it is and that's so exciting or there's always that question about like well what period does the play happen and to me they're always at the same time you know at least three answers to that question and really more but the three obvious ones are the period when the play is set okay if it's Morning Becomes Electra then it's the 1865 and there's the period when the author wrote it right 1931 and then of course period it's set and it's happening now obviously tonight it's happening tonight when else would it happen and then of course other answers too Hello ladies and gentlemen so I'm going to talk for three to five minutes about spectatorship while we switch over to the next panel so at the New Recon Poets Cafe we were lucky enough to host No Passport during how long ago was it three years ago yeah we had a fantastic No Passport conference so one of the things I want to mention about spectatorship but the New Recon Poets Cafe our audience base and our artists base tends to be largely people of color under the age of 30 which is fairly unusual for a non-profit arts organization in New York or anywhere else in this country and I'll tell you one of the reasons I think that our audience base and our artists base are so much younger and more diverse than that of most other arts organizations and that's because our events are very participatory, very crowd sourced and that's obviously true of an open mic or a poetry slam but it's also true of the theater that we do much of which is solo theater much of which does away with the fourth wall and much of which grows out of the spoken word movement, artists like Sarah Jones and Craig Mums Grant who take slam poetry and spoken word tropes and develop them into solo theater and what we found is that the more engaging a work of theater is the more that a solo performer or any theatrical writer and performer can engage their audience in a two way communication the more those works tend to appeal to a younger audience and the easier it is to market them and to draw an untraditional, youthful and diverse audiences and we've also found that artists who come up through the spoken word gauntlet and who have experience being on stage doing immediate relevant and direct performances in a slam or open mic context are often able to command the attention of an audience anywhere and in any context and we've seen a lot of artists who start out slam poetry or spoken word settings who go on to tremendous success as theater artists elsewhere I think that, and it's interesting when we do plays musicals that have more of a traditional fourth wall that have more of a traditional relationship between artists and audience in many cases the audiences for those shows tend to be older, tend to be more homogenous and tend to be a lot more like the audiences that you'll see at other non-profits and other arts venues around the city and around the country but the skills that someone can develop as a spoken word artist and the skills that slam poetry and spoken word nurture I think those translate well into theater in any context and we also see a lot of overlap between the artists and audiences who frequent spoken word slam poetry and open mic events and people who frequent protest events and I think there's a lot of there's a lot of relevance to the immediacy, the directness and the almost confrontational nature of solo theater that translates well into socially relevant movements and into protests like the one that shut down the Trump event in Chicago recently which we're privately very proud of. In any case, so if you haven't been to a poetry slam or open mic recently or any of our events at the Neuriken Poets Cafe I'd encourage you to check one out with an eye towards theater as well as an eye towards poetry and an eye towards audience engagement and political relevance and immediacy as well as towards poetry because in many cases we see that relationship between solo artists and audience translating into theatrical work that transcends traditional audience definitions and transcends some of the boundaries that tend to make theater experiences elsewhere more homogenous and more limited. Anyway, and I couldn't be more happy to be celebrating the 10th anniversary of No Passport so thank you all for being here and thank you Karadad. We're moving into our next session and then after that there will be wine and cheese break I'm told the next session is cultural appropriation it's moderated by Saviana Stanescu there's also a component of it one of the panelists is on Skype and it's Chris Diaz so we're gonna need to figure all that out. I'll hand it over to Saviana. Thank you guys thank you for coming, for staying and for being here with us. Chris Diaz is gonna join us from the cyberspace and his family obligations come come is Chris with us? So, while people are sitting down I'm just going to introduce briefly the panelists and then they will of course talk about their work and we'll start the conversation so we have Kiong Park, we have Isa Fatima, Joffrey Jackson Scott and Jeff Yaniszewski, alright? Okay, trying to pronounce all the names well. Chris, can we have you talk? Yeah, can you hear me? Chris Diaz is here with us See you here. Okay, good first of all I was really happy to see that quite a few panelists before us engaged with our main question, who's telling whose story? So, it's really great for us to finally focus a little bit around these issues and I'm going to start with a comment and a provocation and of course questions for our panelists. As many sociologists stated, our identities are shaped by the stories we tell and the stories we are told since childhood. That being said in terms of the arts and particularly theater and drama arguably although I would say it's really true the main narrative, the mainstream narrative the main stories that had relevance globally have been told from a western European wide straight male perspective for centuries and while of course I don't want to villainize those particular playwrights or theater artists, I do think that this is an important question that we need to ask ourselves as contemporary artists in a world in which people are starting to question the white color dichotomy and we are talking about the white privilege and who's telling whose story of course. Also in a sort of larger global context, I think we also shape the conversation around issues of intersectionality the intersections between gender, class sexuality racial issues and of course other type of privileges and as a Romanian born artist of course I am aware of the main issues that shape the global conversation in terms of the powerful countries, big countries and their power to tell the stories of people from smaller countries from poor countries for instance to start with my own country everybody knows of Dracula and that gloomy place called Transylvania which is actually a beautiful region of Romania that I invite you all to visit but you know Dracula is looming around you know all of us. So starting with that I would really like to ask our panelists and Chris over there what do you guys think we can do as contemporary artists and what you have been doing in your own work to challenge this mainstream narrative this mainstream way of telling the story I'm not saying it's not a valid one but I do believe that we need to diversify the perspectives and the voices that tell stories so we don't only hear one perspective or just one category's perspective but we get to hear stories told from different perspectives, personal perspectives, different context and subtext and pretext than the main Western European narrative I'm making that distinction because I know that we from poor Eastern European countries had also deal with the privilege of Western powers. Thank you. Hi my name is Kyung there are a lot of questions post so I'll try to be brief so I'm having a total I think this is the conversation where we're talking about race without necessarily talking about race but I would like to talk about race because the way you speak about the of cultural institutions like the theater I think are a manifest and have been made very clear in the discussions about racial and cultural equity whether it's on Broadway or in downtown stages in New York City or in the visual arts world or in films so in every cultural manifestation of any discipline we are seeing this overwhelming whiteness and we need to address this head on. I think in terms of cultural appropriation we come from a history where we have borrowed each other's stories to tell new stories since the beginning of theater so to deny cultural appropriation as if it wasn't part of our practices a lie we all do it and I do it so when I speak about racism in theater I want to speak from a place of complicity as well because I am guilty of what we do as professionals I think though the lack of diversity and this overwhelming whiteness points towards other conversations we have in social justice circles about white power white supremacy and the way racism orientalism and genocide are part of the histories of America which are not reflected on American stages when we think of culture or American culture I think a lot of this own history has been swept under the rug so when cultural appropriation happens and people of color are displaced from their histories and narratives and put into this other idealic sort of like white narrative it's unfair and it's insulting and it denies not only our histories but hides the crimes of our complicity in American society so I think that really resonates with me as the reason why cultural appropriation is so polemical right now and I have more to say but I'll stop there Aiza? Yeah, for me you guys so I'm a female I'm South Asian, I grew up in the Middle East and my parents are from Pakistan I considered that the Middle East, a lot of people don't and I'm also Muslim American and I think there's a lot of intersections there and I find for Muslim Americans right now as you know it is a problem in this country and abroad I just came back from the UK a few days ago, four days ago and I have a solo show that I've been performing all over the world and I was performing it there and I find it's really interesting the conversation has really shifted this is the fourth time I've been in the UK including the Edinburgh Fringe from 2012 and it's really different now performing this play there where people are aware of immigration the hyphenated identity and what's going on everybody knows Trump in the UK from the taxi drivers to people everywhere from in theater, outside of theater and I think in terms of who's telling whose story the onus is on us if you are a non-white person of any kind of color it's on you to tell that story because in the absence of you telling your own story other people will tell it for you and it will be colored in the way that they see it I struggle with this on a daily basis I'm an actor and a writer theater may be a close shop theater may be difficult and we might have issues I feel like the issues are pronounced tenfold in film and TV where I've been on sets with people and they have no clue what a Muslim looks like and if I've been cast it's like a woman with an accent who covers her hair why? because Muslim Americans I know don't look like that so that's a whole other sorry I have a lot to say as well but I'll stop there are so many things I could say but I'll begin by also revealing my situatedness so all the things that I am I'm from a very small town in the middle west of this country I grew up across the street from the projects and many years after all those things my dad was in the military and we started moving around so I lived in the south I lived in Alaska and then eventually when I moved away two places on my own I came here to New York I worked at a place that I will name I worked at New York Theatre Workshop I worked there for about seven and a half years supporting new play development and part of your question Saviana is what are the things that we are doing to deal with cultural appropriation so one of the things that I did there is I ran the Artist of Color Fellowship which did exist now it has a different name and it has a slightly different architecture and goal but at that point it was specifically focused around mentoring and providing space in the field for emerging artists of color so I was there for seven and a half years and then I went to Victory Garden Theatre in Chicago where I was the head of New Play Development there now I no longer work inside the institution I work outside I'm a communications and engagement strategy consultant working with artists and theaters on audience engagement and audience development so those are all the different spaces that I occupy the reason I lay all of those out is because I have occupied different seats in a conversation I can say that in the rarefied air of the inside of theater buildings when you are one of if not the only face says of color you are called upon to be an authority you are called upon to to verify the authenticity of one's experience and I found many many many times in my history that plays would move into the building they would be really interesting telling what for me was a very nuanced story about people other whoever those people were a really nuanced picture of people was being told and then you bring that piece forward and in particular for me when those pieces were written by black playwrights I would get into these very interesting conversations about but I mean is this like really authentic like I mean is this really how people talk like tell us like I mean I can actually only speak to how people talk black people talk really from my town my community my family unless I start to reach for how black people are portrayed in the media at large so for me that's one of the dangers of appropriation when things are adopted or borrowed or used whichever of those terms we lean on to what use are those things those elements from other cultures being put and what is the danger the danger is all the space is taken up and then you are this one thing it is only possible for you to be that and when some other voice comes through to try and show that there's actually a nuance in this community or that community these things are not celebrated, supported, produced Jeff, shall we go to Chris Chris do you have an answer a first answer it's a complicated question yeah it's super complicated thank you for turning it over for a second I'm not trying to go quick so yeah I agree I mean I agree with the larger question of sort of tell your own story and I mean you know I don't know any other way to write or to create than to tell something that's really specific to who I am and you know I've been I've been fortunate to have a little bit of success with telling part of it and I'm going to curse so I apologize in advance but I forget who has who I'm quoting here but the concept of fuck you money you don't want to have just money but you have that kind of fuck you money and I think like to be in a position I'm fortunate to be in a position where the first play that I the first couple plays that I wrote gave me a little bit of fuck you capital because they were built on this energy not about the anti-institution or tearing down institutions but that I was going to sort of tell stories the way that I wanted to tell them in the context that I wanted to privilege the kinds of things that I wanted to the kinds of characters who existed in my life and you know I'm a Puerto Rican kid from a Jewish suburb married to a Filipino woman we have no idea what that makes our son like literally we don't know what that is on the census our sons so so I carry that with me and I think that ability to carry that with you once you get into these institutional spaces the to be fortunate enough to have that privilege which is your own sense of privilege gives you a sense of responsibility now so when you get into that room it's important to be in the next room it's important to be in the rooms that give out awards for example it's important to be at rooms that invite people into institutions of higher learning not that you're going to get on those panels and you're going to say you know who deserved this award you know we just gave an award at they at Columbia the Kennedy award for American history we gave that award to I mean big surprise we gave it to Lin-Manuel for Hamilton but not because Lin is another Puerto Rican do because that is the play that really deserved it and we've given it in the past to Dominique Morrisaw we've given it in the past to great works but it's important to be able to be in those rooms and you know from that high level of awards all the way down to folks who are getting into NYU or folks that are getting into Juilliard whatever those rooms might be and not to privilege them because of necessarily what they are but to understand and recognize the work that these folks are trying to do the traditions in which they're writing the context from which they come so I think it's really important that while you're telling your own story you're also being supported in understanding of folks telling stories across the board whether that's race, ethnicity, religion, gender whatever the sort of you know diversity questions might be but if you ask people to cast the net wide wide enough to fit you you have to make sure that that net is now being cast wide enough for whoever's coming next Thank you Chris, thank you Jeff? So yeah the issue that you're raising Saviano of what our culture is and I love that phrase of I carry that with me so what do I carry with me all of us carry with us I'm a teacher and I run theater programs I just came from Australia I was running a theater school there acting program my dad was a butcher and had a butcher shop in Pisaik, New Jersey and very blue collar family and I carried that with me I carried that sense of class of economics of watching him struggle and watching the other people the other Russian and Czechoslovakian and Polish people meet in his butcher shop while I was working there on the weekends and tell stories and that was my introduction to theater was being in that butcher shop and that very literally bloody sweaty butcher shop and hearing people tell stories and so in terms of what I the thing that I am bringing into my theater is issues of class economics but also human dramas and I'm trying to change that provocation that Saviana has running a theater school running an acting program what I'm trying to do is change a number of things change the fabric of who gets into the program who the teachers are the kind of work we're doing what notions of theater students have so I'm trying to expand not only the diversity and fabric of the student body but also the aspects that we're working on and explode that notion of what a play can be so at NIDA was running a theater school at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney when I began four years ago it was an entirely white student body by the time I left after four years there were five actors of color three international students and two thirds of the students were second or third generation immigrant families from Australia representative of the national fabric of Australia that was very important to me at the same time they were the best actors I could let into that program so lots of issues and lots of provocations, thank you Thank you Jeff, yes that's why I wanted to open our discussion with the context of intersections class, race, gender sexuality, ethnicity but move it towards more specificity for each of us so now I really like to ask each of you what is cultural appropriation for you have you experienced it in your work or in any other ways and that's, you might frame the conversation in terms of personal feelings and personal work then we're going to move it to maybe more public controversies like the Mikado or what happened to Katori Hall's mountain top when a white actor was cast in Martin Luther King or Lloyd Seuss play when non-white actors when white actors were cast in non-white roles so I like to start with the personal the personal is political of course and then try to move into these larger conversations so what is cultural appropriation for you, have you experienced it, give us the facts I have a hard time answering that question because I have the opposite I've been told as a gay, Korean, Chilean immigrant playwright there is no way my story can be told on stage because there will be no audience to identify with it so there's no universality for it so no one wanted to appropriate my story so I had to tell my own story start my own theater company and find my own audience and build my own communities and that is the opposite of cultural appropriation I don't know what that's called but that's basically tell your own story and the problem with that is that as an artist of color it is very important for us to tell our own stories that is how we begin to find our voice but I'm really struck by this quote that Lynn Nottage said about her play Sweat where artists of color are allowed to tell stories of their experiences as people of color and the stories of their communities of color but playwrights of color do not get to talk about the state of the union kind of place where we really talk about the grander metaphors of who we are as a nation which is why Hamilton is kind of incredible and the thing is if we are going to really tackle the problems of the mainstream only reflecting white male experiences we need to also empower voices like ours to speak beyond our personal experiences to really talk about who we are as a nation and in America I feel like what is also happening is that this narrative is no longer about the white male American which is why also we see a lot of people like Trump's followers getting really mad because the history of America is not also including them even though they thought it belonged to them and it is now the history of global capitalism and it's destruction of the earth and where are we on that story and how are we as people of color complicit in that narrative so that's my thank you that was awesome so I can kind of relate to that just so when I started doing my show it's almost been like five years now this summer I was told the exact same stuff by a lot of people I was like I'm gonna get an audience nobody really cares about solo work in fact I met with a Broadway producer and she's done really well she's producing on Broadway still and she was like oh honey nobody solo shows about your life nobody really cares it's so funny she hadn't even read it my show is not about my life it's actually based on interviews I conducted in the New York New Jersey area with a lot of people and I play a range of like six year old to a 65 year old woman none of them are on shows until I went out and got my own audience and did it and the play has toured all over the world and it sells out almost always wherever we've taken it so like you know you have to kind of prove yourself first so I've been there and I don't know what that's called either and then I've also been on the other side of things you know where other people are telling the story for you and it's very frustrating I don't have an answer I think we do have to engage we do I mean I'm currently working as a Muslim American consultant on a play and it's a white playwright and it's through a grant and I get it because this theater has always worked with these people so you know they brought them over and they needed a consultant it's at least a step in the right direction I wish that they had actually gotten some of the Muslim American playwrights to contribute to the play as writers and not just as writers so you know it's frustrating having these conversations with people and it's like you know oh what if this girl wears a hijab and she has a conflict with her father and her brother I was like why you know again like showing the Muslim male as an evil it's very frustrating because I'm constantly fighting to show the opposite of that which is what I grew up with my father is the biggest feminist I know and he's a Muslim man who also comes from nothing and was eight kids and the only one to go past like sixth grade level education you know so it's important to tell those stories yeah so sorry I'm like going on and on again I finally have a lot to say about this because it is very it is very frustrating because other people tell and even within this kind of cross-section of being Muslim American I think there's a misunderstanding that you know a lot of Muslims are Arab when in fact I think 90% of the world's population that's Muslim is non-Arab you know and there are more Muslims in India than there are in Pakistan and so who's telling those stories there are also Muslim Bosnians and Puerto Rican Caribbean's who I've met here so yeah absolutely there's this huge kind of misunderstanding of what that looks like and I remember early on when I was first there's a character in my play who covers her hair who talks a little bit like a valley girl and that was very important for me because it was based on somebody very real who I know and I remember there was an interviewer from backstage who was really into us into the play you know she was very supportive but she sat through a rehearsal and at the end of the rehearsal white woman she goes well but you know that character I mean somebody covers their hair they really wouldn't talk that way I mean I hear things like that all the time if like you do acts then you couldn't be why you know and it's just this I it's frustrating it's like we have to fix this and we have to keep telling the stories and we need many more voices especially from the Muslim American community you know to tell those stories yeah I love it when people tell you about your own culture and ethnicity and they know better oh I've been I've been asked in an audition to do an Indian accent and then told how to do it by a white person so you know I mean I could tell you so many stories Jeff you know thinking about the question I have so many complicated what feel to me like very complicated relationships with with even the not with the phrase of cultural appropriation but just different ways in so one piece when I was very young I was studying to be a director and I was going to Columbia College in Chicago and it was my graduate project and I really wanted to direct the glass menagerie I loved it I had just a deep deep deep connection to the play and I could feel at the moment of proposing oh I want to do this thing I could feel the tension in the room I couldn't quite identify why it was there because I was younger and I wasn't so smart about the world but I could feel it and because I was younger and not so smart I asked is there a problem with me directing the play and I worked with some very frank people on the on the faculty and they're like well actually yeah like why don't you want to do fences why don't you want to do and it was when they started listing the plays that I realized oh damn I totally I I believed the for myself at least in this program that anything was possible and you know when you go through program you've been there for a long time so this was now the end of a journey and it's like wow you've actually always thought that for me a certain set of things were possible and I didn't believe that so I had to struggle very hard to get to direct that production and then I did and by the end of it oh wow you really had something to bring to that it's like well of course of course and what I had to end up saying actually which was very complicated but I had to sort of disavow I was put in a position where I had to disavow sort of all of black theater and like I don't have anything to bring to that or at least nothing that you haven't seen before because a lot of those experiences in those plays don't they don't resonate for me that's just real so I didn't I just didn't have anything to bring to fences for sure I bless it but I just didn't have anything to bring to that um so that's one piece the other when I think about how I was raised in my community and in my family there's a kind of cultural cultural appropriation that was promoted there are ways you want to speak there are places you want to go maybe you should go to the museum and not to and and saying this is complicated because it suggests that these are things that belong to a majority I'll be very I'll be very kind ah but it was definitely a part of my my background my childhood so when I hear contemporary folk um say things like pull your hands up and do that like those things I I hear those with a kind of suggestion that you must appropriate the ways of being and speaking um of other yeah that's a great point and also the exactly like the other extreme is when you are asked to represent the whole culture race or ethnicity right like you know we are all one uh Chris do you have uh something I guess um yeah this is great it's it's these are such huge topics um I mean I guess okay so two things so personal story I'm looking at notes I wrote them that's why I'm looking at um uh so personal story I mean I guess the only really sort of personal applications I can think of as early on in my career and I think it still happens to some degree but you know when your work gets primarily sold as you know the Latino play for this year or it gets primarily sold as the female play or the whatever that is and that becomes the main selling point and often to the detriment of what the work itself is doing becoming accomplishing I think you you know you start out having to have a slightly different conversation you have to have this this this primary conversation before you're allowed to go to the second conversation you know you have a play on Broadway I don't but if someone you know one has a play on Broadway and the conversation becomes I mean it's happening right now although this is a good problem to have like with Eclipse right so the the conversation around Eclipse is the first all black female cat or the first all female production first all about all these these various firsts of things and I'm dying to hear the conversation about Eclipse as a play good bad and different like just be able to talk about the thing so on some level this cultural appropriate this this well-intentioned cultural appropriation can be really problematic where you don't get to view the piece on the terms of the piece and and marketers or or producers will sell it they'll say oh we're going to do the Latino play right now let's we'll put it out to the world and then the Latinos will come and I was in a theater a theater organization where they were holding a Cinco de Mayo organ I think a Cinco de Mayo party and they had a salsa band and I went over to the to the artistic director and I was like you know maybe not a great thing maybe not the right match of ethnicities and the associate artistic director of this organization said our audience won't be able to tell the difference and so it was like all right fine I don't need to be here anymore but more importantly you know matching being able to talk about what the thing actually is rather than the sort of qualifiers on the outside can be sort of problematic but hand in hand I think with some of the stuff that was going said earlier I think it just also speaks to this need right now I mean we have a lot of playwrights and we have a lot of folks people of color who are becoming actors increasingly more and more but we don't have is critics and journalists and administrators and there are opportunities and spaces in those realms for folks to contribute to the conversation on those levels as well so that when you go to see a work by Muslim American female that you're able to engage with the work on the secondary and tertiary levels and actually engage with the work on its own terms you know be able to understand all of the signifiers be able to understand all the references but also be able to understand you know be able to place things in a slightly different context it's not so subsumed by that mainstream that we talked about in the first place so I think you know just these appropriation often has to do with ignorance and I don't use the term ignorance in as pejorative a way as it sometimes comes off but just you know folks who grew up in different perspectives it's important that those perspectives be shared on all sides of the conversation Thank you Grace, Jeff I love what you said we need many more voices and I would I wrote that down and underlined it I love that and as a educator or teacher and a producer I totally believe that and actually that's really what I love about NoPassport so thank you Caridad for continuing this amazing conference because every time I come here you know watch it or come I learn about so many more voices voices that I need to include in my canon and in my keep them close to my heart so I want to read you know young your plays and read about your one woman show and you know have my students do them in classes because we they need students need to expand their repertoire of the human heart and really learn about the wide wide capacity for the heart and your different stories and embody different stories in terms of a cultural appropriation two things as again as a teacher I have the ability to have students work on fences black actor and a white actor no well because because you mentioned fences before you mentioned fences before right that's why I'm mentioning it but you know you don't want to work on it I did want to work on it with my students I did want to have a white actor and a black actor work on that because well it was actually right those characters were right for them as people and it expanded their hearts it really opened them up and actually something that opened me up I was reading Jeffrey's blog that you were in a theater an oppression or something yeah and one of the questions to you was what is your attitude towards the police and reading your answer to that really moved me deeply because again I just recognize yet again yet again what privilege I have you know I won't speak for you in terms of what your answer was but you know I don't have that experience with the police I don't I can't remember your exact words the fear and the apprehension and reading that opened me up and made me realize okay I have to pull off the blinders and as a teacher that is what I have to do I have to shut up I have to listen listen to students listen to their experiences and give them these profound texts to push against learn from and learn all the human dramas which is why this you know whole sense of we need many more voices and we need students young theater people to experience different voices and to expand their version of what humanity can be so when I had students work on defenses you know they were you know they were in Australia so first of all they didn't really know much about what August Wilson was writing about and they had to learn about a totally different culture and learn about different kinds of ways of growing up and hopefully learning more empathy my only other connection or another deep connection I have to cultural appropriation is I performed Bouto for many years Japanese Bouto and I won't get into too much because I don't want to take up too much time but it's about you know how can one dance another person's culture if I am performing Bouto am I actually appropriating and ripping off someone else's experience in culture and the answer sometimes is yes sometimes no and I think the for me the issue about cultural appropriation or cultural translation or if it's like a blood transfusion it's cultural transfusion and you actually take someone the blood and the tongue and the story of someone else and you actually really go through a deep transfusion into your soul, into your heart I think sometimes it can work I think there have been times when I performed Bouto in the past when I really wasn't digging deep enough and I was merely ripping off the signs and signifiers of someone else's story and then I think when I went deeper with it I actually made it my own story so those are my connections Thank you Jeff, actually along the same lines about working with students I need to share my little story because I'm in rehearsals right now at Ithaca College with a device therapy about microaggressions and macroaggressions on college campuses and after a whole semester, last semester of protests and the vote of no confidence against the president of Ithaca College I thought that we cannot do anything else we cannot stage a play, I need to use my little workshop production slot to devise a project with the students and we are featuring 14 students one of them is a spoken word poet Gerelle Jerome and it's really important to learn from the students and to work together to shape this script and this piece and that was my little thing of what I'm trying to do right now with young people but the other issue as I'm speaking about Romania now wearing my Romanian hat because back in Romania I used to be a talk show host and I was having a TV talk show called Necessary Polemics and I'm really now I'm realizing that I'm back with that hat on me, I'm like I need polemics in my life so that's why this panel so back to the issue of cultural appropriation because with this panel I really want to open it up to questions from the audiences I think the most important thing that we can do is to have this kind of conversation so I like to open it up to questions, if you guys don't mind yeah, Randy I couldn't hear a thing Is your work as more than a spoken word rather than a spoken word given where you're from Can you ask this microphone to everyone? Because so far it's anti-white anti-this, anti-whatever is what I'm hearing but on the other hand killing is like the personification of somebody who's writing work at least in my mind that's Joanne and Korean and American so as a writer how do you see your work building on your own culture? please okay so I'll start so I think I saw a great documentary last week and I'll use it as an example to sort of explain what I do it was about Boyle Heights and the history of this community in LA that over the years for the past, I don't know, 40-50 decades has really changed in demographics with new influxes of immigrants but really maintained this very strong sort of activist nature and you can see it with the Japanese population being taken to internment camps and shifting to this African American community and from this African American community becoming a Jewish community becoming this Latino community I mean, identities are really permeable and I feel like I carry many in this country because it's so racist it just wants you to pick one and you can't when you fit so many so I just check multiple boxes and part of the work I do and what I love doing is to just short circuit that thing that makes you just want to be one thing because it's so inhuman to try to do that and I don't understand why the stereotypes are perpetuated in our culture or why we need this so my point of attack is to just confuse you so much that you just realize you don't know anything because it is the only way there's some humility to talk about who we are and it's been really hard to get to that point because most people just want to laugh it off and ignore you and dismiss you so you really have to get on people's faces and short circuit their brains you know you have to do both things right, do you want an answer from Chris as well? Chris Ren you need an answer yeah, well I think because I missed sort of the setup I'm a little uncertain on exactly the best way for me to answer but I probably gave the wrong impression by using the term because I don't think that I am anti I don't think I'm right anti I don't think I really know how to write anti I think I know how to write my own stuff my own experience in my world is a very, very diverse I guess for lack of a better term world because of where I grew up and how I grew up like I said in Puerto Rican I grew up in the suburbs I grew up on hip hop and professional wrestling and at the same time theater and high culture, role of culture and you know I think it's funny hearing part of the question because when I had just written down here on this card right here is advocacy for I don't know if you can see it but advocacy for as opposed to always against and I think that there's this sense of like this is about sort of what are you and this is changed as I've gotten older but certainly the big question for me right now is what is it that you're advocating for what are you pushing for who are you speaking on behalf of what groups are you giving body to and to me it's less about saying like I am anti it's even less about saying like I am anti white power structure because I work in white power structures I work in most theaters I work in these big mainstream theaters and I want to continue to work there but actually that's probably B B and A because that's where I came of age I grew up in the public theater and in Manhattan Theater Club and at the Roundabout and at Databricks USA and in all these institutions and then regionally later on so it's not so much to me about completely like dismantling or disregarding what all that is as much as it is campaigning for my own voice and for the voices of people you know who's work I did to be heard in sort of a similar way that entirely speaks to that question but it does it does that was my question I think actually that indeed we all have all kind of strategies to deal with these issues and bring nuances to the conversation I was just talking last week with a Cuban scholar and she was really upset that you know each time when the Cinco de Mayo happens she's being you know everybody tells her Happy Cinco de Mayo and that all Latinos celebrate Cinco de Mayo they don't even know what that is you know so I feel that we are all of us put in some sort of like stereotypical boxes and how do we get out of those boxes it's actually my main question and we all have strategies but questions from the audience so I came in on the tail end but I heard something that to me was very disturbing from the gentleman on the end should I put your shirt it's a long story to tell about me and August Wilson it's a funny story but there was this time where this old man used to buy me dinner every night in a diner he used to go to this diner every night and this old man would buy me dinner and he would he was a writer he would buy me dinner and he would say he would talk to me about all his plays they had nothing to do with me and he would read my poetry my work he said it's brilliant but it will never sell and it's going to go on and then one day I saw a paper and I saw a picture of this guy and the headline said August Wilson dead and I thought that was really funny but anyway all of these remakes if you really want to reach people and do something why don't you just produce a new play a new coming of age story instead of recouping all of this crap that people don't really like actually they want to teach like hip hop now everything's got to be taught in hip hop it's a bunch of people who hate hip hop you know they want to make it like a school thing to teach hip hop it's ridiculous just like they want to teach hip hop if you really want to help get a black voice a spanty voice that's not like a hip hop or whatever voice and produce it something new isn't it strange you want to blame Scott Rudin but it is a little strange that every movie that comes out is was a slave wanna be a slave the slave walk the slave dance adopt a slave do you dare slave I mean come on there's no coming of age story what do these kids do do they put on change and do a slave dance before they have sex and their first kids I don't think so so forget all that find something new that the people are seeing We used to beat us up. Everyone can Google now. The Ramones time. This is a video with me, the Harlem Boys Squire. Filmed in the West Ford Street Church. One of the first videos ever made when they wouldn't let blacks on rock and roll out. They used to beat us up because we were punk. Now they come up with Adropunk 40 years later. Why didn't they just embrace us then? Embrace these kids now, don't they? Shove this shit down their throat. It sucked the first time. Thank you. Do you guys have any comments or answers to that? I just wanted to clarify because I'm not sure if it was misunderstood. When I said I worked had my students work on that play, it was in class. It was never in production. So I would never, for example, I did one of the issues that we were going to talk about was doing the mountain top with the white actor. I would never produce something like that. It was a classroom experience, but I very much hear your story. Let them write something new in that classroom. Yeah, I support that as well. And get it produced. I mean, I can't pretend to speak for every theater in the country nor pretend to tell you anything you don't already know about how it works. But one of the challenges that I found sitting in those seats working on new play development and really advocating for new voices and working to make space for a diversity of voices or working to push against the obstacles so that we would have more inclusive spaces. One of the things that you encounter is a belief. And I don't think it's real about what you can sell. Well, that's what August Wilson used to do. Every day I think this thing is real, but it is powerful. It is a powerful narcotic. It's like nobody wants to see that, or I can't sell that. What I can sell is that thing that was already popular. What I can sell is that thing that has someone in it who is or was all the way possible. A black man looking for a hand. And these are powerful obstacles. There's a thing that Kyung said, though, that I feel like each of us are talking in various ways about strategy, and there's a thing that Kyung said that I sort of want to underline because it feels like a powerful gift. She used the words overwhelming whiteness. So it seems like a really powerful provocation to all of us, to find those ways from where we are, to overwhelm it, to just really push it out. Thank you. The lady with the hat. Hi. I just had a comment. One of the things I thought that Christopher Diaz said that was really interesting was about, I think he said it, was about getting people of color in administration and in theaters because it's not that people aren't, there are no new voices. There are a ton of playwrights who are of color, who are trying to get their shit done, and these theaters have a stereotype of their audience. That's what we sort of need to focus on as well. If you go to any of these theaters, and we're doing this new playwrights initiative in L.A. the Templars because when we focus on L.A. theater right now, a lot of people, they're bringing New York theater writers in to L.A. because they think that is a viable economic equation that translates into dollars. And we're a diverse group of people who are out there trying to prove that wrong. Theaters want to make money. They think their audience is white. If you go to a lot of these theaters in Broadway, $150 tickets, et cetera, yes, they are white because people of color don't spend $150 on said Huey, 55 minutes of Boris Whitaker, would. A great play, but who has that type of money? What we need to focus on, I think, also. Who has that type of money for theater? For theater, exactly. But what we need to sort of also focus on is audience development. How are you getting these young people into theater so that they see that as a viable career construct for themselves? Why do you want a kid who's 12 years old to go into theater when they can't even see themselves on stage? They can't see their stories, and they don't know how they're going to pay their rent with it. So it's not just a matter of, it's the typical, it's changing the narrative of what theater is for us. And something the two of you both said in the middle about like, I don't know what the opposite of culture appropriation is, it's theater. That's what it is. We're all just doing theater. We just have to take away what we've been told, what that construct really is. It's not something that's put on us. A lot of us have different backgrounds. You were talking about the majority culture of going to museums. I'm obviously black, too. A lot of my friends went to the museum. We went to the library. We're told that we don't do that. So that's not true. That's not a majority thing. We're actually the majority of people of color. It's not necessarily a minority of minorities. I hate that word. But we have to change how we approach what we do and stop believing what people tell us is the construct that we operate in. Because we won't change theater if we keep approaching it in this sort of traditional narrative. Yeah, can I jump? Why aren't you? I'm still here. For people of color, particularly young people of color who are out in the house today, let's come over here. Let's see what the mayor will say. Come over to the camera, too, if you'd like to say. So you belong in whatever space you find yourself in. Period, punto, that's part one. You belong in those spaces. You belong in those spaces as audience members. You belong in those spaces as creators. You belong in those spaces as administrators. If you go to those spaces, if you go to a theater, if you go to the opera, if you go to an art gallery, you belong in those spaces. You're a shareholder. You have as much right to those spaces as anybody else does. So on that note, you have as much right to be participating in the conversation about what gets done in that space and what is art there as anybody else does. You may not have as big or as president of the voices of people who've been, whose families have been doing it for 30 years, 40 years, multiple generations, but they need you. They need you in that space. If you care about the kind of thing, they need you in that space. So don't be afraid, A, that advocating to make notice for the stuff that you want to see up on those spaces, on those stages. And B, maybe the most important, if you're a creator of art, like, don't be afraid to make the thing that you can make that nobody else in the world can make. That's what Chiara Luzis is doing. That's what Dominique Grisso is doing. That's what Vin is doing. That's what McDonnelly is doing. That's what Lisa Moore is doing. I'm looking at you all now. That's what the people who were in this room when you were doing, and it's sucked because it's hard to get produced and it's hard to get done. It's hard for everybody to get produced and it's hard for everybody to get done. It's hard for us. And it's definitely hard for you when you have, you know, other sort of things in front of you. But like, the thing that you can control most at the core of it all is to just keep making the goddamn work and keep making the work that only you can really make. And you deserve to be in those spaces. I forget why I jumped in at a disagreement. In addition to all these other sort of larger conversations, they work. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Actually, because we are approaching, you know, our time limit, I'd like to give the chance to our panelists to give us a few closing remarks. That was mine. That was mine. No closing remarks? So, I've been thinking a lot about, you know, sort of cultural institutions as these predominantly white spaces that now are becoming increasingly diversified. And the need for these institutions to diversify because without those new audiences and those new artists, those institutions are going to die. But I look at sort of the power and privilege that exists within mainstream theaters or stages like Broadway and I keep imagining neighborhoods that are becoming increasingly gentrified by people of color. And the thing I really fear is that people that are white are going to get scared and fly white, white flight. And how do you create a neighborhood that is diverse but is connected and that doesn't lose the whiteness it had? Which is why I feel like we can't pick each other and I don't mean to be anti-white when I say this. I'm just trying to understand how do we all become closer and more together and a real community that genuinely cares about each other's histories and not, you know, become another urban space that becomes depleted when all the white people leave and then you're stuck, you know. And these narratives of people of color telling you and now we've been abandoned by the whole system and there's no one here to help us, you know. It has to be a real collaborative effort and I struggle to find the metaphors to really say this but yeah, that's all I'm going to say. Thank you. Yeah, I think I already said this earlier. It's just important to create spaces for telling our own stories and back to what Chris was just saying. You guys were sitting here telling your stories and I promise you if you tell your story and it's specific and it's honest and it's truthful you will find an audience for it. Don't let people tell you that you know it's not going to sell or it's not nobody will relate to it. People will tell your story. That's what I'm saying. But with the black people who beat us up when we came to them and said we were punk and then they came out 40 years later saying they're punk apropos. A lot of black people suppressed black people. You know, I was talking to the one who runs the studio museum. I said, Miss, why don't you have any pictures of punk rock and stuff in the exhibition. She's got a little red head white girl who's a curator of the studio museum running around telling people she knows what to audit. But she lets the white kids do it but she doesn't let her own black kids show that type of work at the studio. And that needs to be addressed as well to be fair in what he's saying. We're not here to beat up on white people unnecessarily. Thank you so much. One of the things I'll say to you, I already said the overwhelming whiteness thing which will reverberate for me probably for the rest of my life. Thank you for that. One of the things that I focused on a lot in my work when I was inside the institutions and now outside really focusing on audiences is trying to make space and to promote inclusive spaces to do what I can from where I am. So to really recognize what is this position that I have, what space do I occupy and what power is possible here. So think about where you are and what you can do from where you are. And for anyone in the room who's working inside an institution, get out of the building. Get out into the world. Get out into those conversations that are absolutely happening outside the building. Sure they're happening inside, but they're happening outside too. This is one of the things that we focused on a lot in Chicago at Victory Gardens. There are a lot of things that we wanted for that theater and a lot of those things are happening right now. But we had to get out of the building. The only way we were going to know about the Latino community or any other community in the city is to actually get out into that community. We had to get out and talk to you and learn from and elevate and support and recognize. Thank you. Jeff, do you have a last comment? I'm a student here right now. I feel like I'm learning from all of you. That's why I'm taking so many notes. And my job is always to listen. And I feel privileged to have listened to such a great dialogue right now. Chris, do you have any last, last comment? No, I'm good. I think, yeah. Just benefit a lot of voices. You have to listen to all the voices that are in the room. Thank you guys. Let's continue the conversation of our wine. We just have a breakdown of 50 minutes at 4.55 when we turn. Mika, you first will pick us up. She's been in quite a few positions all day, but she's taking a lot of notes I can tell. Right now we have a wine and cheese break. They'll be outside in the lobby for those of you on our round. Create your own wine and cheese break. And we'll come back at 4.55. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.