 So welcome everybody back here to the modern SEAL center, the greater center. My name is Frank Henscher, I'm the director of the SEAL center. It's day five of the pre-owned festival here. We had over 40 presentations in the last days. Great companies like elevator repair servants, Richard Maxwell, Major CEO of Oklahoma. The year we had a great dinner, Raja, and that county was here. And he parsed in many, many discussions also, many panels. And today is a day where we focus a bit on the exchange of academia and the New York theater scene on many levels. It's about space in New York, about performance and responsibility for performance. It will be about many things. We think one of the important questions what we don't have also is how does academia react? What do we do? How does it observe? And today, at the very beginning, for our viewers also on HowlRound, we have a panel on device, the theater. We have Kohars-Huelas and he brought his team. They did an extensive research over 12 days of the national download of humanities art. And they're going to give us a report on this I feel most important subject because it also covers ensemble theater, dance and also, of course, device and theater. The term that is an umbrella for many things. So I would like to welcome all of you to come here and I hope to get over to you. Thank you very much. And thank you to Frank and his wonderful staff for putting us all together. It happened on Chardonnay Storybuddy and they did a great job. And then the patient was really able to ask us for the flexibility around our schedules and for this being part of the probably best of all kind of promotion. It's great. And I want to thank all of everyone here for also being available to come. I'm going to introduce everyone the detailed biographies of all the speakers today are on the probably best of events website. So I'm just going to give you the essentials but you can find more there. And I think it's going to give for a while. However, so I'm Alan Koharski and I'm currently a senior research scholar in the department of theater at Swarthmore College. And I teach in the Pig Iron Theater Company's MFA program in device performance and something I've been doing for the last 10, 11 years. With Quinn Bowredell, who is co-boundary for the Pig Iron Theater Company and the director of the School of Device Performance. I served as co-director of the 2023 NEH Institute in Philadelphia title preserving and transmitting American ensemble based device theater. And I want to make sure we hope Quinn would be able to be with us today and Quinn should be given a shout out as the person who actually came with the original impulse and idea. The original idea came from his side and then he came to me and asked me to partner with him. And so it's very interesting to think about someone really coming from the practice and the specific side and not based in more academic side of higher education who whose brains are really led through all of this starting. And we also did that proposal, the original proposal on a very short notice and got the funding suggested nonetheless. So we were really proud and pleased about how it worked out that way. So let me start with our panelists who are here. And then there are two ways people are represented today on the panel. Three of the people were what we call participants in the NEH Institute and in NEH Institute there are people who are funded by the grant, fully funded. And NEH does have many expenses for participation and they do the entire 12 day ride. And it's a very intense commitment that requires an unbroken attendance for 12 days. And then there are faculty and the faculty come and go and are there sometimes for just a day, some opted to stay longer at their own expense and to observe and be able to take in more of the content of the institute. And then there are the organizers from the King Iron School and in total, it was a gathering of 50 people involved with the teaching of theater and higher education who have interests in devising, physically based work and also on school-based work. And in the case of our gentleman in particular it was part of our very high quality person of proposal language to include archiving. And that we have right here, right with the person you were able to have in the cohort who's full on work is with archiving and library and work in higher education. So we have people here who are representing who are here's participants. And then we also have Tom Seller who was actually on the faculty. And so we had a session that was devoted to editors and publication. And we had as part of the proposal for the institute from the beginning, we had a prior agreement with Tom and the theater, the theater magazine and Yale that they would dedicate space to the future issue to writing coming out of the institute. And that is happening. So there will be an entire issue of theater published in May where the entire content will be from the participants, not the back of the participants of the institute along with Ken Boerendal and myself as organizers. And then Rebecca L. Schein who's here is a co-editor on the theater magazine that was also a participant in the institute. So they did the entire ride of the 12 days and Tom was there for one day in the way to go back. So it's these different ways that people come in and out. Okay, so then the just the fuller introductions without everything that's on the website. Tracy Haasos is an actor and movement director. She has performed at New York City theaters including New York City Center, Dixon Place, Akron's Art Center and Theater for the New City. And most recently she was seen and prepared this co-produced by the Bushwick Star and Hear Arts Center. Haasos is an affiliated artist who become a balanced theater. She teaches performance movement, collaboration and voice at Queens College in the CUNY system. And previous academic positions have included lecturer of acting and movement at Stanford University and work at Emerson College, Los Angeles, Montclair State University of New Jersey and others. Right gentlemen, on my right is a librarian for the Performing Arts and the Division of Libraries in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota City Arts and Dance Department. And MLIS, a Master's of Library and Information Science. My husband has that degree. From San Jose State University. He's a development and conducts research at the intersection of performance studies, transgender studies and new media studies. His dissertation based book probably explores the ways transgender embodiment is conceptualized and shaped by the media. He is also currently working as a contributor and co-editor on an anthology focused on trans feminist theater and performance. Rebecca Alacharn on my far right is a doctoral candidate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University, where they studied queer theater and performance. They are also a lecturer at Tufts University. The writing has been published in the theater magazine where they also serve as an associate editor. Rebecca is originally from Peaceburg, Pennsylvania and received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and their MFA from the Elm School of Drama. And I'm a seller, far left. He's a writer, curator and dramaturge, editor of theater magazine, long-serving editor of theater magazine and professor of the practice of dramaturgy, the practice of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at Yale University. His writing and criticism have appeared in national publications, including Art Forum, Bomb, The New York Times, The Guardian, Four Columns and American Theater. From 2001 to 2016, he was a frequent contributor to The Village Voice, where he covered theater and performance art nationally, serving as an only award judge and for two teams as chief theater critic. So that's our cohort. And I just want to share a few words about the institute, how it was framed and about one of the agencies to represent some and to encourage others to think about a very nice number of fields of theater performance sites because they had been kind of employment practice that we found out by doing it. The past, present and future of the biased physical beauty in the U.S. was the topic of a historic anti-agent student at the battlefield this past June. A diverse group of over 50 professors, artists, teachers, grad students, editors and archivists from around the country as well as several foreign countries gathered for 12 days of rigorous discussion on the issues of archiving, criticism, and especially the theoretical and historical framing and teaching of a 60-year-old practice in American and world theater. This exchange was prominent by the recent proliferation of the teaching of the practice of devising colleges, universities and drama schools, often without a theoretical, critical historical framing and took place in the context of the larger challenges such innovative life performance in the U.S. following the COVID epidemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and the growing impact upon the change. And of course not just in the United States. These factors are all in play. All the participants here today are in practical necessity from the New York Philadelphia vicinity. It is important to note that the mission of the Institute and the charge we have for many age was for this to be a national gallery and with broad geographical and institutional representation as well as with participants from every phase of career development in the field, ranging from graduate students like Rebecca to late career scholars and artists. The profile of the 2,500 participants was also often interdisciplinary, including colleagues in dance, fiddle art, media and comparative literature. The scope of the artistic practices considered in the Institute were also defined as national in nature with the goal of making visible work in a wide variety of locations in the country over time, including regional hubs of such activities in cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Minneapolis and San Francisco. And of course there are very robust examples of individual companies working in places like Austin or Albuquerque or Milwaukee. And there's a very good group of people that are trying many of these companies that have very significant and sustained histories. Alongside the 25 committed participants were 20 faculty who led a variety of seminars and workshops over the 12 days, as well as a half dozen graduate students and staff members from the Pig Iron School. The presence of all participants, faculty and support staff from Pig Iron were funded by the grant from NEH, which was the only such institute in the country funded this year with a focus on contemporary theater. These grants are highly competitive to receive and the selection process for the participants was similarly highly selected. We could only accept one out of four applications to be participants. Last month, Frank Henscher, Henscher generously reached out to us to consider this work as part of such a conversation about device theater after COVID, while the pandemic, which is ongoing, was an undeniable context for our gallery. It was never explicitly the focus of our sessions on the past, present and future advice just on some of the United States and in particular its presence in higher education. But it was always one way or another present. So I suggested to our speakers that they gathered and thoughts about the following. What are your concerns and interests about device musical ensemble theater? We're coming into the institute in June. What you gained from the intense public experience of the group, what you came away with was not there when you arrived. And what you see and experience as the challenges and opportunities for such work now and in the future, especially in regard to higher education's role in this work. And I think it is also important that our discussion emphasized, is also important that our discussion emphasized nap and global framing of our clock and points in the institute at Philadelphia with the local defined as our given local academic teaching situation wherever that was or wherever that is. And the one thing that we emphasized over and over again and it came out beside this, I'm going to leave the language for promoting today's panel with Frank is it's a bit of a mouthful and it's one of these things we always want to add it down but the fullness of the theme was threefold to start on the device, physically based, on solid based in combinations. And then that expanded to include even just for their performance, global performance and interdisciplinary performance, global performance and applied performance. So in the end, we had almost six talking points, at least six talking points, but we began with those three and they're interconnected. If these are the theory and the context of COVID are important to you on the panel for those of you when you get to the question and discussion and answering these questions, then they are great to discuss to hear your thoughts about all that along the way, but it's really, we want to hear first what the institute, what's foremost in mind at this point, so. So we look to start, maybe. Good to hear. Yeah, okay. I was delighted to, I was just like what is pig iron up to? So I just went to pig iron site and was delighted to learn about this institute, which I felt addressed directly what is questions that I've had for, I don't know, it's five years. I'm just like, how do I, as a person who teaches, acting, multiple levels of movement with theater and courses in collaboration and devising, how do I get better at what I do by becoming more aware of other things that are happening in the field of the questions that are arising for other scholars or teaching artists in this area? How can I give my students access to what's going on in the field, especially in an environment of austerity in which many of my students have never been to a theater when they begin training with me, much less ensemble theater? So I feel a great responsibility to be on what I'm teaching them in the studio, try to, how can I make them or how can I allow them to be conversant in what's happening right now at theater? It remains a question, so I'm just so excited that this exists and hope that it can continue in the future iterations of it. So that was what brought me to it. And I was really surprised by the great inspiration and validation that I found by being with these other scholars and teaching artists and kind of becoming aware of my experience in any department and theater departments can sometimes be small and filled with overworked people. So even though a number of us may be working on devised practices, devising practices in our coursework, it's having reached each other and be sure that our courses are speaking to each other and things like this. So I became aware of like, oh wow, in a way it felt that I'm working in a vacuum. I think this also is a reality for movement practitioners who are often brought on as part-time faculty, and so that is my past. But yeah, so it was incredibly inspiring to be surrounded by everyone and all of these folks who were so interested in dedicating this work and it was so inspiring and it's like reaffirming your own commitment to it and there's no greater driver to me as I get back into the studio this semester with students and just have so much more energy to try to push this work forward. My own thoughts, yeah. Great, thank you. Yeah, then just to say one of the things that we emphasized in the grant proposal and as a consistent being throughout the Institute was how the discussions can lead to innovations in the university, college, and drama school curriculum. And particularly on the academic side, theoretical, historical, critical, curriculum to inform the practice which is proliferating widely and teaching but without necessarily a grounding in the knowledge of the history and larger, yeah, historical and cultural context. So, yeah, all of this. Great, maybe we're going. Yeah, yeah, I think that the Institute was sort of two separate perspectives. The first was as a editor, we know that we're going to be doing a study with you and for me, I think the writing around device and company-created theater has been relatively narrow, at least the writing that I encountered and I was curious what ideas folks would have and generally how we'll expand those perspectives, how we include all of the richness and capaciousness of device theater and to have them talk about it and how we teach it. So I was mostly just curious about what that conversation would be like and how we would find each other in terms of writing partners for folks who are just contributing to this issue. And then the second is as an artist and a scholar, my work is really around queer theater and performance which to me has always fell into the category of device and company-created theater, both aesthetically and in terms of practice but is not something that's commonly talked about in the language of device theater. So I was curious how we would open up that particular portal into the world of queer theater and performance. And then at the Institute, I was equally really inspired by everyone's curiosity and focus on this topic. And also I think I found those contributors or collaborators, both as a medivariant as folks interested in queer theater and performance. Yeah. Ryan? Sure, yeah. I'm very grateful to be one of those collaborators. Yes. So yeah, when turning to the Institute, I was thinking, you know, my practice encompasses librarianship, scholarship and more so the past practice. So I came to the Institute kind of in librarian brain and noticing that, you know, the faculty and the students I work with were coming in to me more and more with questions about device theater or ensemble-based or collective creation. And I wanted to be able to be in a better library. So that's kind of what drew me to the Institute. When I came, I just made a second when everyone else had said this, that it was a really incredible experience in large part because the group of the 25 of us just brought so many different perspectives and brought such energy and such curiosity to the conversations we had. It was really stimulating, inspiring to have those conversations between us. I think the last part of your question. What are the challenges and opportunities going forward? Yeah. So I think also thinking in a librarian sense, a lot of what I gained from the Institute and what I have to see going forward are more materials available for teaching and scholarship in libraries, right, so building library collections, building bibliographies around this kind of work, which we started doing during the Institute. I think it was a really cool minor project we worked on together. And I also, I think the other thing that's moving forward for me is this group we were talking earlier about how our WhatsApp chat is still really, really active. We've not stopped being engaged with each other, right? And we are working on projects together. We're co-writing essays. We are possibly co-presenting, working groups at conferences. I think going forward, I'm just really curious to see how this group starts to articulate what is the importance of some device being a little forward. Great, thank you. Yeah, and Tom, you're coming into the different footing, but also in a very informed way about the bigger context of the deal and work in the country and globally. So I'm just kind of curious to hear, and also even seeing things, we have got to see all the materials that come in from the participants that will make the material of this. There will be an entire issue now, I guess, of material coming out of the Institute. So coming into it as you have, which was as one of the faculty speaking just for one day, and I'm there for the entire journey by talking a lot with the background and then looking at the written material, what's coming together in your understanding of the issues and then the COVID situation is a useful, meaningful, kind of hook on which to make your point, so great. Hi, everybody. It's great you got to get created by the way. Thanks for this invitation. Yeah, I was only at it super a day, but I could be immediately walking into the room where there was very energized room. You can sense these things right away, and I was worried about that. I had instinctively committed to doing an issue of Yale's general theater. As far as Alan mentioned, that they were objecting this project because I have thought for a long time as a critic that this is a very underappreciated, under-recognized, but very artistically exciting sector of the American theater in particular. What groups can do working on their own terms as collectives, as ensembles, detached, semi-detached from producing hierarchies and mechanisms you find in kind of institutional theater is very interesting. And I think that's been an incubator for a lot of the supporting American market that I've seen in my 20 or 30 years of writing about theater and making theater. And I was interested in the question of the legacy of the essential, it's almost from the 60s, 80s. And also the question of what might be coming next, when we expand our understanding of devised theater or collective creation to look at a much wider spectrum of work or a historical moment where we're really re-assessing our whole understanding of theater history, I think across the Academy, there's a lot of intention into center, iPop work and career work in particular that may have gotten overlooked. And I was interested in how this institute might shed light on both of those questions. What is the inheritance? On one hand, what can we learn from it and how can that empower us? At a time, very few people pay attention to history or learn about it. And on the other hand, how we're looking forward, that might be, we might be able to change the course of it and make it an exciting vehicle in the sector. So one of the things that's interesting about a magazine in my hours is that a magazine is both a kind of repository and it also creates a sense of what's happening right now or what is in the process of forming. It's kind of forward-looking at the same time. So this was a great project for publication because on one hand, it is a documentation of some of the work, the conversations that were had in the institute. And on the other hand, it is a space for everyone who has been participating in these conversations for 12 days to begin to work out some of the questions that you all were thinking about when you were there. So I hope that the essays, forums, the recorded dialogues that people are working on will be what gets you to the next place, the next stage you're thinking. So if you watch out for that issue, it's going to be finished and published in May, May 2024 and will be available both online and in print. And go to our website, theatermagazine.org and pre-order your copy now so that when that beautiful publication is ready, have a copy. Yeah, and we are, the way that the NEH institutes work is they are potentially repeatable, but they can only be repeated in the alternating years. So you have to complete kind of reporting and everything back on the event. And we intend to reply to repeat the Institute in June 2025. So it would done that we're lucky we'll be able to do a second iteration of it as soon as 2025. And then we've heard in some of our meetings from people who've done institutes that have gone up to six or eight iterations. So that would be very exciting. But we'll see if you have a standing for all of that. So yeah, that's in my thinking already. And one of the things that Tracy brought up, which I think is there are many apparent contradictions of paradoxes in this work that come up very quickly like the issue of students who are teaching students who have not yet had the access to theater in general. And then what seems like a pretty esoteric category on the first contact and is it in fact a more accessible form of theater to introduce less privileged students to or is it more distant and harder to understand access and make a program. And one of the things that started the Institute off very powerfully, I felt was the kind of keynote speaker at the Institute was my man in Google of the University of Wisconsin who was responsible for some of the real foundational books providing kind of a foundation survey of the history of the practice in the United States. And the word that he used that I keep circling in my own thoughts is precarity and that how we're creating if this is I think where the COVID question comes in and it seems extremely immediate maybe right now with the end of federal funding that helped many theaters going in spite of the COVID stresses on audiences but it's an operation set once that seems no longer necessary or the government no longer has the commitment to continue that funding and we're finding this extraordinary vulnerability of many organizations that is revealed all the way over actually seemingly perhaps feeling like the past COVID though in fact or not that the government funding is being thrown nonetheless and therefore weaknesses in the infrastructure and all kinds of things are being revealed. So that may be where the COVID situation is most apparent all around and it's hitting every kind of organization from we've just had 180 degree terms with the Radar Festival that it was gone and now it's back as we heard this a few days ago, it's back. And a lot of other kind of dramatic news in the world about organizations of the LRJ company and school in California and they have a representative in the Institute has just announced that they will probably be folding by the end of the year. So that's a big loss on another front. And then we found out by having to be a national gathering and I think it's really important to point out that some of the most important things happening nationally are in state universities, not on the coasts and that there are very significant operations well-funded, large enrollment, adding tender ones for example, and devising. So there is good news in the country or hopeful signs in the country but you have to really look at all of that and look broadly and then look at the nuances. So by having people that are from State Ball State University from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro from the University of Washington in Seattle we found that there are in fact could be interesting movements forward specific to devising physically based for an ensemble based teaching. So there are interesting things moving in different parts of the country that my thesis would be most if you don't take in the bigger scope. And so yeah, I think one of the contradictions and maybe this is back to what we have. At least today we have such the queer representation that we had in the Institute among other categories of taxation in the cities. Again, is this a form of theater that serves well in the interests of certain communities such as ones that you're part of in research? Yeah, I'd like to jump in and tie maybe a few things together that we're talking about. I'm also gonna start with the COVID question and say that in addition to things like funding which are of course very important. Like another thing that COVID brings up for me is that I can't really think COVID without thinking about racial justice uprising. It's about thinking about George Floyd's murder. I can't really think COVID without thinking about the ramifications of the U.S.'s lurch toward authoritarianism that was playing out in a particularly a key way at the time of the COVID crisis. And I bring all of this up because I think when we're thinking about what the history of devised theater is and what its future is, I think the answer to that might be one of the same. I think that in this thing that we're trying to do and in the essay that we're writing is to broaden how we think about the histories of devised theater to include practices that have been happening for a very, very long time including practices that precede the sort of 60s to 80s moment that we most commonly associate with the development of devised theater. I think not only about career practices that creates a step, but I also think about, I was just doing some research around the African Roe Theater, which was the first all black theater company in the U.S. here in New York. And a lot of the way that they presented plays was by taking the play and kind of like subverting it, kind of devising and redoing it to because all the plays available to them were of course written from a really white supremacist framework. And so they're taking these plays and they're kind of completely throwing away the script and saying, let's do it this way in a way that points to like visions of black power versus like this white supremacist. So I guess the answer I might have and how this is relevant for classrooms today is that this has always been really, for me, what I think about the history of my theater, it has always come out of this kind of this radical place and this place of pushing back against particular kinds of oppressions that far pre-existent in 1960s. And I think that's, I think reaching back into those histories allows us to see a little more easily how these modes of practice are relevant right now and in ways that we can imagine a path forward for them. I think I would also add that I think as Tom was super reflecting on devised theater, maybe one of the forefronts of the future is the theater that we're making now. It's, there is a desire for collectivity that we can't necessarily get and we're watching and moving on our tapestry. This is back to the conversation of why theater is important to us at all. I think the process of making this that is related to collective creation and the historical practices is also how we might be able to move forward as our sort of desire to be back in the world and back in community is re-enacting and also complicating in our current political climate. Yeah, I think one of the other things I was thinking about hearing everyone speak was that how, I mean, one way to frame the question is all, how has COVID impacted the ethical practice in the making of the narrow sense devised ensemble theater practice? But the other way to reverse it is how does the, how do these practices reach out to beyond the theater into communities and into society and into larger social relations and political questions? How do we impact the world beyond theater makers or the theater insiders or whatever? The pre-existing audience, the pre-existing community of makers and are there in fact opportunities emerging to have a bigger impact out rather than focus on how these stresses in the world are hitting inside the sour of the work of theater making and teaching. And one of the points I kind of incised in the Institute and I think, and then my calculations at the Yale Theater Magazine coming out is, I think a lot of the solutions that I see that we are, that where possibilities may be greatest if we understand them properly are through the channels of subsidy possible in higher, that exists already in higher education. That higher education may be the crux that it's a little understood thing how much we subsidize the arts through higher education in the United States in a way that no other country on earth does and it's a lot of money. And it's not centralized, it's not top down, it's not coordinated, its evolution is very uneven but in reality it adds up to an awful lot of subsidy goes into the arts through higher education and that the higher education has has started to perform all these functions of presenting, incubating, teaching, training, providing an anchor in an environment defined under an increased assessment in an increasingly neoliberal environment and alternative to the precarity of independent artistic life professional in the United States which is different than other environments globally. But I do think that's where I've been, I've worked in, I think I've only been in a big theater in a certain sense because I've been linked, I figured out how working relationship with higher education and I was so keen to write in places where I could access each source of time, be there to maintain a relationship with the artists that I was interested in writing about in the United States and elsewhere but I think it's really an important way to think about the future and how to maximize and prioritize maybe better in different places how we use the resources of higher education which are not always an example like the American environment you don't feel like you're in a highly certain environment and you're trying to introduce students to these opportunities or these artistic possibilities and that's the goal too but it's also overall the arena of higher education is an extremely significant one and often it's not included in the conversation of the profession or how to understand what's going forward. Yeah, and I feel like that paradox of another paradox I feel that I experienced on the dailies where I'll feel so, I look around, I feel we're simple cash trapped, I'll be like, this is what we can do with more of a budget but I also think that talking about this infrastructure that you're referencing, I mean, in a way there is such abundance for the students where they see it as like a pinnacle of their creative life and they're just wondering how they could sustain that beyond graduation. Yeah, and returning to an earlier, but it does feel like teaching, devised work in the past few years, you do feel a certain essential element to the work where it feels like it's needing a very deep need in students, which is very rewarding and awesome and you're like, how can I then, so they're like making it themselves and how can I connect them to what's going on outside? But it is interesting that in hearing students' feedback on this kind of theater, they almost link it with somatics and yoga and other things that like feed their souls. It's kind of interesting to like, how can we have more courses like this? Like maybe there's just somatic. And I think that's interesting because- And I'm going to physically base piece of this. Yeah, but then there's work on- But they were almost thinking that the generation of one's own, generating one's own work is a kind of self-care and self-expression that they feel that they need right now. And then they connect that with other kinds of self-care, which I thought was very, because the work is also very hard and very rigorous and about many other things, but I think it speaks to how crucial it is right now, especially. Maybe we could open it up to questions or thoughts from the audience, and I don't know if we have a way to get it to the minimum. I don't think we could do that in prison, but are there- What surprised you most, what did you find? What surprised you most in your finding? I think the scale of what we touched, that yes, this is 50, can you turn the mic? Yeah, I said the scale of what we were touching by opening up this institution the way we did, that we have 50 participants, and even that number, I hadn't really seen town as I was writing for home to get the number right, and that was really 50 people at one point or another working in the room during the 12 days, and many, most were the entire topics. So then to realize that we had four times more applicants than we could take, people who pursued it actively as an opportunity to be a participant, and we've had it close the doors to many people we knew very well, because it couldn't be a Philadelph, we couldn't have Philadelphia, for example, overpresent, but Philadelphia, we could have filled the whole institute with just people doing this for people in Philadelphia. Okay, so like when did these numbers begin to mean something, like nationally? I mean, but I do feel like those numbers keep surprising me, and how many graduates of the Pickering School would pursue it if we invited them? How many members of the larger advising and it is from their performance team in Philadelphia would perform simply, we could participate simply locally if we did that. And then how many graduates of schools like Rookuck are in the country? There are a lot of the Del Arque School, there are a lot of them, and that people we didn't even have, for whatever reason, this is the time for them to apply, but we don't even know them in the area. So I feel like I felt like we were touching the tip of an iceberg of a community, and that is dispersal nationally that a part of our hypothesis, I guess, that it really is a national phenomenon, and that we had participants from 19 states, and we are doing just a simple list of every company we can identify that does this work, and it's in the hundreds of companies. Captain Cicerova, who was one of our faculty members, who wrote one of these foundational books on devised theater companies founded and led by women as part of the women's movement has identified over a hundred devised theater companies founded and led by women. That's just one category over many, many years, and the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia started as one of those, that's the origin even of the name. And so I guess that for me was what it's affirming and beyond, it took me a while to take it in. I don't know about others, I don't know, Tom, are there things that you're finding in the material coming in as far as you? Well, I don't know about surprises, but I know that I have elated on certain questions that have been interesting to think about based on what I'm seeing of the pieces people have wrapped so far, and also what I was hearing in the discussions at the Institute. One was sort of about sustainability, I think. This is what we all walk through the theater and maybe it's the post-COVID piece that we're trying to find a way to allow the theater to get to you at all and to make the work that we're doing in it meaningful and lasting. And so much work could be classified as devised or collectively created, right? There were kind of problematic categories over the last seven times, I think in these conversations, all theaters collectively created and all theaters devised after all. So what are we talking about? But if the criterion for including work in that category is that it was made by a sustained collaboration of some kind over time, we're talking about time when we talk about this or what we're talking about, a form that has found a way to harness time and make it productive and make it meaningful, actually. So it can be a tremendously helpful area to be thinking about in the theater right now. If our other structures are failing us, because they're tied to some more capitalist regimen of like convening a team of artists to make one show and then to stand and reconvene another team to make another show, this is an answer to that. This is kind of temporarily charged form. And that's very interesting to me. And just as I look across all the things that people are writing about, all different perspectives, I've just been thinking about that a little bit. I'm thinking that this is a very helpful side. The old speed nursery. Yeah, I think that's one of the, for me also on the contradictions that we keep going up against is, where is it richer and better? And where is it that presents itself as poor, simpler and more efficient? Like that can play into the neoliberal thing. This is something you can do with less. This is something you need less time, less money, less budget. But in fact, the origins of it are people saying, we need less stuff, less richness in one way, but we want the richest is fine. And then the enrichment of the process over time. And this is where in the work I began with Jesse Taken's open theater work that the revolution was to take eight months to create this sort of piece of serpent. And they gave up any interest in any other material of support to have the time to create the workshopping and the aesthetic that followed the paradox of the richest was to have that amount of time to create a piece together. The other example, which was contemporary, which Patosky's building work where it was like, they were living very poorly in communist fall in the sixties. They lived like a very modest graduate students as a professional theater artist. And yet they've been a very difficult city. And the shock when they found their change in this company was how much time they had, the privilege to have to make their work even as they lived under these stresses and the rest of communist life in Eastern Europe. So I think that's how, and I think that went back to students like, you're like, how is it a solution to the problem of precarity and scarcity rather than a coping mechanism? And I see versions of the advising where it is like, oh, it's efficient, it's apparently efficient. It's apparently more bunch of friendly to do with an institutional setting. And I'm not sure those are the big tributary impulses that are really caught. And yeah, it's contradiction, like how to help. It's a search for the other artistic categories, right? So, and I don't know how that connects with like, what your thoughts are with what you're writing on now, but part of also the institute invited the participants to do a Pechakwiche to do a short presentation on a company they wanted to make sure that everyone loved to wear out as an example of this work and maybe have a neglected category of work and scholarly literature or whatever and the work that was brought in is extraordinarily interesting in every way. And I don't know if the work that you reach out in, the examples at all of what we're touching on now, or what you found out when the other participants shared their concerns. I'll just say one thing that I really loved is that most of us refuse the form of the Pechakwiche. It is set to take our time. Yeah, I think that's really interesting to give in the conversation. Yeah, and yeah. I think maybe one of the things I pull out from what you were saying is we've now created this incredible network of people who work with disciplines sort of nationwide and a little bit globally as well. And I think that network is both reflected in the piece of people who've been submitted from the IT, some of that is Pechakwiche work that has been developed into larger articles. Some of that is collaboration from people who didn't know each other prior to that. Some of that is looking at really specific networks, for example, the network of Philadelphia devising artists. And so I think the more that we can build on those networks, the more I think hopeful we can be about nurturing this form both in the academic and in the academy and professionally as well. Yeah, and I think these very building like conversations or network building initiatives are really really important when people have been working maybe in more isolated ways or in a more siloed way and this is good for the work where it's necessary and we'll open up actually possible with everyone. So maybe Mike, anybody has a question or comment? If not, I asked another one. So I said we mentioned that if I would support, do you have a rough number? How much money goes and we get on and look at it into an education towards the vice theater? And someone told me about 15,000 students on being getting degree each year in theater. How do you see was available to them from career-wise and the vice theater and whatever? How many of you train? Is the training right and what happens after? Did you guys look at that? Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I have any numbers that I just want to know about. The way you can identify students who are identified with devising. This is the best work on some of it where yes, they enter, as they enter their educations and they go forward. It's usually a piece of the education if it's there at all. And then, yeah, what's the economy or what are the actual things you can expect? Now, in a place like Philadelphia, we've had over 25 years, the Philadelphia Frenchmen. So then we're actually talking about this right now. I'm 29, having this conversation about in the program for the next festival to include at least a day devoted to possible curating and people who are leaders in long histories in leading such organizations and how that the benefit of having something like the Philadelphia French Festival in our environment, nothing would have happened really that a lot of us are coming to be one is for the department's work more to have the number of alums go on in the way that they could have over time, without that festival, I don't know very little that would have happened, honestly, the same way. So now we're realizing the importance of partnering between different kinds of institutional structures and the Philadelphia French Festival. It's again, it's not for profit organization that it's not an educational institution, exactly, but they've been a very powerful partner synergizer support. And for that delicate phase of what you are doing the first few years after your first degree or MFA degree when you're trying things out, that's a really important time. The word I'm talking about is incubating, like how can higher education be an incubator for the students? And it also requires frankly, a confrontation with certain bad practices in higher education. I don't want to present higher education greatly. They are inspectors, what would you say? You put the student at the center of everything. All the time. Is that harder? It's really hard. I'll tell you in practice, it's really hard to honor with colleagues, the practice of putting students at the center of the practice. And the reason you're there and the reason ultimately you're justified as the professor is the work of the student. And that is not honored in many situations. You give us some example of what you feel is not right. Well, the biggest example, and this is a typical, I would say the majority is the biggest elephant in the room in most environments is the production program. How do you define productions? And I have a mentor and countless students going into two positions about how you constructively negotiate as an incoming faculty member your role in the production programs. And then I've been talking to dozens of Pygmiron students as they look at jobs to talk about going in as a device first, coming from this type of training into a conventional theater department doing a season that's often meant to be to resemble at best a regional theater subscription season, which is not what it pretends it is. And then, or at worst, it's practicing just like old summer stock. It's like the mustiest of models. And then you come in and you have to find a way to work and succeed and be supported by your colleagues to keep your position while you're bringing in these new practices. So I feel like the reform, the constructive engagement and the form of the production season in Calvin University is critical. And frankly, it's very important. I had to kill the entire idea of faculty production debt and start over. And then now we have a robust faculty production program that it can exist helpfully with student-centered productions. But if you don't open doors for students to direct, if you don't open doors for students to design, if you don't open doors for students to be playwrights as undergraduates with meaningful support and they're not competing with faculty or the budget staff or personal time resulted in everything you need to be able to be successful if you're a year out of college, you're non-dominant. And I very rarely see it actually being honored. And the actors and I see actors and stage managers supported because they serve the interests of the faculty production program. And a student director doesn't, the wrong kind of faculty director does not see a student director as interest. And they don't see it as appropriate to give resources. And to even get a class or to even have a curriculum that's more than token or is that that there's a class at all? And this is, we're still talking about the more traditional categories, directing, design, playwriting, geometry. Then you move into devising. And then where does a devised project arrive in the season of a department? And then how do you, how can that student, how can a student go on and devise after their education if they've never had this range of experiences, right? And that the resources are there to mid-life that transition of the student. First, that's really hard. And I don't think we can romanticize or sugarcoat to require the new education from those issues. It's a huge, difficult fight. They're going through the UWCL right now. It's a large, rich, rich resource, venerable, large-scale, out-regressed students get full scholarship, out-regressed, it's always been true. It's only that to turn it towards devising is to turn that shift towards devising at the Olympic level is when several of the people in our institute, both the faculty and participants are engaged with. And even when you have several highly energetic, brilliant young faculty coming in together, it's really a quite strange amount. It seems to be out. But there's so many embedded structures in this place that has not been attracting the best students. It's like for a while, there's one example. Now there really are, I think, asking the right questions. Maybe next to the door here, maybe each one of them, what is an example, what you saw that works? Or a company, or maybe an educational convention, but every one of you, what is an example, is that this is how it should be. Think yourself. Okay. I mean, I think it's really thinking about what we're writing about right now. Yeah, and we can maybe talk about that together. As a model that I think has been working for a really long time is queer collective making. Like this has been going on for a very long time. It is a space not only in which I think queer collective performance is interesting because it both exists within a community and it creates a community, shapes that community. If you can't pull up the idea of a community and the making, right? I find that to be really interesting. And also there's a particular approach, I think, to history, both in making and preserving that have been in queer collective performance. But I think there's something also interesting about, I know like the conversation and the sustainability, like not having that sort of mean the same thing as doing more with less, but that's precisely what your collective performance have been doing for a long time. Like how can you make an entire copy of tin foil? Well, you can, right? I mean. But it's also a medium that necessarily refuses the larger structure. It can't be like the larger structures of regional theater performance or whatever where we're using here. Theater makers are not very performance makers are not welcome in those systems. So they created their own, that also are a development of community and kitchen structures for the reflect than that performance. They're for many, many, many families, which is the easy example of all of this or how these various forms of performance are adopted into queer performance making. So it's a system that both creates and reduces at the same time, usefully. What universities do that or? They don't. I know, but you see it should happen. No. I don't think it should happen. Is that they have me? I don't know what you think. I think something to see is impressive. They have me thinking of a particular device performance when I was at university, university will sit down there and it's like clearing the shooting. It was a device performance, which is, so I think they're like little spaces, like little openings, but I think what's happening outside of those spaces is really the point. And I don't think we should be withholding queer performance making from our students by any means. I think it's part of the work of queer performance creators is figuring out how to work in opposition, even if the information you get is from your WTFF class, your theater class. How do you then make something that would be so sad? Maybe to what examples of kind of possible work or advice they receive, this is really a great thing. I also have a metropolis. I have two thoughts on this. So just, I think that theater departments have a lot to learn from dance programs because there's already a lot of devising in choreographing student choreographed work that happens every single season. And for whatever reason, students aren't intimidated by the work of creating their own dance and departments aren't afraid of it. So that's amazing. I think they have a lot to learn there. And I'm thinking of my Pachar Pachar. So picking up the Agro-Ulico from Cuba, which has been going since 1990 in all different kinds of economic moments, but they've just been working consistently and doing amazing work. I want to incorporate a unit on their work into a course that I'm already offering for actors and dancers in collaborative creation, kind of using the tools in the tool bit of this company. But there's a lot of adaptation. There's using the work of major Cuban playwrights and singers and reworking them and remixing them in ways that are really relevant and pertinent to the Cuban theater going public now. They're just doing extremely well. I'm not the person to say exactly what is working on it, but I'm very intrigued by this company and I want to really learn what is working in that tool bit because I feel like it has a lot to do with queens. And I think that we could make really, really, I think we could make really pertinent work utilizing some of their practices. Yeah. I have a question, I guess. I'm curious about whether or when in the Institute did your conversations turn to invitation and distribution of the work for audiences of non-practitioners, non-trainees, people who are not necessarily already critically invested in this kind of work. Because I mean, I happen to believe that this work could change everything, but we have to convince everybody at that. I don't know that that was, I don't remember that specific question, which is a really important question. And thank you for that, but it's being a full point of a discussion in this that we had, though I hope will be in the next year. I think it's a really fundamental question, what do we call it? I guess my audience is all in this, the kind of like, I don't like that. Everything that comes to mind with that term, but it's curating an audience maybe is better. And that's what the festival does. And we've seen this in Philadelphia with your French Festival that audiences learn and return based on an experience that they didn't know if they would like, but you have to get them to show up at all. So it's all those questions. Subsidy is a really a giant issue against when these products are speaking. Subsidy makes most of this type of work possible, but you can't have a runaway hit. You can't know what your maximum audience is if you are dependent on a grant for every single show to go forward. So I've said that I've been in the pig iron in different ways from the beginning on their board. I know all the financial calculations are issues of such a company. And one of the things is that there are certain examples where I feel very fine, but they've never known what their maximum audience is for certain shows because the model is baked in to be something to think of. Because, and all of American Mountain Provincial Theater in effect is in the situation of you can't have a runaway success. And so, and then to have something that like, and I do believe audiences can be shown something unprecedented in their experience and have them love it and be excited about it and have a cash out the virus and then people are not even there. So I think that's what Peter History showed that when Oregon happens. And I don't see it recently can happen with this kind of work. But there are, we have so much sort of circle of how to have a show be able to go until the audience goes away, which commercial theater knows how to handle. That's understood very well, but in this arena, it's trickier. And then, festivals I think are really interesting. Player and perhaps a variety of, for instance, if you have affordable performances, accessible performances with artists, audiences can feel comfortable checking on. Can I have a critics, superficial observations? And thanks for your head and to your excellent concern. I think this would be a great question because I think that the American theater has been in urgent conversation for the last three years, but I don't reinvent itself. And the audience has all been at hand for the ball in those conversations. And I think that it just very recently noticed that and realized the audience has not been brought along. One of the things that's always interesting to me as I suppose almost a professional spectator is that you go to see the work of a collective or a true or an ensemble or a devised company differently than you go to see a play. It's just a different mode of spectatorship. People go to see the group. People go to be part of that collective. And that's actually very interesting. That's a different mode of spectatorship in a way. I think there's a lot of potential in that. We were to lean into that and understand that a little bit better. So I think it's essentially very exciting that it's a different reason to go, different reasons to be there and it's a different feeling of attachment and community. I would also say, in addition, that the question of how we bring this forward and it was very present in our conversations about archiving because so much of the history of these companies is lost, there is, and the jukebox under the bed. And so the question of how we preserve these histories in order for anyone to know about them at all and it was really present in a lot of the work we were doing. Yeah, and I think this discussion there is a contribution towards the importance of this field that you are going to talk about it. And I want to thank you all for coming. I hope maybe if you have additional questions, you can talk right now. We stop the next panel at 4.30, but you can continue. So really thank you all for taking the time, also for creating the panel, writing the application. And probably that's what we all know how much work that really is. It's often unlocked it, but in Joseph's voice idea, the social sculpture or the engagements or it's an artistic activity. You just really thank you all for coming at 4.30 with our next panel. So thank you at least talk to the panel. Thank you all.