 Good morning. How is everyone? Doing well? Awesome. So my name is Crystal Chanelle Truscott and I am the artistic director of an ensemble company called Progress Theatre. I'm also a department head for music and theater at Prairie View A&M University near Houston, Texas and I'm also a board member of the Network of Ensemble Theatres. So very happy to be in this space and to have shared time with everybody over the last couple of days. And so we thought that we'd start the morning with a little singing. How do you feel about that? Yeah? Maybe some exploration, some group singing. Freedom singing. Yeah. So if you were in the one of the session yesterday we talked about you know the difference between performance singing and freedom singing. In Atlanta at the Center for Civil Rights there was a poster that used to be handed out to people who were going on the protest marches. And one of the rules is that for that for freedom singing versus performance singing everybody sings. And that if you can't sing sing louder. And I just thought that was just kind of a beautiful thing to know that was being distributed there. So thank you, Imagining America, for introducing me to the Center for Civil Rights in Atlanta and being able to witness that. I'm giving a shout out to Kevin Bott who's in the audience. So the song this morning there's one word and it is the word is membaaye. Can everybody say that? Membaaye. Membaaye. So I am from the South. I'm from Houston, Texas. And as you folks know sometimes Southern folks have a way of shortening words. So membaaye comes from remember, right? And if you're a Southerner you know that sometimes people don't say remember they just say memba. And certainly in African-American tradition and folklore that term memba can be used like kind of remember that time we went here remember that time we went there. But it's really a call to action to remember. And remember the past, remember stories. I've been hearing such great stories over these last two days and time that is shared. And so then membaaye in the tradition of my company is trying to think about how do we make African-American language reflect back to its African roots. And so we took remember to memba to membaaye. So we're saying membaaye but we're also just kind of reminding ourselves to remember. Remember the lessons reflections mirrors windows that we've had over this time. Remember the stories that we've shared and the space that we've shared with each other. And so without further ado here we go. It's a pretty simple melody. Anyone know the song Camp Town Races? And all of the complicated history of that notion just to tie it in. So it goes membaaye membaaye. Can you try that? Membaaye. Don't you sound lovely? Membaaye membaaye. Membaaye. I love it. Membaaye. Membaaye. Then I just want to raise hand the baritone bass category. Our tenors out proud Alto's who can you know carry down there. And so I'm gonna give you another part. Your word is sweat. And it goes sweet. And I need the people who can be an octave under me to go there sweet. Yes beautiful. Sweet. So I'm gonna tell you when to come in. We're gonna go back to the melody. So everyone is going membaaye. Keep going. Keep it the sweats. Membaaye. We have any Sopranos? You ready? Sopranos want to give it a shot? We'll do it one more time. So Sopranos go membaaye. Have a good final day of the conference. The symposium. So I'm going to bring to the stage the wonderful, fabulous, marvelous Alicia Tonsik, the Managing Director of NET. Who does more than anyone could ever imagine. So please give her a good welcome. Updates to your program for today. We have one room change. The Ensemble and University partnerships for creating socially engaged theater. That was in your programs as room 204. It's now gonna be here. So after we finish, take your break. Come back here if you want that. There are also two sessions that are in your programs that we will not be offering this morning. One of them is the University and Ensemble Practice for Social Justice session. That will not happen. Also the creating ensemble devised work for the main stage. So you still have three awesome choices. So pick one of the other ones. Okay, so I get to tell you a little bit about our speaker this morning. Michael Rode is the founding artistic director of Sojourn Theater, which is a 15 year old ensemble with 15 members living in eight cities. Their current and upcoming projects have various combinations of them working in Kansas, Montana, Illinois, Oregon, where I live, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. Michael teaches at Northwestern University where he helps lead the MFA directing program. He's also the founder and director of the Center for Performance and Civic Practice, which is a three year old national resource leading programs and initiatives that engage partners in sites including Chicago, Tucson, Maine, New Orleans, California and Kentucky. I had the great honor and privilege of working for about 10 years with Michael as the managing director for Sojourn, and it makes me very happy to get to give him over to you today. So Mr. Michael Rode. I'm going to use this. Yeah, thanks. Oh, that's so nice. Am I okay? Okay. I think they, is this okay? Yeah? Okay. Good morning. Hey, good morning. I was supposed to be with you yesterday and got trapped in airports for the entire day, so I did not get to enjoy the awesomeness of yesterday. So all I want to say before I start is I'm going to read, I'm going to read something to you that I've been working on for this morning and the you is not you, the you is us, very much including me, which is how I've been thinking about this. So 100 questions, three ideas, one story and a ghost. Question one, why are we here? Question two, what draws us to ensemble? Question three, what draws us to teaching? Question four, what do universities, often large hierarchical bureaucratic institutions offer us as labs for ensemble values and practices? Question five, why teach? What do you teach? What do you teach? Do you share a method for being an artist? Do you share a set of tools? Do you share a way of looking at the artist's role in society? Do you share your own beliefs and principles as a foundation for understanding the role of theater in the world? First idea, in a university theater program, our primary intention can't just be to train artists, it's got to be shaping experiences and strengthening skill sets that will nurture strong agents of civic presence, bold thinkers and empathetic human beings. To work in ensemble, which I define in theater practice as a collaborative community of artists working together repeatedly over time to build and share performance, you need specific skills. Collaborators need to listen and they need to make offerings. They need to make choices and be responsible for those choices. They need to articulate a strong personal vision while respecting and negotiating a space filled with multiple visions. In some ways, it is a fairly radical educational agenda, a contradiction in our contemporary education context, which is a setting most comfortable when committed to and measured by the acquisition of knowledge. An artist in ensemble has to live safely, though not always comfortably, with uncertainty. So, our students ideally must learn to be off balance and learn to find balance, individually and in community, in ensemble. Question 11, how do you teach balance? Question 12, how do you teach listening? Question 13, how do you teach generosity? Question 14, how do you grade those things? How does a single teacher manifest the power of multiple voiced leadership in a traditionally hierarchical space such as a classroom? Can you be in ensemble with your students? What does Palo Freire offer a theater artist in a university setting? What are your values in a classroom? Is professional arts training antithetical to building agents of community change? Does community change have a place in a room seeking aesthetic virtuosity? Does ensemble practice automatically correlate with a vision or agenda of community change? What is aesthetic virtuosity that's not placed in the context of community? What do we even mean when we speak the word community? What virtuosities do you build in the process of training ensemble? What excellence does ensemble demand that we do not articulate loud or often enough? Question 25, what does ensemble mean to you? What do you get out of it? What do you give up to be in it? Of it? With it? How do you love an ensemble? How are you loved? Question 30, what sweet taste does ensemble have that you can't find anywhere else? Question 31, what about ensemble? Have you traveled over mountains and across seas just to touch? Question 32, what song does ensemble sing to you that you hum in the dark? Question 33, what scent would you miss if ensemble walked out the door and never came back? Question 34, what does ensemble have that you can't find anywhere else? Second idea, Google, the name of a company, has become a verb. To seek knowledge in the world, you Google. Google searches. It is what they do. It is what they are known for. So when they seek to expand both their market share and their utility, what do they do? They take that action, that verb that they have become, and they expand what it means. They are apparently developing a nanotechnology in the form of a pill that will search your body for pathologies. The prototype currently identifies antibodies that would be inside you if cancer was present anywhere in yourselves. Their product will search you and quite possibly save your life. Google searches. Question 35, what is our verb? What is our action? What does ensemble do? What do we know it does? What can it do that it doesn't do now? What do we want potential partners, collaborators, participants and audiences to consider, feel, think, wonder when they hear the word, the term ensemble? How do we channel the power that we know exists in our practice and make meaning with it loudly and intentionally? Question 42, when was the last time you were invited into ensemble? Was it in a theater experience? Was the invitation explicit? Do you recall the invitation or just your acceptance? Or do you simply recall the condition without a clear sense of how you arrived? When was the last time you made the invitation? One story. Though I worked with both Cornerstone Theater and Looking Glass Theater before I turned 23 years old, half my life ago, my first deeply personal experience of ensemble was just after that. In 1991, I helped start an ensemble called Hope is Vital. What began as me giving theater workshops at a Washington DC clinic for homeless men and women living with HIV and or AIDS became that group of adults working with a group of DC teens creating original theater and interactive workshops all over Washington DC about HIV. This story is about the moment those two groups first met. I've been working with adults at the clinic for a few months when Russell, a quiet, charismatic participant who had helped me gather the crowd that now joined us weekly, came up to me and said, when do you want to bring some of the kids down? I assumed he meant the teens at the school where I taught theater my actor day job. I said I wasn't sure and he said next week, bring some next week. Everyone in the chapel, our workshop space, was watching Russell and I. I had no choice. Yes, I told Russell, of course I will. And I did. Six teenagers, Sunila, Mina, David, Lauren, Shana, and Veronica. I had worked with them all in class and in shows I directed earlier that year and I adored every one of them. Couldn't get a school van but a couple parents helped me drive them over to 14th NP. We took the elevator up to the fifth floor where the confidential clinic hid above the giant homeless shelter on the lower floors, 1991. We walked into the chapel and not surprisingly the room was quiet, awkward, even a bit tense. Tim tried to make small talk with Shana immediately. I think I recall Jerry playing the piano and Lauren hovering nearby. As everyone put their things down and we gathered into a circle, Russell said to me, let's do the game. David's eyebrow raised. What game? Russell stepped into the circle, pointed at Veronica and gently said, you want to play? Veronica looked at me, stepped into the circle and smiled at Russell. Russell said, okay, you're my mom. Veronica immediately started to fuss over him. Grabbed a chair and said, sit down, you need to eat. I'm cooking, sit down. She became a whirling dervish of fairly mediocre pantomime, conjuring a kitchen full of food and utensils instantly. Russell tried to start a conversation but Veronica's comic intensity left him no space for actual connection, which seemed not far from his actual mother-son experience. After a couple minutes of hilarity, providing much-needed shared release in this large circle of newly met participants, Russell said, mom, I need to tell you something. He said it with urgency and everyone in the room, absolutely everyone, knew immediately what he wanted to say. He was playing out, disclosing to his mom that he was HIV positive, something he was struggling with how to do and if he wanted to do. I looked at Veronica, suddenly very aware of just how out of my league I was. 24 years old, not a counselor, not a therapist, just a person who loved theater and who figured, sure, I can handle whatever happens until that moment. Veronica looked at me, sensing I was about to interrupt them and she told me with her eyes, I've got it. She turned to Russell who was now standing and she simply said, I know Russell, it's okay. I know. And she opened her arms and he walked into them and they hugged for a while. The room was silent and then Russell lifted his head and said, damn Veronica, you know how to play this game. And Veronica said, I love this game. Russell nodded and then he said to the rest of the circle, who's up? Russell taught me about making invitations. Veronica taught me about accepting them. Over the next 18 months in correctional facilities, in schools, in legislative offices, in hospitals, in church basements all over the DC metro area, this newly formed supergroup taught me about ensemble. And eventually, I realized how lucky I was that day when Russell turned to Veronica, the two of them knew to each other, Veronica held the space. I did not. What has become for me a lovely memory of connection could very easily have ended up a story of my failure to make a space safe. Question 48, what's the last thing you learned while in ensemble that surprised you, that scared you, that made you question your own constants? When did you last fail? Is it okay to fail in ensemble? In what contexts are you willing to fail? And in what contexts are you not? What do our students have to gain when ensemble holds them amidst mistakes and hesitancy and fear? What about our colleagues? How does ensemble as a practice strengthen us as individuals and members of groups? How does ensemble move the personal into the social, the social into the public, the intimate into the political? Question 60, where do you see ensemble outside the arts? Is a sports team ensemble? Or the researchers working together in a lab? What about the nurses and doctors mid-surgery in an operating room? Is a state legislature? Is it about work together or is a family that lives and eats and makes a life together? Are they ensemble? Is this the wrong question? Is it not about who is ensemble, but rather what is ensemble practice? Where and how can it be deployed? Third idea. Recently, I was working with employees of a Chicago City Department to help them develop a collective vision and better collaborative practice. After lots of small group work, we brought together supervisors and staff from this department's sites all over Chicago for the first time to engage together in identifying shared challenges and build problem-solving strategies. It was a remarkable gathering, a remarkable day given how many workers from across Chicago attended. As the work progressed, something became clear. These city employees experienced their role in a large bureaucracy as so disempowering that when it came time to imagine possible visions and new tactics, they literally could not release their voices of the system in which they were embedded. They could not enable themselves to see possibilities outside their daily lived experience. In this instance, it was our job to help craft a space where possibility was present. Question 69, what does ensemble practice have to offer your school outside the classroom, outside the theater department, outside the arts program? What does it have to offer your provost's office, your student services, your student government, your faculty senate? How does ensemble craft spaces where possibility is present with those who do not self-define as artists? In what ways can we be useful in rooms where policy and structure are dependent on vision, but where systemic lack of imagination means vision rarely comes from the best idea? What does ensemble practice have to offer your public bodies of decision makers? What does it have to offer as your communities engage in public dialogue? Do your communities engage in public dialogue? Should they? Do you want them to? Question 82, highlight, how can we through ensemble practice bring our assets to the dramaturgical requirements of public conversation? Question 83, how can we through ensemble practice help build the muscles of civic imagination that a healthy democracy demands? Question 84, how can we through ensemble practice use universities as labs where we co-create opportunities and explore innovative pedagogy and radical approaches to change in and around and through the theater we make? A ghost is something I remember and I don't know how. A ghost is someone who stays with me long past the moments we shared. A ghost is the person I was who is gone, but walks in my shoes nonetheless. A ghost is not memory. A ghost is not fear. A ghost is not want. A ghost is present and absent, missed and forgotten, known and utterly anonymous. Who is not in this room today that you would have in this room? What ensembles are conjured when we do our work, a foot in the past, an eye to the future? What do you tell your collaborators, your students, your friends when you tell tales of ensemble before you? Do those tales reach into your circles today? If so, are they bridges or postcards? Question 90, who is in your circle now and forever? Question 91, how open is your circle? Question 92, do you include only people who share your eye and heart? What do you tell students when they ask, how do I find my tribe? Do you tell them, for God's sake, don't just look for people like yourself? Do you tell them the world is messy and ensembles should be as well? Do you tell them this university is not a bubble, it's a part of the world, make sure your work is as well? And what about the network of ensemble theaters? How big is our circle? Should we be of like minds, hearts, and eyes? Or should we be a collision of values and ideologies? What share is left empty here for the people who will be in our circle not yet appeared? A ghost is everywhere, something known is not. So I want to be where the ghosts are, especially when I'm in ensemble making, which is why I'm here and which is why I ask question 100, what next? That's what I got. That might have been quicker than what I told Mark. Thank you Phil, thank you all. So fantastic questions, 100 questions. 100 of them. I actually was skeptical. I thought there's no way you're gonna get 100 questions in. That's why I counted them for you. Exactly, thank you and needed the proof. But are there questions, I know I have so many, but are there questions about the questions of the questions? Yes Matt, Alyssa, which do you help with? That's thrilling to have somebody ask you to repeat something after you just read something that long, thank you. Also this is gonna be posted on HowlRound in the next few days, but the last line about the very end, oh a ghost is everywhere something known isn't. Other questions, Laura McKaynes. In the network of ensemble theaters we have a lot of questions, one of them being a question about the word ensemble. Is the word itself an exclusion because of where the word comes from? Yeah, what a great question. People out here should answer that, what a great question. Yeah, it's great. This is now our group conversation. I'm happy to be a part of it, but you just listened to me for a while. What about it? Is the word ensemble itself exclusive? All words are exclusive, we're here. Yes, there's been so many definitions this weekend, is it really that exclusive? Is exclusion a problem? A quick thought about that and I come from more advanced background than a traditional theater background. It is a word that resonates with our collective's practice and with many people that I know who would never use the word ensemble to describe their work. They might use the word collaborative or collective, but not the word ensemble. So I just wonder if there's a way that that language can be a web rather than a single word so that people have an idea of the multiplicities. Hi Michael, thank you as always for your talk and all your great thoughts. I think that what troubles me about the use of the word ensemble, although I also love it, is that it seems exclusionary because some of the ways in which we come consciously to work together in really deep and beautiful ways are temporary. And I want to expand the notion of ensemble and its temporality that we can create an ensemble when we're working with a group in a short period of time. And there's an implication in the way we've been using it this weekend that it is a long-term commitment and endeavor, which is a really gorgeous thing, but it's also a luxurious thing that many of us don't have access to because of time and money and space. And so I want to think about ensemble as a state of mind and being that can constitute both a temporary and an ongoing group of people with a commitment to a shared purpose. What do you think about that idea? Me personally, I agree with you. Personally, I see ensemble both as a noun that might sort of represent the continuity and commitment of a group who do work together over long periods of time. And I don't want to lose that as one way to think about that kind of context like my own company that's been that fortunate to work like that. But I also do think in other ways of looking at time that ensemble as a condition, ensemble as a practice or even as a verb is something that does not necessitate that kind of durational aspect to be a thing. For me, that's how I think about it. I've had one of my ensembles I've had for 18 years, my ensemble of people with disabilities. And I have to give you props because you really were very helpful to me when I was first starting that 18 years ago. But you know, I've also made ensembles with people that were very short term like working with a group of women with breast cancer. And there was tremendous commitment and and purposefulness and and the nature of a lot of what we do in the theater it's built in that it's ephemeral and that we don't get to necessarily be together. So it's important that we try to think about constituting communities in whatever way we can with depth and purpose, but understanding that we don't always get to be together. And that still has a value, right? So thanks. Yeah, Morgan and then Matt. I think it's a great question. And I guess when I think about it, I think about it sort of like physics in terms of center of gravity and concentric circles that at the nucleus or the solar center of any solar system, there's an intentionality. And then there's like levels of commitment that an ensemble that stays together for a long time is really close to the nucleus and probably becomes part of that nucleus. But that that other orbits are around it at various times and spaces, including an audience that is witnessing a particular performance becomes part of that orbit, and that there are also, you know, comets that go through that can disrupt things in interesting ways or can get pulled in. So I guess I see it as a really fluid organism or, you know, physical setup. But I think for me, the nucleus of intentionality is probably the most key. Yeah. Yeah. So something I think you're pointing at has has been missing this weekend for me. There's been so much about the symbiosis between ensembles and university and the wonderful mutual benefits that come from these relationships. And that's all true. And I also think for me as a guest artist going to universities, I think these relationships have to be dangerous. And they have to be scary. And I see a huge part of my role as a guest artist in is in shaking up the university and challenging things that I see that they can't see anymore, or they don't want to see anymore. And I think I always approach guest artists work. There's a part of me that's trying to get fired. There's a part of me that that that doesn't want to be invited back. But in a good way, pushing boundaries in a good way that they can't push anymore. I guess it's not a question. I'm sorry. That's that's okay. Do you have you been fired from the university? Not yet, but close. Hi, I think of ensemble a lot the way I think about queerness like as a queer theater practitioner that queer we sort of want to make it into a noun, but it's actually this verb that we like question and ask questions and we untangle and we never kind of like rest on what's comfortable. And to me like I think queerness and ensemble theater have a lot to speak to each other because it's all about sort of like what are these hierarchies and norms and ideas that we've been taught and how can we keep asking questions and keep expanding what that means and sort of never resting on one definition of what something means and how do we sort of keep that it is always growing and always changing and how do we sort of not become comfortable in something because it worked this one time whereas you know it might not work the same way. So how do we remain flexible and on our toes and always listening and asking those questions. And so that to me is sort of how I bring those two things together and think have a lot to speak to each other. A lens and a set of actions and an intentionality in addition to sort of the thing. I have a question or comment. The comment is I love what you said about the verb of making ensemble a verb and I was trying to think what that would be and maybe something like think create search together. And the question I guess is that I'm sure a lot of people resonate with a lot of people who work full time in colleges of what is the provost's office need. And so I'm curious in your experience you know if we look at the administration as something that needs that work but they don't know they need that yet. How do you don't you need to be invited. How do you create the opportunity to introduce the possibility of that to people who may not yet know they need it. It's a really good question. I have to say although I'm not wearing my glasses Christine is that you. Yeah. So I mean I feel like without I mean I guess putting on spot but it seems like your current job and the context you're in is like a really unique place to respond to that question just because you have a level of access and conversation at those levels that certainly I don't in a university. So you can if you are interested in that I would I would I would see the response to you this question about like how an artist or a university theater program does or doesn't connect with higher administrative levels on things they do know they need help with and they don't just what those conversations are like. So I'm Christine Dunford I'm at the University of Illinois Chicago right now like many of us I go way back with Michael and I'm an ensemble member with a theater company looking glass. But what's at the heart of your question that's interesting to me is the invitation. And so that that to me is at the core of some of the questions embedded in your hundred questions and about partnering with particularly organizations either universities or community or however we want to describe them. And and I think it's a complex and question and I think that you know just so I'm interested in this question on two levels like what your agenda is in that way and what this this agenda for thinking about civically engaged practice but also just on the ground. I think this is going to be very obvious to most people here but to state the obvious that doing the work and using it as a model then can serve as and then inviting someone to invite. I think is is a way that I might begin to approach it at the university level. So to create a project and invite the provost or invite a team of people to have a conversation to experience it and have a conversation about it or to fund a pilot on a very small level or to get somebody in on a very small level that you even though you could do it on your own sometimes it's better to it's helpful to bring somebody in who's like minded to work with you because they can get more attention. But anyway those are some of my immediate ideas. Thank you. This brings together a bunch of things. I'm actually an administrator and a low level administrator. So I struggle with this. I think one of the reasons why I choose to bring ensembles in is because I'm looking to get fired in the same way. And so part of the invitation is sometimes provocation that can work. The middle section of your questions really resonated for me because one of the things that I struggle with is am I transmitting a sense of futility to my students in doing what we do. And how can I empower the students that I work with to feel proud and vital and valuable as the artists that they are. And I think that that's the question that I keep coming up with. And I often utilize. You have to know the university and you have to have somebody on the inside who knows the specifics of the bureaucracy because I can't imagine that we're all the same for the. I'm at Columbia and it's a student focused environment. So if I can empower my students to feel comfortable walking into the dean's office and walking into the provost's office. I get things done. I can't get that invitation but they can. But I know that and a visiting artist might not. And so how you do that and how you sort of work very strategically I think is an important way to think. But empowerment is so key for me. These are all fantastic questions. And just to keep us on schedule. We need to start to wrap things up as we're having this conversation. I was thinking back to what Liz Lerman was talking about yesterday when she talked about love purpose and risk. And I feel like when it comes to risk we are we're there like we know how to do that when it comes to love. We are awesome. And we are on it. We love like like nobody loves. And when it comes to purpose I think that is the question. And I feel like this question about what is ensemble and everything that was coming up is really a question of purpose. And I feel that is that is the burning question that I hope we just continue to dig into. We are we do. I mean hopefully that this is all one big conversation and we're just going to hit the pause button on this conversation so we can pick it back up in a couple of minutes. But we should make sure you get your break and then get to your room so that we can so that we can respect all the presenters that that are yet to come. So I want to thank Michael road. Thank you.