 Welcome to the LMDA Hot Topics 2020, brought to you by the LMDA University Caucus. I am your host, Michael Chemmers, and I am the LMDA VP of University Relations. For more information on how to engage with us, Brenda. Hi, thank you, Michael. This panel is streaming via HowlRound. There is closed captioning in English, and there's also simultaneous oral interpretation in Spanish. Through the web switcher, you can find the token or the code on LMDA's virtual hub. Bienvenidos. Michael, back to you. Thank you so much. Muchas gracias. I sure wish that we were all in Mexico City together, but I'm very grateful that we have this opportunity to get together in the virtual space. Bye, Brenda. Okay, so my pronouns are he, him, his. I want to take a moment and note that I'm broadcasting to you live from Santa Cruz, which is the historical territory of the Amamutzen and Olone tribes. Thanks to them for their stewardship of the land. Now, you caucus was first convened at LMDA in 1992 by Susan Jonas with the support of President Anne Cataneo to create a regular meeting space for members who teach and practice dramaturgy at universities and colleges. We encourage the exchange of ideas about but not limited to dramaturgy and education, and we participate in LMDA's exploration of shared assumptions that inform our field. The ASU Relations Committee oversees the publication of three different resources at LMDA.org under resources for dramaturgs, the LMDA Guide to Dramaturgy Programs in Universities and Colleges, volumes one through five of the LMDA sourcebook, which is an online compendium of teaching strategies, and, oh my god, you guys, the new and improved LMDA bibliography, brand new, the love labor of the amazing Jeff Pearl, a monster book. It's 38 pages, all updated, incredible information for anybody who's interested in dramaturgy and doing research on dramaturgy. It is astonishing and it's going to be available this weekend, I believe, on the LMDA resource for dramaturgs page at LMDA.org. I want to thank Night Swimming Theater for sponsoring this event. Thank you, Night Swimming Theater. We love you. Thank you so much. And I just want to tell everybody that you can pop questions to us on Facebook or on Twitter using the hashtag LMDA2020. All right, now to the to the matter at hand, hot topics or tópicos calientes. The speakers for this prevent provocative questions, assertions, issues or projects with which they are currently and passionately engaged to initiate conversations and collaborations or to address pressing issues for our community. Speakers have just five minutes to each to open a door into their topic. The strict time limit allows for multiple presentations and follow-up conversations. It also requires careful preparation. At four minutes, I will give a one minute warning. At five minutes, the presenter will be gently but firmly muted because my my giant hook to pull you off stage won't stretch as far as I had hoped. All right, so here's how we're going to play this. We're going to have the speakers in no particular order come forth. And I mean, I have an order, but it's not like alphabetical or anything. And they're going to give their five minutes. And then we're going to have once everybody is done, we're going to have an opportunity for questions. So if you have questions, go ahead and post them in the on Facebook or Twitter. And we will get to them when everybody is finished speaking time permitting. All right, without further ado, our first speaker is Judith Rudikoff. Judith has worked as a developmental dramaturg with emerging and established playwrights and artists throughout Canada, in Cuba, Denmark, South Africa, England and the United States. Her books include performing hashtag me too, how not to look away, performing exile foreign bodies, dramaturging personal narratives, who am I and where is here and trans performing Nina Arsenault, an unreasonable body of work and a whole bunch of other books in the last 20 years. Amazing. Her articles have appeared in many journals, including the drama review, theater forum, theater topics, Canadian theater review. If I were to tell you all of her honors, we would be here all day. So without further ado, give it up please for Judith Rudikoff. Thank you, Michael. That's kind of embarrassing to hear all that, but thank you very much. So I'll just leap right in. I'd like to acknowledge the original caretakers of the land I stand on, both recorded and unrecorded. The area known as Takaranto has been taken care taken by the Nashnavik nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Huron-Wendat and the Métis. I acknowledge the current treaty holders, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the Métis nations of Ontario. So every year I produce a public event with undergraduate playwriting and dramaturgy students at York University in Toronto called the Ashley Plays. This is a cycle of short site-specific monodramas performed in the intimate spaces throughout the Center for Film and Theatre at the University, which are typically viewed by three pods of roving audience members, each led through the cycle on one of three alternate routes. Each pod contains approximately 20 to 25 spectators. Audience members are at some points within one foot of the performer. Some of the sites are located in very confined spaces, such as a cramped space underneath the staircase. The plays must either be performed by Ashley or be about Ashley, the character who varies from play to play, but embodies some shared characteristics as delineated by the class dramaturges. In the time of COVID-19, the challenge has been to re-envision and reconstruct this event, maintaining safety principles such as physical distancing, yet not losing the value of the exercise. The first shift has been from live performance to live stream. The second change is that the performance sites have been altered from specific assigned locations around the building to the playwright-performer's bedroom. The time of the play is April 2020. Playwrights were given the following directive. Your play must involve your site in an integral way. The play could not happen elsewhere. The site will influence the content of the play. The site is what it is, and it is where it is. Your bedroom is a bedroom, and your character finds himself in that bedroom for a specific reason. The COVID-19 pandemic is part of the given circumstances of the play, but should not be the central narrative of the play. The pandemic may inform the play, giving it a context in the world. This is not a play about the pandemic, but rather a play that lives in the pandemic. While originally the Ashley playwrights were tasked to spend copious amounts of time in their assigned performance spaces in the theater building on campus, trying to make the unfamiliar familiar, they now are challenged with creating from a space they know so intimately they must make, conversely, the familiar unfamiliar. The Ashley plays at home quarantine edition, as the event is now called, will be performed in a series of bedrooms using a laptop, smartphone, or tablet. The character will be speaking to someone specific using a social media platform. Each playwright will self-tape or be recorded by a member of their isolating household using a cell phone or a tablet. The files will then be transferred electronically to a member of the dramaturgy team who will edit the short performances into one longer cycle. That performance will be streamed via YouTube for the general public. So will the goals of the performance change? Absolutely. Will there be new outcomes and experiences to be had? Absolutely. What will remain the same as the need to engage with the primary dramaturgical questions? Why here and why now? Thanks. Thank you so much, Judith. I was going to say a way to come in under time. That was fantastic. Thank you so much for that. Okay, terrific. Moving on, our next speaker, Amber Bradshaw is the managing artistic director of working title playwrights in Atlanta, Georgia, the South's leading play incubator currently serving 117 members and offering over 600 paid opportunities each year. I think that's important to note, especially in these times. In Atlanta, as a dramaturge, director, performer, collaborator, Amber has worked with Actors Express, Synchronicity Theater, the Alliance Theater, the Center for Puppetry Arts, Out of Hand Theater, Outfront Theater. Again, if I were to go on, we'd be here all day. And she's also a freelance dramaturg in the area, co-produced and written three original works, including circa, the three original works are Circa 50, Learning to Fly, and Identified a Queer Variety Show. Without further ado, Amber Bradshaw. Thank you, Michael. Appreciate it. Hi, my name is Amber Bradshaw. My pronouns are she, they, and I just want to thank LMDA for always being such a fantastic host and providing such an exciting conference every year. I would not miss it. So thank you. So I would like to, from Atlanta, Georgia, I am on the land of the Muscogee and Cherokee nations. And my topic today is new play dramaturges as radical disruptors. So what is radical dramaturgy? You know, I've been asking this question of myself a lot lately. How can we radically disrupt this moment that has already been completely uprooted by a virus? So what is radical disruption or a radical disruptor look like? So they challenge the status quo. They create a new one. And then I'm going to go to we, we nurture our artists so thoroughly that they make stories we've never seen before or heard before. We advocate, we train, we mentor, we lift up our artists. And we especially lift up our artists that have had their voices marginalized. We influence funding by taking part in community conversations. We stop taking a backseat as dramaturges. We have an incredible ability to explore and we need to share that with everyone. So how else do we do that? How do we, we need to tell our playwrights to tell their stories no matter how hard, no matter how possible they might be to produce. We need to offer them opportunities that are designed for them, for their unique process, for the structure of their play. We need to respect what our playwrights and our artists bring into the room. And remember that these stories are their stories and to not center ourselves. We need to nurture the team in the space, choose them wisely based on what the playwright needs, not what jobs we might owe our friends, dare I say it. Let's think outward instead of instead of in. What does this experience do for the playwright? How does it serve them? Even if we're producers producing this reading for an audience, how are we serving the playwright? And then this is really radical. I'm going to go there. Let's let go of the white European hold on the theater canon. Let's really discourage producing so much Shakespeare. Let's not stop teaching it, but let's try to make space for other work. Let's stop encouraging adaptations. These adaptations are often built on foundations that just cannot be meshed with our modern world. We need to think about that. Revivals, are they saying something new? Are we reviving something that may not be such a great idea? What story are we telling there? Let's be intentional, right? Let's advocate for marginalized voices in every room we're in. Let's stand up for new leadership. Let's resist the urge to build stories for an audience we may no longer have, right? We can choose our audience. We have the power and the agency and we should take hold of it. So what can we do right now? Let's be the dramaturgs superheroes that I know every single one of you are. How can you give back your resources to your community? How can you open your arms and create a more inclusive theater community, one person at a time? Everything we do can do that. So make everything intentional and really think about it because we as dramaturgs hold that agency and I believe in every single one of you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Amber. That's fantastic. Wow. This is really shaping up to be the hottest topics ever. Our next speaker. I have to say, you know, just when it comes to liveness, it's really hard to do this when you can't read the room. But I just know you guys are all out there and laughing at my jokes. Okay, so our next speaker broadcasting live from Norway where he went when he got a chance to study there from UC Davis and forgot to come home is Michael Evans, who has been working in Norwegian theater. He has a book in Föhring Idramaturgi. That's my attempt at that. Much used. How was it? How did I do Mike? Great. All right. In Föhring Idramaturgi is much used in Scandinavia and is currently in its fifth printing. His articles have appeared in American theater, Ibsen studies, several Scandinavian journals and anthologies. His translations have been used in productions in London, Chicago and Toronto. His current book is a book about play construction coming out with Rutledge this winter. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up live from Norway, Michael Evans. Michael Evans, he, him, his. Let me start with something that happened to me many years ago when I was an undergraduate. And I think many of you probably know Professor Ted Schenke at UC San Diego. Well, when I knew him, he was top dog at UC Davis. And my first meeting with Ted went like this. Knock knock. Come in. Professor Schenke, I'd like to take your course in playwriting 1b. Okay. The thing is I didn't take playwriting 1a and that is listed as a prerequisite. Well, then you can't take 1b. That's the meaning of the word prerequisite. But you see, I only have two courses left for my bachelor's and playwriting 1a isn't offered until next year. So, well, tough luck. Better pay, better attention next time. Well, yeah, but you see the thing is, I just got back from my junior year abroad on the UC 4 and exchange program. Oh, why didn't you say so? The exchange program, that's great stuff. Good. Okay. What the heck? You're in 1b. Hope it works out. What happened was the university in the department showed some flexibility. A hard and fast rule was bent by common sense. There seems to have been an understanding that studying abroad was important, was valuable, and that a year abroad wouldn't be the same as a year at UC Davis. The point of the program was that the year abroad would be different, equivocal in some way, but different. When I had my meeting with Ted, I had studied in Norway for a year, a year that turned out to be rather fateful. Long story short, I've been living here ever since. So, what I want to impress on you today is very simple. Studying abroad is important. You should help your students and encourage them to do it. It is important and formative for the individual student. And if we could get enough students to do a year in a different country, that would be transformative for American theater. Studying abroad will broaden the field, and it needs broadening. Here's a joke. What do you call a person who speaks three languages, a tri-lingual? What do you call a person who speaks two languages, a bilingual? And what do you call a person who speaks one language, an American? I particularly want to speak about year-long full immersion programs in languages other than English. Now, there are a lot of shorter programs, a semester abroad, a five-week summer program and the like. Forgive me for being a tad skeptical about these programs. It seems to me they may be encouraging a touristy mindset, more than fostering truly cross-cultural learning. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong. Nonetheless, it seems to me that year-long programs in languages other than English are the thing. This is one of the very few ways undergraduates can get really good at a foreign language. Having to learn something in a foreign language scares a lot of people. Am I here to learn the language or am I here to learn my major? Some students may wonder if they're going to ruin their GPA. A year-long immersive program certainly pushes them out of their comfort zone, but they'll hack it. Most students would have taken two years of foreign language in high school, and most universities still require them to take two quarters of the language for the bachelor's degree. This gives them a good foundation to build on. They know enough Spanish or French or whatever, for them to profit from lectures and the reading. All they really need is practice. Diversity is our watchword. Everybody wants diversity in our schools and theaters. We've become a lot more diverse the past few decades, and that's good, or a good start. This is by and large a monolingual diversity. Now, there's an oxymoron for you, monolingual diversity. It is a diversity founded on the English language. Is it just me or is there something colonialistic about this monolinguism? English was the major language of the colonial era and still is. This conference is a glorious exception, so kudos, lmda. The monolinguism we see is seen, for example, in the scarcity of plays written in other languages than English. They just aren't done in the US. But my gosh, there are whole basket loads of really good plays being written in German and in the Scandinavian languages that nobody in the US has heard about, much less read, even in translation, much less produced. Theater in the US is poorer for it. The world's last remaining superpower really should show more largesse. We should be creating an expectation that theater students will get part of their education abroad. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Michael. Very well taken advice, I would say. All right. Thank you so much. Our next speaker is my dear friend Sarah Freeman, associate professor and chair of theater arts at the University of Puget Sound, a very well-known center for dramaturgical excellence. She co-edited international dramaturgy, translation and transformations in the theater of Timberlake Wharton Baker, and public theaters and theater publics as published chapters in the British theater company, 1980 to 1994, decades of modern British playwriting, the 1980s working in the wings, reading and performance and ecology, querying difference in theater history. The list goes on and on. She's in modern drama, new theater quarterly comparative drama, contemporary theater review, and she is a former editor of a journal dear to my heart, theater history studies. Ladies and gentlemen, Sarah Freeman. Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for hosting us for this virtual hot topics. My name's Sarah Freeman. She, her hers. I'm coming to you from Tacoma, where the original caretakers of the land are the Puyallup and Nisqually, and we are in the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples. So my topic for you today is projects in dramaturgy, a curricular model for exploration. And so this is about a way that we do things here. Dear fellow dramaturgs and university caucus, in a time of retrenchment and constriction in higher education, I propose to share with you the curricular model we use at the University of Puget Sound to allow for a deeper dramaturgical exploration within a small department's limited course offerings. As a small residential liberal art school, Puget Sound has the ability to be deeply dramaturgically oriented in all of our theater course offerings related to theater history, acting and directing, and even technical theater. We do not, however, have the option to proliferate deep dive, narrow focus topics at the upper level. The projects and dramaturgy course theater 323 is a structure first organized by Jeff Pohl, emeritus professor of our program that allows for a creative and analytical upper level dramaturgy class to be offered every year in our program. We rotate the class among our professors, except for our resident designer who is busy being our director of production and cannot take this into his rotation. So projects and dramaturgy is a class that is meant to have a research, a generative, and a performance aspect to it, all grounded in collaboration and imaginative exploration. In many ways, it is a structure that speaks to Julie Dubiner's point yesterday from the dramaturging the Phoenix panel about dramaturges as active, advocating forces as opposed to passive responsive forces and to the long-standing initiatives to support dramaturgy driven work at LMDA and to understand that while research is central to our knowledge and engagement, dramaturgs are not the research person or the book person. They are full collaborative and creative artists. So this is a class where we inculcate and support how directors, actors, and designers practice dramaturgy, as well as encouraging people who think of themselves as primarily dramaturgs to work across all spaces. And I think that this speaks to some of the things that Amber has said and that we may hear about teaching from other members of the Hot Topics panel. So outcomes for this class include a greatly expanded range of reading for our students, both of play text and theory, the creation of creative and research portfolios, as well as the creation of evenings of performance where we sculpt and present those events in many different modes and many different places and expand our students' producing capacities, which is something that helps them in the many places they go after graduate school. In its iterations so far, the class has been built around the work of particular writers, concepts, techniques, or themes. So so far we've had these iterations, which helps you understand some of the things we do here. In 2007, Jeff Pearl taught the first version of this class called Take Me to the Water, which was built around the theme and imagery of water. And it was a multifaceted exploration where students wrote work, read, collated, and curated things. And in many ways, it also fed into the next year's Race and Pedagogy Conference on our campus, which is run by the Race and Pedagogy Institute here. And so they created some processional performance and worked with some guest artists who then also came into engagement in the next year on that conference. The history of the class intertwines with a former structure that we had at the 400 level that allowed us to offer special topics. But I'm going to tell you those topics because they were done in the spirit of Project Syndromaturgie as well. So Professor Pearl also taught a very important seminar with our colleague Grace Livingston in African American Studies called Ugly Beauty, which was about race and aesthetics and identity and performance. That is an important template for the type of things that Project Syndromaturgie can do as well. I first taught a class here called Collaboration, Creation, Theory and Practice of Devising Theatre that allowed us to experiment with devising techniques, create performances, and read an enormous range of theory and documentation. Our colleague Marilyn Bennett did a fantastic class on Benio Futures. And we brought Greg Allen out and they created their own performance. I did a Project Syndromaturgie class on Carol Churchill. Jeff Pearl did one called Moments of Knowing. My colleague Jess Smith did one called The Dramaturgie of Space, Sights and Audience Experience. Marilyn Bennett did another on The Three Uses of David Mamet. And our newest colleague Dr. Windwood just finished teaching Project Syndromaturgie called Politics and Practice. Politics and Practice of Rememory. Some of you may have seen the reading of the resulting play, Aliyah and Underland, live streaming on HowlRound in May. This was something we did to adjust to our COVID-19 remote operations in spring. I would love to talk about the way this class allows us to cross some borders in practice and the uniqueness of the format where we make the work and then figure out what it means, but I'm at time and I thank you for the five minutes. Thank you so much, Sarah. That's awesome. Our next speaker, this is exciting because this speaker is following up on a previous hot topic from 2014. Catherine Bellacci is a Vancouver-based dramaturg and administrator. She completed her MA in Dramaturgy and Theater Theory at the University of Ottawa 2016. Congratulations. Her research is focused on the dramatic adaptations of literary text. She also has a BFA from Simon Frazier, worked with many Vancouver-based companies, including New World Theater, Pi Theater, Electric Company Theater, Canada's National Voice Intensive, and she co-founded the Resounding Scream Theater in Vancouver. She was the first dramaturg to be funded as an individual artist by the City of Ottawa for her emerging creators' unit with the Ottawa Acting Company, so a true dramaturgical pioneer. She was nominated for a Pri-Rido Award and that was the first, as I think, Catherine, you were the first dramaturg to be recognized in that field as well. So give it up please for Catherine Bellacci. Thank you, Michael. Yeah, those introductions make me blush. Thank you. So yes, like Michael said, my name is Catherine Bellacci. She, her. I'm speaking to you from North Vancouver, the traditional land of the Coast Salish people, in particular the Squamish, Musqueam, and Salewaltooth First Nations. I apologize for the dog barking in the background. Here we are. So today I would like to prove myself wrong. And so I submitted my thesis about four years ago, so I finally had time to think about it. You know, when you're submitting your thesis, sometimes it gets to the point where you're like, what do I need to do to just get this done? So I'd like to prove myself wrong today, but then I think it's made me a better dramaturg. So I'd like to start with the best advice I ever received in my master's thesis as I was writing it. And I'd like to pass it on to whoever is currently writing a thesis or plans to write a thesis. A good friend said to me, your thesis is going to be the worst thing that you'll ever write. Accept that now and just move forward. Now that was incredibly free and helpful and very true in my case. Now as a quick overview, I wrote my thesis about literary adaptations, so page to stage adaptation. And I found four steps in this book here, A Theory of Adaptation by Linda Hutchin. Now these four steps that she briefly mentions, essentially every adaptation, regardless of medium, moves through the four steps. And in my thesis, I posited if every adaptation is moving through these four steps unconsciously, what if we as dramaturgs consciously applied them as a dramaturgical model? Would that be helpful? So just to quickly summarize the four steps. Step one was initial circumstances. I interpreted that to mean the source material. Step two was distance traversed. I interpreted that to mean the space between the source material and the circumstances in which you're creating the adaptation. Step three was set of conditions of acceptance or resistance. I interpreted that to mean the structural components of your source material and the artistic choices you could make in your adaptation or that you will make in your adaptation. And step four was transformation, or I interpreted that to mean as the final product, the adaptation itself. So after working through these four steps, writing my own adaptation, which was its own challenge, and 116 pages of writing later, my conclusion was this. Was this model helpful? These four steps helpful? Yes, and no, it depends. Which as you can imagine was a really fun conclusion to defend. But now that I've had four years between my defense and now I've had some time to really think about it. And I've come to three new conclusions. And I think in these conclusions, I'm proving myself wrong a little bit. But I think it's made me a better drama drama. Bear with me here. The first one is actually reminds me of a piece of advice that I got in my undergrad, actually in a directing class. Our professor always said to us, do the work, do your research, do your prep work. And then when you walk into the rehearsal room, set it aside. If it needs to inform the work, if it needs to inform the artistic process, it will just trust it. What's more important is your is your presence. And number two, it reminds me of something I've been thinking a lot about, which I like to call the dichotomy of the dramaturge. At least up here in Canada, it feels like dramaturgy is both a necessity and a luxury, both vital to the artistic process and extraneous. So I've been battling with that a little bit, which reminds me of my yes and no conclusion. And the third thing it reminds me of is the adaptability of the dramaturge, something I've been thinking a lot about. And I think this thesis helped me get to that perhaps these four steps, all the research that we do, all the prep work that we do is really just one tool in a massive toolkit, a massive dramaturgical toolkit that's at our fingertips. And really, it's our job to be adaptable and to pull from that toolkit when we need to. So maybe it's not as helpful to shoehorn an adaptation into a four step process. If it's not necessary, maybe it is. It's about staying present with the work. And maybe I wish I'd come to that conclusion four years ago, but it's all part of the process. And at least I'm here now. So thank you very much. I proved myself wrong a little bit today, and I think it's made me a better dramaturge. And thank you so much for letting me speak today. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you so much, Catherine. Woo! We used to say, Ken Chanel reminded me that the best thesis is the one that is done. That's right. Okay, our next speaker is Kaylin Stockton. Her paper is called Dramaturgical Pedagogy, a Case Study. Kaylin Stockton is an incoming senior studying theater at the University of Kansas with my friend Jane Barnett, right? All right. Give it up, please, for Kaylin Stockton. Thank you very much. Hi, everyone. I'm Kaylin. I use she, her pronouns. I'm speaking to you today from Lawrence, Kansas, the traditional lands of the Kickapoo, Osage, Kansas and Sioux peoples. I didn't hear the word dramaturgy until my fourth semester of undergrad. And even then, I had to hear it from a dramaturg. Like Michael said, at the University of Kansas, we are lucky to have Dr. Jane Barnett, a practicing dramaturg on staff. And last fall, she taught a dramaturgy course, which was my first real experience with dramaturgy. Due to time constraints, I will only be highlighting three key features of the class, the students, the project structure, and the grading policy. But I welcome conversation to talk about this further. The class was composed of five graduate and five undergraduate students. The small class size and mixed enrollment meant that our class had a lot of really great discussions. We were able to pair together both on projects and for in classwork and learn from each other on both ends. Graduate students were also expected to attend one additional class time per week for more in-depth work. The majority of our work was divided into two projects, which we called the Alpha and the Omega Project. For the Alpha Project, we worked in graduate and undergraduate pairs to craft lobby displays for KU Season Opener, The Christians, by Lucas Nase. These included display boards, sheet music, interactive voting, which was very popular, and even a portal to hell, also known as a hell mouth. We were also given space on KU Theater's website for an online dramaturgy page, including bibliographies and further reading. My topic, along with graduate student Katelyn Tossi, was the ethical framework of good choices drawing heavily on examples from the TV show The Good Place. We submitted our initial topic proposals on September 9th, and The Christians opened on September 27th. And yes, you're doing the math right. That was less than three weeks. The rest of the semester was centered around the Omega Project. We each chose our own script and worked with it in various ways in class. My script was Memoirs of a Forgotten Man by D. W. Gregory, which is a new play about fake news and exceptional memory in the Soviet Union. We had everything in class from the crucible to dogfight. And our final was a program essay and a Pecha Kucha style presentation, which is 20 images for 20 seconds each. With this Alpha Omega Project structure, we were immediately doing real hands-on dramaturgy with guidance and with a partner. We had lots of time and practical in-class exercises for our Omega Project. We had a chance to work with the script we knew very little about and with the script we were very passionate about. But the most crucial element of this class was the grading policy. This was an ungraded course, which is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of the class being based on letter or point value grades, it was based on written and verbal feedback. We voted as the class whether or not to have this ungraded course, and we worked together to modify the syllabus. We got a default grade of B for undergraduate students and an A minus for graduate students if we did what was asked in the spirit that it was asked. We could raise a grade to an A by doing something extra for either the Alpha or the Omega Project. For instance, I proposed talkbacks for a performance of Memoirs of a Forgotten Man with professors from KU's history, political science, and journalism departments. Again, we had no graded assignments, only feedback. The ungraded structure was the crucial factor that made this course successful, and I encourage educators to research and implement this model. This pedagogy model based on principles of kindness and empathy towards students gave us the freedom to crash and burn all the way through the final presentations. Dramaturgy as a practice is subjective. A practice-based dramaturgy course should allow and encourage subjectivity through disruption of the traditional university syllabus. Thank you so much. Fantastic. Wait, something happened. Are we good? Can you hear me? Who knows? Okay. Thank you so much, Kaelin. Fantastic. The next speaker, Adrian Centino. Speaking of the dramaturgy of grief, Adrian is a freelance dramaturg, theater lecturer and arts education programmer based out of LA. As a dramaturg, he's worked with San Diego Rep, Child's Play, Ensemble in Santa Barbara, the Jewel Theater Company, Playwrights Arena, Company of Angels, the USC School of Dramatic Arts, UC Santa Cruz Theater Arts, and UC Riverside Department of Theater. He's a very California gentleman. As an arts educator, he's worked with the Rhodes Theater Company, Barnstorm, UCLA Department of Theater, Cal State Long Beach Department of Theater Arts, and the Los Angeles Unified School District. As a reader, he's worked with Kitchen Dog, Premier Stages, 50 Playwrights Project, Page 73, of course, LMDA and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the former Literary Manager of Playwrights Arena, Adrian Centino. Hello, everybody. Can everybody hear me? It's my headset. I know that headset is an issue earlier. You're good. You're great. Awesome. So my name is Adrian Centino. My pronouns are he, him, his. I'm speaking from North Hollywood, California, at home of the Gabriolino Tonga, the original stewards of this land. I just want to say real quick, this is going to be very raw. This is definitely in rough draft form, and I really invite and appreciate any conversation and collaboration that occurs after this is all over. On Monday, September 2, 2019, I received a phone call from a hospital in Ontario, California. An emotionless voice asked if I was the son of Mark Anthony Centino, and I said yes. The voice clinically listed a series of numbers, dates, times, vitals, platelets, enzymes, and several other bits of data for which I have no frame of reference. After a meaningful pause, I asked, are you trying to tell me that my father is dead? Yes, the voice replied, and I apologized if that was unclear. At the time of his death, I had not spoken to my father more than one time in the previous 18 months. We did not have an easy relationship, and it had only grown more difficult in recent years with his struggle with addiction-intensifying. To my surprise, my father had listed me as his emergency contact after he walked into the ER that morning with an ache in his abdomen that he didn't know at the time, but the ache was the result of an internal hemorrhage that would take his life before he received medical treatment at that hospital. Just a few weeks later, on Friday, October 18, 2019, my mother didn't answer her phone. We planned a visit that weekend, but she called to cancel the evening prior. Someone who worked had been ill that morning, and now that she'd arrived home from work, she didn't feel well either. In a gruff voice, so far removed from her usually gentle tone, she cautioned, please don't come visit me tomorrow. I don't want you to catch whatever I have. She told me not to worry, and she said that she'd sleep it off. The coroner's office declined to perform an autopsy. I don't know what happened to my mother. She was unwell. She lay down. She didn't wake up. The next morning, when she didn't answer the phone, I called a family member who lived just up the block to check on her. She had passed away in the middle of the night. The death certificate lists the probable cause as an electrical misfiring of the heart. I'm not sure what that means, and I'm not sure I'm never going to know what really happened. One of these losses alone would constitute a tragedy, that they occurred successfully without wanting and prevented the opportunity for closure served to split my experience of grief. The accumulated weight of these losses, for me, produced two alternating reactions. The first, deep feelings of empathy followed by the second, sharp swings into a state of alienation. The latter manifesting itself as a hypercritical real-time analysis of the former. Moments of emotional vulnerability, understanding, and deep feeling punctually by a self-aware interrogation of my own interiority. Am I expressing authentic emotions, or am I performing what I imagine to be an appropriate response? Are the actions that constitute my outward manifestation of grief part of some organic human process, or am I reproducing the images of grief that I have internalized over the years? Paradoxically, the more outwardly I express my grief, the further removed from it I felt. As inferential and interjection is all grieving, really grieving for ourselves, and if so, what happens if in grieving for us, we don't believe our own tears? What psychic state does this produce, and to what end might it offer a lens through which we may consider the materialization of loss, i.e. the objects we transfer emotional attachments to, and the contradictory, absent present of the dead. I'm using that as one word, hyphenated. The contradictory, absent presence of the dead, i.e. the sense of memory that those objects evoke. Thank you. Thank you so much, Adrian. Thank you very, very much. I really appreciate it. Our next speaker is LMDA's own Veronica Thomas. Veronica Thomas is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, developing a theory of civic dramaturgy for her dissertation on performances of urban planning, cultural space, and cultural policy, and the role of art and culture in 21st century Chicago. Her chapter, Temple Swapping in the City, the Spatial Imaginary and Performances of Placemaking in the Work of Theatre Gates, is in the forthcoming book, Makeshift Chicago, a Century of Theatre and Performance out of Northwestern University Press. She was the 2016 recipient of the ATDS, that's our Library Association, Graduate Student Travel Award for her paper Toward a Civic Dramaturgy, Performances of Urban Planning in Chicago, and of course, she was the host of yesterday's excellent panel on digital civic dramaturgy here at LMDA, Veronica Thomas. Oh, thank you so much, Michael, for that generous introduction. My pronouns are she, her, and I am presenting today from the ancestral and unceded territory that was variously cared for by the Piscataway, Conaway Confederacy of Peoples, the Susquehannock, and the Algonquin. I recognize that Indigenous peoples are the traditional stewards of the land that we now occupy, living here long before Baltimore was a city and still thriving here today. My hot topic is called Fire the Cannon, Our Student's Life the Fuse. This spring, I devised and taught a theater history class for Washington College. The impetus was a desire to have a class about the suffrage movement and theater and performance that would tie into the College's commemoration of the 100th year anniversary of the 19th Amendment. I thought that was a great idea and I was excited to teach such a class and I proposed that we use the unit on suffrage plays to begin the class, but then consider theater and performance as it addressed various social movements in the U.S. throughout the past 100 years. That way, my dramaturgical thinking went, we would begin with white women's suffrage, but not end there, with a goal of positioning theater not as a site only of protest and progressivism within these movements, but as a site where the tension of these movements expressed themselves in a variety of ways. So I designed a class that took us through suffrage, race on stage in the 20th century, labor movements in the Federal Theater Project, mid-century feminism, LGBTQ lives on stage, including trans visibility, race and casting, Chicana and Latinx performance, reproductive justice, accessibility and neurodiversity, indigenous performance, and issues of representation and dramatic structure in the 21st century. And I'm happy to share my syllabi with you for anyone who's interested. Now if it sounds like a lot, it was. And I want to commend my class of 12 students for diving in and grappling with some tough material and complex ideas and doing so as the pandemic raged and we all moved online. We started with a section of readings I called Firing the Canon, as well as a section on dramaturgy and play analysis so that we had a shared vocabulary for the class. We read Eleanor Fuchs a visit to a small planet and a section of Amphliotsus interpreting the play script for our script analysis unit. And we read Susan Jonas's The Other Canon, 10 Centuries of Plays by Women, from the American Theater Magazine. The Other Canon, excuse me, an interactive feature by Aisha Harris on the New York Times website called The Cultural Canon is Better Than Ever and Susan Bennett's chapter Decomposing History, Why Are There So Few Women in Theater History. Bennett's chapter was immensely helpful in framing the course as she argues historians should do more than uncover previously overlooked contributions by women theater makers. But that we also need to examine the very methods we use in our research and the criteria that we and our sources have used to determine what was significant enough to write about in the first place. I had hoped that these early readings and conversations would empower my students to push back on common historical narratives, including ones we would encounter in our own class. They did not disappoint, including challenging my own organization of the course, why had I created a second unit on trans visibility separate from our LGBTQ unit. Very good commentary. I learned as much this semester in teaching this course as my students did in taking it. We read beautiful and heartbreaking plays alongside critical theory and theater history and had supportive discussions where students critiqued the work and how we approached it. We worked through some tough material. I remember in particular a discussion about Angelina Weld Grimke's Rachel in which some students just couldn't fathom the main character's decision at the end of the play and others argued for how tragic but rational it was considering the violence she had witnessed and taken to heart. We were not necessarily reading unknown or marginal plays. Indeed some of them have been immensely popular commercial successes. But I think something in the success of the class was putting them all together. I remember thinking and saying at points throughout the semester that this was not some alternative history of the last 100 years of the United States. That this was our history. This is theater history. It is inseparable from the social struggles of this country. We should not teach one without the other. Any theater history without these artists and texts and ideas is incomplete. Let's not leave May West for an upward level class on gender studies. Don't confine Langston Hughes and Cherry Maraga to a graduate seminar on critical race theory or credible rock to a musical theater class. In conversation with each other these pieces not only give our students a more accurate view of American theater but a more exciting one as well. One where students feel an agency to address the concepts of our courses and take up the conversation in new and brave ways. As Julie Dubner reminded us yesterday we need to stop serving the great man model of American theater. The calls to expand the canon as Miranda Haman succinctly details in her recent howl round essay how liberal arts theater programs are failing their students of color are numerous and have been made for decades and a dramaturgical approach to pedagogy is well positioned to make these changes. And I'm not sure if we should just expand the canon or explode it. As Sierra Jones argues in her article not just the syllabus throw the whole discipline in the trash which is a great companion to Bennett's chapter quote by refusing to reimagine not only the canon but also the theories and methods of every single discipline academia is choosing to remain complicit in upholding white supremacy as its core value. This course for me was a good first step in moving both my thinking and my pedagogy and my students showed me how effective it was but I also think about how much more I could have done and I will continue to explore how my courses and how I can challenge the assumptions at the heart of our discipline. It is more than the canon and I invite you all to do the same. Thank you. Thank you so much LaRonica. All right our final speaker is Karen Jean Martinson an assistant professor of dramaturgy in the School of Film Dance and Theater at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University another colossal center for dramaturgical research where she's beginning to embed dramaturgy into coursework in theatrical practice. What can I tell you about her? Her manuscript in progress make the dream real dissects the performances of Elvez the Mexican Elvis. She is an active member of ASTR, AVTS and ATHE for which she's currently concluding her second term as secretary and it looks like she's going to serve on the LNBA Executive Committee as the VP of Advocacy. Is that right Karen? All right give it up. Give it up for Karen. Thank you. You see her her pronouns and I'm speaking to you from the lands of the 22 tribes including the ancient who built the canals that give us life in Arizona and also the Akam, the Pima, the Yaki and the Apache. Okay I was trying to be clever when I entitled this hot topic bring your own hard hat riffing on the idea of construction building hard hats but perhaps a more apt title would be bring your own hard head as that is surely how I must seem to my colleagues. I am determined to make a highly engaged dramaturgical practice a key component of our production processes at ASU seriously I'm like a broken record dramaturgy dramaturgy dramaturgy and overall people are very excited by what I'm doing but things always get a bit difficult when it comes to resources and so I want to address four key issues that arose this year while I point out three successes as well as three areas for growth a bit of context dramaturgy was not a completely foreign word at ASU after all I was hired as an assistant professor of dramaturgy so clearly the program recognized the need to develop this area of specialization. Dramaturgy was talked about and some shows even had dramaturgs working on them but as best I can tell the dramaturgy that had been done is not the dramaturgy that I do it is not the dramaturgy that we as an organization talk about when we talk about dramaturgy it was what I would call incidental a program note a short research presentation by and large removed from the rehearsal process and therefore lacking vitality and I intend to change that so I got down to it and I began working on two different shows and I very quickly realized that there is not an infrastructure for the kind of work I do so issue number one there was no compensation for my labor directors and designers are allowed course releases or other teaching credit when they work on shows students can earn course credit for their production work but my labor was performed on top of my teaching load it was a choice I made with open eyes to prove the value of dramaturgy first and and then make the case for its compensation later but boy that lead to some long work weeks for both productions I met with the directors extensively attended production meetings and thanks to some lucky scheduling was in rehearsals for each show three times a week like I said long weeks to underwrite this labor I taught a production dramaturgy course in the fall I had six grad students who assisted with analysis and research that I then used and credited in the actors packets program materials and dramaturgy displays so success number one I am slowly building up a roster of students trained in dramaturgy in fact other than the first show of our season last year every show including an implied project by one of our mfa performance students had a dramaturgy attached to it and I have dramaturgs assigned to our two fall shows this coming year issue number two dramaturgs are not integrated into the design and production meeting process I did I had the buy-in of my directors who made sure to leave space for the presentation of my research and who gave me a strong voice of the room but it was clear at times that a few people would have preferred my silence since I'm faculty they can't really shut me up but I need to be sure that student dramaturgs are similarly empowered issue three as I mentioned dramaturgy had been basically a program note other lobby options were to order cheap looking plastic folding tables from our facilities or to hang things up on the wall and from the ceilings I wanted a more professional look and I wanted dramaturgy boards and success number two I had to fight for them but I got them they are massive a bit unwieldy but these boards give us a lot of space to share research we can also print on our costume platter for free so we can move away from the I made this on the office copy machine aesthetic that had been going on issue four resources we could print and with some caudoling we could pull items from storage for our lobby displays but anything else that needed to be purchased still came out of my pocket and this leads to success number three dramaturgy has been granted a small per show budget though the dollar amount is tiny the import is huge I just learned that our overall production budget has not been increased in over 15 years so I'm grateful in an already resource scarce environment that dramaturgy was given a little we are still working out some labor issues whether it not running crew can assisted overseeing the lobbies once the shows are up but we're making progress so very very quickly three areas for growth number one keep training dramaturgs I will be taking over our dramatic analysis class and we'll be teaching an undergrad intro to dramaturgy class in the spring so I can embed more dramaturgical thinking into our curriculum along with this I need to be a more active mentor to the what dramaturgs I have working on shows to make sure the quality meets my standards and that they feel supported number two keep building and refining processes to make dramaturgy more visible more supported and more valuable at ASU I plan to reach out to my colleagues in the design school to see about linking dramaturgs with graphic designers to assist in creating the lobby displays and I'd like to do the same for our programs dramaturgs can generate substantive beautiful materials and create an archive of our productions and finally number three secure course releases and mentoring credits so that dramaturgy is sustainable and that it does not prey on our passions thank you speaking as a dramaturg in the academy thank you so much for that an incredible advocacy okay well we are at one minute and 50 seconds left so I am afraid we're not going to be able to make it to the questions this is usually the case with hot topics we try to fill it up but if the folks on the panel would give martin kye green their twitter handles then we can connect people to some of those things and we can ask these questions also in the discussion groups and the bars later tonight I want to take just one quick second and say that I wrote a book in 2010 called ghost light an introductory handbook to dramaturgy some of you may know it I wanted to let you guys know that thanks to your input I just finished the second edition of this book it'll be out this year and also a book called systemic dramaturgy a handbook for the digital age thank you president kye green we love you so much thanks for our support team lordess kuzma and gonzalez josephine clark eric lopez dominique nadeau daniel mesta on howl round travis amiel on facebook laurel perlatt and david fam and last but not least muchas muchas gracias a la asa ambrosa brenda moonyos have a great conference everybody whoo 10 seconds to spare everybody dance hot topics hot topics hot topics