 Good day, everyone. I am Brenda Munoz, the conference coordinator of LMDA, conference 2021, and I am happy to welcome you all to the Canadian and Mexican Artists Exchange. This panel will be presented in English and Spanish, so remember that we have oral simultaneous interpretation available through the Web Switcher Pro app. You can download that in your phones or gadgets, and one of our amazing volunteers will introduce the token to login to that on the chat box. Hola a todos, mi nombre es Brenda Munoz, coordinadora del congreso LMDA 2021, y me da gusto bienvenidos al panel Intercambio Artístico México Canadá. Este panel será presentado en español e inglés, así que recuerden, por favor, que tenemos acceso a interpretación oral simultánea a través de Web Switcher Pro. Pueden descargar esta app en sus teléfonos o gadgets, y ahora uno de nuestros voluntarios introducerá el token de acceso en el chat. Muchas gracias por acompañarnos. Welcome, Guides. The panel is yours. Thank you so much, Brenda. Thank you for all your hard work on this fantastic conference. Hello, everyone. My name is Catherine Bellacci. She, her, I'm coming to you from the traditional unceded territory of the Squamish and Zeweltooth First Nations, a.k.a. North Vancouver. It's a suburb of Vancouver just north, very aptly named. And I'm the board president of LMDA Canada. I am going to be facilitating today's conversation. Before we dive in, I wanted to provide just a little bit of context. Now, I think all of this started actually a couple of years ago at the Chicago conference when Brenda, who you just saw a moment ago, asked for my advice coming from, you know, LMDA Canada as she was setting up LMDA Mexico, the new kind of entity of LMDA Mexico. And it got me thinking that there's a lot in common between LMDA Canada and LMDA Mexico and their relationship to a larger LMDA. But I had a feeling there was also a lot of, a lot in common between Mexican and Canadian theater artists and dramaturgs in general. So I took this to my colleagues, Danielle and Pedro, who you'll meet in a moment. And we kind of came up with the idea of doing Mexican artist exchange at the Mexico City Conference. I mean, our original idea was in person last year, but of course, for obvious reasons, there were a few pivots. So this year we dreamed up this kind of panel discussion that you'll be seeing today, of course. So how it's going to work is I'm going to give each of our six panelists, our six artists here, about five or so minutes to introduce themselves, their work, any questions they have at the moment, anything they have on their minds. And then I have a few kind of starter conversation questions to get the kind of discussion flowing. But ideally, it's just going to kind of go from there and everyone will kind of be free flowing chatting between them. And then we'll start taking questions from the crowd, as it were, you all. And you can pop your questions, as I understand, you can pop your questions in the, if you're on Webex through Q&A. Or you can also tweet your questions, they'll all be kind of fed to us here and there. And one last thing before we dive in, I just wanted to thank our sponsor today. Today's panel is sponsored by the Canadian Latinx Theatre Artist Coalition, Caltech. Thank you so much to Caltech on behalf of LMDA Canada and LMDA. We couldn't have done it without you. And so I figured we'll just dive in and I'm just going to go with it the way that your little rectangles are on my screen. And I'll just kind of go in order there. And so that means the closest person to me is Pedro, right below me here. Pedro, would you like to start us off? Now, Pedro, I believe you are coming, you're coming to us from Armstrong. Is that correct, or? Yes, I am coming to you from the interior of British Columbia on the silk and sequelaque lands, also known as Armstrong VC, at the Caravan Farm Theatre in a writing residency currently. So yeah, thank you. Thank you. We're on Elon Musk's Starlink Internet. So if I drop out at any moment, it's because it's satellite internet and it is not the most reliable. So thank you. Yes, so I am Pedro Chamarle. I do make and live on unceded and ancestral stolen lands of the Musqueam Squamish and Slewa-tooth nations, also known globally as Vancouver, but originally from Treaty 8 territory in northern BC with my parents who emigrated from Guatemala. So I am the court artistic director of Rice and Beans Theatre, which has a multi-lingual mandate to also explore form and kind of the stories of where we come from and where we go. So that's kind of really briefly who I am. I'm a playwright. I'm a director and performer as well, and recently I have been working in dual languages along with programming a double speak, which looks at multilingual language in Canadian works, but also in a self-reclamation of language by learning, taking lessons, and writing in Spanish, and then also in English, and incorporating those two halves of myself that I feel I am neither complete of both, but have foots in either circle. Yeah, and the latest product I worked on was actually with one of our fellow panelists, Daniela Densia, where we worked together. And Daniela was my Spanish language dramaturg. As I was writing Spanish into the project, that project was called Made in Canada and Agricultural Operetta, where I interviewed migrant temporary seasonal agricultural workers primarily from Mexico. And so a lot of interviews had to happen in Spanish, which I was capable of, but when Daniela came on, those interviews only got better. And then we took those verbatim interviews and news articles around the seasonal agricultural workers program, and we put them into song and into scenes, which then due to the COVID pandemic, we transformed into a song cycle with our composer, Michelle Cutler, and our Mexican composer actually, as well as we found along our journey, Ray Alegria, and we, if it's available to stream on Spotify. That's about it. There's my little quick intro. Thank you so much, Pedro. Next on my screen, we have Carmen. Take away, Carmen. Yes, thank you for having me. I'm joining you from the unceded land of the Squamish Nation, which is also known as downtown Vancouver. And I come from Chile, also known as Walmapu in Abbeyala, Latin America in the Guna language. I arrived here as a child as an exile fleeing the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and all of my work comes from that lens, from the lens of being an exile as opposed to an immigrant. So an exile is a person who dreams of their return to the homeland. An immigrant is a person who reinvents themselves in the new land. So even now as I speak, you know, I am still an exile, and I think there's not a lot of us writing about that experience in Canadian theater. There's a lot of immigrant stories, not a lot of exile stories. So I came to the theater here in Canada in 1990, which is when I started going to theater school. Of course, I was, you know, the only Latinx person in my theater school. And I'm the first Latina woman to ever have graduated from that school. So my journey through the theater has been a long and treacherous one. I began in theater school to be a very outspoken activist for racialized voices, which we're lacking in the Canadian theater. So I could talk about what I'm doing right now, and I'll do that for about two seconds, because that's very easy to find if you read my bio, for example, right? But I'd rather talk a little bit more about the 90s, which you won't find in my bio. So currently, I'm a core artist at Electric Company Theater based in Vancouver. I'm also an associate, oh, Christ, I forgot the name of the title, artistic associate of new play development, sorry, Bob, I know you're watching, at the Stratford Festival. And I'm writing about four different plays right now, an adaptation of Medea, an adaptation of Moliere's The Learned Ladies, that was for the factory theater in Toronto, and an adaptation of a book called The Many-Headed Hydra for Stratford. A couple of other things, which again, you could just find on my bio, but I want to go back to the 90s. So the work that Biddle was talking about is so exciting to me, and it has a long history. So one of the things that I did in the 90s was I started a group here in Vancouver in 1994 called the Latino Theater Group. And for about eight years, which is how long it lasted, we had about 120 members. And what I had done is I had trained in theater of the oppressed with a local company here called Headlines Theater Company, later called Theater for Living, and with Augusto Boal in Brazil, and in the United States, and with Victoria-based company called Puente Theater, run by a pioneer Latinx theater artist here in Canada called Lina de Guevara, who is now about 88 years old and still very active. So it was through the Latino Theater Group that we presented about 25 short plays all over Vancouver and two full-length plays, all based entirely on the participant's lives and all completely bilingual, right? All in Spanish or English based on who the audience was. And the interesting thing about this group was that it was very purposefully for non-actors and for marginalized youth from Vancouver. So most, I would say pretty much all of them, no that's not true, most, most of the members of the Latino Theater Group were also exiles. That was the demographic in the 90s in Vancouver, the Latinx demographic, were exiled people from Central America and from South America. And of course many, many, many undocumented people who crossed the Rio Grande, the Rio Bravo, it was so great to hear Sabina talk about that in the keynote on foot, you know, and some, and walked to Vancouver and were still undocumented. So that's what the plays were about. I feel like I've gone on too long, so I'll stop there. I just wanted to express how what we've been doing, certainly here in Vancouver, what Bayadol was talking about, has deep roots and I'm always really happy to see new generations like Bayadol, like Daniela, continue with that long tradition. Thank you so much, Carmen. And so next on my screen, we have Didan Lee. Take it away. Thank you, Catherine. Bueno, yo voy a hablar en español. Mi nombre es Didan Weekend. Soy mexicana, vivo en la Ciudad de México. Soy investigadora en artes escénicas, historiadora del arte. Mis intereses sobre todo han estado siempre vinculados al tránsito entre artes. Me interesa de manera específica los estudios intermediales, los estudios performativos. He desarrollado mis investigaciones sobre todo en ese ámbito y de manera especial las manifestaciones relacionadas con el sonido. La escena, la escena creo que tiene siempre una dimensión sonora que es poco atendida o menos atendida de lo que quizá debiera y para mí ha sido muy, muy interesante trabajar sobre todo en esta capacidad de agencia performativa también de los honoros en términos sociales, políticos y culturales. Y bueno, trabajo, trabajo como profesora de tiempo completo en el Colegio de Literatura, Dramática y Teatro de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Uno de mis mayores placeres es la docencia, es el espacio del aula, pero me considero también una espectadora, siempre digo que con picazón cognitiva, es decir, con mucha fe de comprender el fenómeno de la escena. Y me interesan entonces los espacios de mediación, en especial la relación espectador escena. Soy coordinadora del aula del espectador de Teatro Unam desde hace varios años. Coordino un grupo de investigación que es el seminario permanente de estudios de la escena y el performance, en donde se congregan personas de diferentes disciplinas interesadas en investigaciones sobre la escena. Y he trabajado también como dramaturgista en algunos procesos, pero sobre todo me interesas siempre todo lo que tiene que ver con relaciones de investigación. Actualmente, Coordino, junto con Jorge Duvati, el Diplomado Internacional en Creación y Investigación, donde estamos creando redes de investigación también en toda Latinoamérica. Me he tenido sobre todo mucho trabajo en relación con Chile, con Argentina. Mi mirada ha sido quizás más cercana hacia el sub. Por eso también el día de hoy hablo en español. Me siento con una responsabilidad de nombrar también desde el español, desde los matices y la fuerza performativa que tiene la palabra dicha desde la lengua materna. Y, bueno, estoy muy contenta de estar el día de hoy dialogando con todas y con todos ustedes. Muchas gracias, Tadani. So I'll be going back and forth with the wonderful web switcher pro, so I'm sorry if there's a delay there. But thank you very much. Up next on my screen we have Emilio. Emilio, take it away. Thank you so much, Catherine. I'm Emilio Mendes, he, him. I'll be talking in both English and Spanish, which I do hope it's not hectic but dramaturgical. I'm a professor of theater studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico at UNAM. I've also worked as director and translator. I hope that sort of opens some questions further on. And for a decade now I've tried to study and explore with students at UNAM the benefits of dramaturgical practice, not just in terms of how to foster and empower the students at UNAM to generate their own poetics but also how to best discuss the way to elaborate their own artistic policies. I do believe dramaturgical work is essential for the consolidation of the work in the cell of a company. And this in two ways. One, understanding that theater is also a dynamic, it's a fluid term, I want to conceive it like that. Theater is not only a professional theater, theater is also a theater that is made in very diverse communities, which can have not necessarily commercial intentions. I do believe dramaturgical outreach is the key element to how to best put it, to best accommodate what dramaturgy means all over the world into Mexican theatrical cultures. Because in Mexico, many, many theater groups are limited to whether they receive or not subsidy. So I do believe one of the most powerful ways to make the most out of those subsidies is through outreach work. Through outreach, I do believe we make the most out of the subsidy, but even if there's not subsidy in any theater company or theater group, I think that dramaturgismo, el dramaturgismo nos ayuda a ser preguntas fundamentales que me emociona mucho poder estar compartiendo con todas y todos ustedes hoy en reconociendo la genealogía de lo que nos tiene hoy aquí reunidas y reunidos. Me emociono mucho escuchar a Mark Bly, que dio su testimonio de sus primeras aventuras por acá en compañía de la maestra Silvia Pelaes y de la maestra Sabina Berman, pero también me siento muy persuadido a intentar traducir el trabajo de Michael Mark Chimmers y de su pregunta crucial, why display now, which I have attempted to translate into Spanish, para qué y por qué, no sólo por qué, para qué y por qué esta obra aquí y ahora, para esta comunidad. Es en ese espíritu que me siento muy emocionado de poder estar compartiendo con ustedes esta mesa que me emociona mucho. Gracias, Catherine. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you very much, Emilio. So, up next on the screen, we have Daniela. Daniela, take it away. Thanks, Catherine. Hi, everyone. Hola, todos. Mi nombre es Daniela Atiencia. I think I will also go the bilingual route because it's very much part of my identity. Nací y crecí en Colombia. Viví en Colombia hasta que tenía 19 años. Mi mamá es canadiense, mi papá es ecuatoriano. Entonces, crecí en un hogar bilingüe y a los 19 años me fui al Canadá a estudiar teatro y desde entonces pues el teatro ha sido parte de mi vida. I am a freelance director and dramaturg and I am also a deviser, which means I create theater from scratch. If I'm going to talk about myself specifically, I'd like to hone it in on the lens of dramaturgy because it's a topic I'm very, very passionate about and I mostly like to think that dramaturgy exists everywhere and so I'm very much interested in dramaturgy and non-conventional spaces but if we're thinking about the theater, lately I've been applying my dramaturgical skills in language and this has taken a variety of forms. Mostly it's been supporting artists in there are different processes of where they're at with language so for example as Pedro mentioned we had a great collaboration. He already had a dramaturg in English but hired me as a Spanish language dramaturg to focus in on the language specifically of Spanish and we were able to collaborate together on what that meant and what that looked like but I've also collaborated with Paola, my fellow panelist who's here today on work that she's done on translation and looking at her own translation and figuring out how it's fitting into a bilingual play as well. I like to think my work is intersectional because that's how I was raised and I'm very interested in language and translation but also in cultural exchanges like this one and I'm fascinated about how dramaturgical practice is being explored in other countries and I'm also passionate about encouraging my fellow artists to see themselves as dramaturgs. I think Pedro and I have discussed this especially within the Latinx community. I feel like many people are dramaturgs but they don't see themselves as one and I think that they are and I'm interested about opening up that conversation and feeling like they have ownership over the quality and the way that they're observing and making deep analysis about work and I'm very intrigued about how dramaturgies practiced in Mexico specifically for this panel. Anyway I could keep going and I'm sure we can have lovely chats about this but that's a little bit about me. Gracias. Thank you so much Daniela. Last but not least we have Paola. Hola soy Paola Salaya Cervantes, también me voy por el Camino Bilingüe and I'm a Mexican playwright director and translator. I live in Mexico City. I went to school in Canada for a university. I was there for five years and then came back here so I got the chance to meet a lot of wonderful Canadian artists while I was training to be a theater person and then came back to Mexico to meet theater makers in Mexico that I hadn't met before before my university experience. I'd never really met theater people at all so I first met Canadian theater artists and then came to Mexico to collaborate here and one project that I've recently been working on is a play that I wrote co-wrote with a friend of mine Ana González Vello which was born in Spanish. It's interesting that we mentioned La Lengua Materna just now because this play was born in Spanish. We wrote it in Spanish and then almost immediately had to translate it into English because we had the chance to take it to New York to a festival so we took it there and we had one show and then we kind of submitted it for a couple of prizes. It won the Latino National Player Award in Arizona the Arizona Theatre Company and then a Tom Hendry's from Playwrights Guild of Canada but all of these kind of awards and readers of the play were all English speakers and had come into contact with the play in English and recently about a month ago we opened the show en Español y lo tradujimos al Español en el año pasado pero no había tenido oportunidad de que se encontrara con su público, el público que la la intención que entrar en contacto con la obra y me llamó la atención lo emocional que fue eso y lo diferente que se sintió presentarlo finalmente en el idioma que en el que había nacido y aparte para el público es una obra muy mexicana habla de un superhéroe de su hija y de el heroismo en tanto a lo entendemos creo en México con la política que tenemos con nuestra historia y entonces fue increíblemente aterrador mucho más aterrador porque nos sentíamos un poco más responsables de el mensaje creo y eso no me lo esperaba aquí que allá entonces creo que en esta como intercambio o estas esta plática de sobre idiomas y sobre cruzar fronteras para mí fue cruzar una frontera no sólo de lenguaje sino emocional ahora de escuchar la obra en español por primera vez para el público al que iba este so I was really it was surprising that's why I'm talking about it today because I'm still surprised by the feeling and and the weirdness of it and the fact that I never expected to to affect me that way and so that's basically what I've been working on lately I worked with dramaturgies for a long time in Vancouver and then kind of stopped when I came to Mexico and only recently have I contacted one to start work with him on a new plane I'm really excited because it's a part of me that kind of left behind and I shouldn't have and so this is really exciting being invited to speak here just at the point where I'm about to start working with a dramaturg a young Mexican dramaturg who's amazing and maybe I'll get a chance to talk about him later but thank you so much for having me thank you so much wow I'm I'm just amazed at this panel this is such a fantastic group of people I so many places where we can just kind of dive in and where do we start um you know what I'm going to start with a very general question um which might be boring and vague but maybe it'll open the door to more specific things I'm not sure um so a few of you have spoken about specific projects um that like involved cultural exchange like Paola what you were just speaking about and Carmen what you were mentioning as well um I want to hear more about these about these projects and so the question that I have is like what is a project that you've been particularly proud of or that was particularly challenging that involved cultural exchange and I actually I kind of wanted to take that to Pedro and Daniela specifically because I personally am very curious about Made in Canada and how um the kind of English and Spanish language dramaturgs worked together or or not or how that was approached if you're open to it maybe we could start there sure thank you Catherine thank you that's a great question for that project specifically because um that play was uh how developed with many partners um I had a resident I was at the Banff Playwrights Lab as a playwright and the PTC Playwrights Theatre Center was a company collaboration and so with that company collaboration um their dramaturg Kathleen Flaherty worked with me on that piece for a number of years and so when when Daniela when I approached Daniela um about working on that piece because I needed the care for right um not by my choice of having been born in Canada um I just I needed a greater care and respect for that that language that I needed that needed to be in there and so then I approached Daniela and then that was her question is like how is it going to uh Daniela? Yeah um there was you know as Petra said already a dramaturg uh associated with the project and um if there's anything that I that I love about theatre and doing my work is um and dramaturgy is like how when I get to be specific about something so um actually this this was ideal because uh you know as as dramaturgs sometimes we have to focus on like the larger scale and the bigger picture uh but in this instance I was actually able to just hone in on um the the the language the Spanish uh how it was serving the play what it was doing and um Kathleen also felt supported because then she could relax and let me um focus on the on the aspects of of the play that was in Spanish um but it I would say it was it was mostly a collaboration with Pedro you know we would just sit for hours and discuss about one word you know he he's coming at it from you know his his Guatemalan Spanish and I've got my Colombian Spanish and so it was also so uh uh uh una conversación cultural entre nuestros países nuestros idiomas nuestras expresiones y tratar de decidir también um si usamos un una español mas neutral o si tratamos de pensar en los personajes porque uh la mayoría eran de de américa central entonces um si se desarrollaron unas conversaciones I was just listening to the end of that. That's fascinating. I just wanted to follow up quickly since Danielle, you were just speaking. There's an incoming question for you, if you like, in the chat here, it says, Danielle, can you speak to the non-conventional spaces where you see dramaturgy? I was going to hone in on that, too. That's fascinating to me. Can of worms. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to take over. I just think that my brain is, I think, wired dramaturgically. I am highly analytical. I'm always analyzing and observing. Because theater is my world, I think that I apply naturally my dramaturgical lens to every aspect of a show. That starts with how are audience members entering the lobby? What kind of experience are they having at that point? The dramaturgy behind the marketing, but also having dramaturgical conversations with lighting designers and sound designers and everyone behind the scenes. So not just applying dramaturgy to the play and the script, but applying a dramaturgical lens to all the other aspects of theater. With people who are not in the theater world, they can be engineers or architects. I think that you can apply a lens of dramaturgism to other spaces that are not in the theater, and also be able to talk about what I do, because it's not easy to explain it sometimes. So I also like to be able to speak with other people who are not in the theater world and be able to apply this way of analyzing things and life in areas outside of my world. Danielle, that reminds me of when we were working in a box office together. We talked about the dramaturgy of patron services, which is a whole other can of worms, like you said. That's fascinating. We could have a whole panel on that if you wanted. That's exactly what I mean. Now, D'danui, the questions are starting to roll into the Q&A, so I'm just going to dive on those. I do see one for you, and I did a quick Google translation, and I'm pretty sure it's asking about if you could speak to your dramaturge co-work with the dimension of sound in theater. Is that correct? Yeah. Take your way, D'danui. Yes. Thank you, Catherine. Well, maybe before I answer the question, I'd like to answer a little bit about the question you asked about which project it was about, which was supposed to be a challenge in trans-Fronterizo. I'd like to mention, as a special challenge for me, I was the director, coordinator, and curator of the last meeting of the MISFERIC Institute of Antipolitical Performance, which took place in Mexico City in 2019. And probably around 700 academic artists and activists from 23 different countries were a major challenge in many ways. In many ways because the majority of the meeting took place in the university city, in Launan, and understanding this institutional translation of what can be done, what can be done in a space, the connotations that each of the spaces has as a management, working with the whole team of the MISFERIC Institute, and also with collaborators and collaborators from so many countries. It was for me a huge wealth, and I bring it to a close, and I think it's a great opportunity for me to share with you a little bit of what Daniela was talking about. I think there are, like, touristic acts, like the management, where the research is put to the service of this understanding of a whole, which doesn't have to do with production, but with a sensitivity to interpret and understand the different cultural universes to put them into dialogue. For me, being a healer of the MISFERIC Institute and organizing, which I have been managing for two years, meant letting me go through other schemes, allowing me to think from other places, to investigate a lot, and a little bit of a meeting, a setting in the scene too. And, well, about drama-tourism in relation to sound, it's curious because I started the relationship with the scene, especially as an investigator. My thesis of Doctorado is a thesis about the promise and the broken promise in different phenomena of Don Giovanni de Mozart, linked to Don Giovanni and the opera, and then I had the opportunity to work as a drama-tourist in a setting, well, not from the first creation, of the opera Titus, with a team of Chilean collaborators, with Guillermo Eisner, Chilean composer and Carla Romero as director. Well, I think that the first time I was able to put in practice, beyond academic research, this was precisely in Titus. And, well, I consider that there is a lot of the scene that is said from, for example, making the adaptation of the text, that there was a lot of research to be there, that we did collaboratively, the adaptation of Shakespeare's text to the opera, well, from the beginning it has to come out a lot of the word that is going to be said with the music. But specifically, the theme, for example, of the vineyard, that normally after it is, they cut the tongue and it is soft, in almost any representation of this bloodthirsty tragedy of Shakespeare, that is what appears. As we were interested, and the team was interested in talking about this Titus, not from the perspective of Titus, but from the perspective of the vineyard, it was very important in the research process to find the possibility that this vineyard would not be soft, but that it could not pronounce words, but continue to be lamented. This, from the context, in addition to violence of feminicides that we live in Mexico. So, well, that is an example of, for me, what articulates a intermediate image from the investigation to take to the scene, from what it means to say to a team, in addition to collaborators, wonderful, right? I gave material, we talked a lot about the text, etc., but I mean, they were solutions to which we were reaching in a shared research process and that it has a lot to do directly with the subject of sound. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for that. And thank you for kind of tying it back to my other question as well. That sounds like a fascinating process and to work with those images and how it relates to your research and how it relates to sound like that's, wow, that's fantastic. I'm sorry, my dog is next to me. She cries out, yes, Carmen, yes. Oh, good. Now you can hear me, yes? Yes. Yes. Yes. Just jumping on the whole question of dramaturgy, I mean, one thing that I know that we're discussing in Canada, and I'm curious as to whether this discussion is also going on in Mexico, is also the question of cultural and political dramaturgy, right? So, for example, right now at, I'm sure I'm allowed to say all this, Bob. No, maybe I'm not. No, I think I am. Okay. Anyway, Stratford is about your premiere, a play, I don't think it's the world premiere. So, scratch that. It's about to produce a play called Serving Elizabeth by this fantastic Afro-Canadian playwright, Marcia Johnson. And the play takes place mostly in Kenya. And so one of the dramaturgs that's going to be in the room for this production is the fabulous Mekonze Muzioki, who is my fellow artistic associate of new play development. A, because he's a brilliant dramaturg, and B, because he's Kenyan. So, he is able to bring this, you know, the cultural dramaturgy into the room, right? And for me, I always also look at my particular projects through a political dramaturgy, dramaturgical lens. So, for example, my last play that was up is called Anywhere but Here and Pedro and Daniela worked on it very hard. Thank you so much for working on that play. It was a world premiere by Electric Company. And the political dramaturgy of the play was We Are Here. So, it was about exiles and refugees, mostly taking place at the U.S.-Mexico border. So, almost all the characters in it were Latinx, and almost all of them, well, all of them were exiles and refugees. I needed to be sure, dramaturgically, that the theme of it was We Are Here Because You Are There. And that is an actual line in the play, right? We, us Latinx refugees and exiles, are here in North America because you, North America, are there, right? So, I needed to make sure, along with my dramaturg, Heidi Taylor, who's incredible and she's the artistic director of Playwrights Theatre Center, that that political dramaturgy was threaded throughout the entire play, that we never dropped that lens, that anti-imperialist lens, right? But I wanted to make sure that the play was not an immigrant story, right? The immigrant story of North America that you see on stages being, thank you, thank you, thank you for letting us in. Yes, my global South country is a piece of shit. I'm so lucky to be here. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm so grateful my global South country is backward and stupid and static and, you know, kind of like an orientalism, right? So it was very important for me that that political dramaturgy, as well as the cultural dramaturgy, right, was very present during the process of writing and during the rehearsal, along with the director, making sure every beat of the play, nope, right here, we're dropping that, that lens, that anti-imperialist lens, how do we put it back in? How do we make sure that nobody in the audience, and it still happened, right, that nobody in the audience sits there going, oh, these characters are so lucky to be in North America, as opposed to the audience members going, oh, these characters are here because we are there. Shit, okay, let me think about that. I've gone on too long, but I just wanted to bring that into the conversation, and wondering if that's, if those kinds of conversations, if those types of conversations I'd like to offer any of our Mexican panelists to, to revise our other similar approaches to dramaturgy and to your work, yeah? If I jump, may I jump in just very quickly? Because what excites me about hearing Carmen's perspective is what excites me, and sort of, I also regret to acknowledge this, but in many sectors in Mexico, in my opinion, we have to fight the politics of theater-making in order to include cultural and drama, and political dramaturgy. It's the voice of God's Father, God's Son, God's Holy Spirit, it's the infinite post of wisdom, we are a deeply Catholic country, and this logic of who directs a work has the knowledge and the absolute power in many areas of production is something that has cost decades to fight, decades to adjust, decades to bring into question even, even questioning that practice has taken a lot of time. However, I think that through precisely a program like the UNAM, in which I have the privilege of being a colleague of Didangui, there has been a transition in which more and more permeates what I hear with the emotion of Daniela, Pedro, and Carmen. This is a collaboration, and indeed even the stage director is another collaborator. It's not the holy trinity of theater. It shouldn't still be regarded as that. So for me that's the first step. I do believe that the Indian is mythified both by stagecraft and regrettably still by statecraft. But I also very much appreciate that last year, in 2020, it was the first time that in this country there was a question in the national sense that allowed Afro-descendants to self-identify as Afro-descendants. And in Mexico there is also a mythification of the term mestizo, because mestizaje has been, since the 19th century at least, a very comfortable policy that has tended to marginalize and even invisibilize Afro-descendants in Mexico. Didangui, I have a colleague in the university, the professor Muriel Ricard, who in collaboration with, I'm forgetting the name of the director, excuse me, he says, I'm fighting towards the hierarchy, but they have indeed collaborated very, very closely, both as a performer and as, well, this has been a continuum. They devised this story. And I'm sorry for the spoiler, but Angelique is a black performer allegedly, allegedly touring, she's an allegedly French black performer touring Mexico, facing discrimination all over the place. And through a very interesting and compelling musical dramaturgy, both the performer and the director asked, well, do we want to tell the tale from the revictimization of Afro-descendants in Mexico, or do we want to bring this into question while still having fun? And they devised a one-woman show, a piece of camera theater, a piece of musical theater in the whole extent of the word. Through Boleros, La Sandunga, La Llorona, Chansons by Edith Piaf, they started to tell this story about a black foreigner in Mexico. And I hope they forgive me, because this is the point, how they address the political dramaturgy of it. In the end, the audience learns that she's not foreign. She's from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, and she has to pass as a French woman in order to, yes, be exoticized, so to speak, but to have a voice. Because for centuries now in Mexico, it's kind of okay if you have a darker skin color, but you must be foreign. So the Carmen question really sort of excites me, because this is the questions we should be making here. First, sort of revise the political hierarchy of theater making in many, many places, in many, many companies, in many, many industries in Mexico, the theater industry as a whole, but also how we should be asking this sort of question. So I hope I sort of follow up on that. That makes me think of exactly why we decided to have this conversation, because it seems like there are very similar questions, and like you said, restructuring of hierarchies happening here in Canada, or that needs to happen here in Canada, and maybe there's some resistance, you know. Oh, this is fascinating. Thank you very much for that. Now, I saw that you had a hand up at one point, Dan, when did you want to respond to that as well? If not, that's okay. There's another question in the chat that we can go to. No, no, no, I took it. Okay, okay. I thought I saw a hand up. All good. So this question is from Marta, and I think it kind of ties back to what we were just saying, and I'd like to kind of flip it to both sides, because it's a question for the Canadian panelists. The question is, what is the perception of Mexican theater in Canada, and for Carmen specifically, like, how has it changed over time? But I'd almost want to flip that to say, like, what's the perception of Canadian theater in Mexico as well, if there is any? So I'd like to throw it up to whoever would like to respond to that. Okay, I guess I'll just jump in. I think that there is, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, colleagues, but I think there is no perception of Mexican theater in Canada. I think it's completely non-existent. You know, I hate to say it, but I think there's zero perception of what Mexican theater is in Canada. I think that there's misconceptions as well, like, about certainly the global south and Latin America in particular, right, just because that's what we're talking about right now, that there is no theater there. It's like, what? There's theater there? What does it look like? What is it? You mean, like, there's actual, like, huge theaters? You mean, like, there's a huge theater scene just, just like anywhere else in the world, right? There's mainstream theater, there's underground theater, there's device theater, there's theater of the oppressed, there is etc. etc. There's like a shock that that even exists. You know, you know, when I talk about corrientes, which is like the broad way of, of Buenos Aires, right? And I've described corrientes to Canadian colleagues that it's like the broad way of Buenos Aires where you see broad way type shows. A lot of them are shocked that that even exists, right? I hate to say it, but that that's that's the reality. And the struggle for us Latinx artists here in Canada, as I know you know, Marta, has been for us to actually get work in the Canadian theater, right? Because I would bet, not money, because you know, I can't get it to you right now, but I would bet whatever, that in Mexico, when people think of Canadian theater, they don't think of people like me and Daniela and Pedro. You guys probably think about white people, right? When you in Mexico think about Canadian theater, you're probably thinking about white plays and white people. You are probably not thinking Daniela, you're not thinking that, right? And so there's a problem there, right? There's there's a big border there. And I think the border is political and historical, you know, Latin America, as we know, is not a race. It's an ethnicity. However, it is a racialized continent, right? When we view it from the north, right? It is a racialized continent because of a long history of imperialism that continues to this day, right? So because of all everything that I'm just saying, the struggle for us Latinx artists here in Canada, I'm sorry to say has not been to go, Hey, everybody in Canada, let's look at Mexico and see what theater they're doing. No, our struggle has been much more day to day like, shit, how do I get apart? How do I get work? How do I get my lens, you know, my Latinx lens on stage? How do I get Latinx stories on stage about Latinx people who are in Canada, right? How do we reach our Latinx audiences in Canada, right? Knowing that much of the Latinx population in Canada is poor. Much of it is undocumented. How do we get to them? So we're not so concerned about how do we get Mexican plays, you know, translated into English and then put them up here, right? That has not been our concern. It's been more about how do we, we Latinx people in Canada confront erasure and systemic racism in the Canadian theater, you know. So that's, that's what I have to say about that. If I could add also, I think to think of Canadian Latinx artists, it's this country is so large and our percentage of demographic, let alone the percentage of Latinx artists in theater is so small that it's the connection that we're craving because we have historically related from each other, just you are in the country with we're finding members, there's the one lone Mexican artist in Saskatoon, right? And so if you, there's a lone, you don't have that power and so creating these organizations, we're trying to raise awareness simply to the fact that we are here, stop ignoring us. And so, and hopefully one day we can achieve a momentum, then that momentum can create the bridges to the south and to have that stronger exchange, hopefully for me, I don't know, I don't want to speak for everyone. Yes, did Ami? a la misma dimensión en la que se tendría la escena estadounidense, sin embargo creo que hablando de una forma un poco más local, si me gustaría comentar que el Festival Internacional de Teatro Universitario, que tiene desarrollándose ya desde hace varios años en el marco del Launam, ha tenido ya varias veces intercambios con Canadá, y a mí me ha tocado ver ahí Teatro Canadiense, tanto por intercambio, digamos, con escuelas mexicanas, pero también me tocó hace un par de años, o tres, estaba buscando el dato ahora, pero no lo recuerdo, que se abría justamente este Festival con una obra Canadiense, Les Sangres, que fue interesante porque además estaba justo en aquel momento Hansius-Lehman, impartiendo un curso antes, bueno, yo tuve la oportunidad de ver junto con Lehman aquella obra que se autodenominaba como posdramática y que generó una grandísima incomodidad dentro de la audiencia del Teatro aquel día, fue para mí muy interesante el fenómeno, porque era un grupo de estudiantes de preparatoria canadiense con una especie de reformulación de varias cartas del Marqués de Sade, era una obra muy interesante, pero que efectivamente estaba poco relacionada, o sea, poco enterada, del contexto de la audiencia con la que iba a dialogar aquella noche, estábamos teniendo justo en esas semanas, además habían aparecido una serie de crímenes de feminicidios tremendos, entonces la audiencia lo percibió como una agresión enorme, ¿no?, porque era como pueden venir a hablar aquí, digamos, como desde un lugar, de un erotismo exacerbado que era lo que sucedía ahí, como exacerbando la violencia, no es que fuera realmente así, pero fue un encuentro interesante, digamos, en términos culturales, fue rico que al día siguiente en el curso que teníamos con Lehman fueron específicos a hablar sobre la obra, fue riquísimo escucharles porque, claro, sus motivaciones, todo el universo que ellos tenía, de hecho, tenía todo un pronunciamiento político en ese sentido también iético respecto al cuerpo, sin embargo, esa traducción no se alcanzó a ver y a sentir en el público mexicano, ¿no?, pero fue muy rico poderlo dialogar ahí, fue muy rico también poder reconstruir que realmente no tenía nada de dramático, ¿no?, etcétera. Creo que a mí me sirve eso para hablar respecto a qué sucede en el momento en el que más allá de ideas generales. Yo sí creo mucho siempre hablar desde el conocimiento situado, no, desde la territorialidad, pero también sobre todo desde las micropolíticas que se dan en la escena, es decir, no podemos hablar, seguir hablando de esta cuestión tan universal, sino de un montaje específico, un público específico, un momento específico y para mí pienso en intercambio Canadá, México, y recuerdo aquella noche, aquella noche y todo lo importante que fue también para este grupo de jóvenes canadienses escuchar lo que su obra podía detonar también, cómo podía ser leída de otro lugar, ellos además con una gran apertura para escuchar, entonces fue rico, fue un intercambio creo que muy productivo y creo que eso ocurre cuando, cuando, cuando nos reunimos a sentir y a pensar el teatro. Wow, that would be, well like you said, that would be quite an experience for a group of like high school students to see their work kind of like reflected back to them like, wow, that, thank you for sharing that, that was very interesting. There's another question just that popped into the chat here. And it's, are there any works that any of the panelists have worked on that notably bridge the gap or beginning the work of range the gap of bringing Mexicana or other Latin it's work to Canada. And I always wanted to direct that to Paul Lux, I wonder if that relates to the project that you were speaking about before that you're that you've started working with a Mexican dramaturg and when you're kind of going back and forth between Vancouver and Mexico. If you're willing to speak to them. Yeah, sure. The play I was talking about before is a different play. The play that we staged first in Canada, it was kind of like this back and forth crazy thing is the orbweaver and there was actually a question about that so I can probably talk about that as well. This play I wrote while my last year of University and University of British Columbia. I wrote it and then with a couple of friends from University, we just like staged a really experimental weird version of it that completely changed afterwards. And then it was really interesting. One of the people involved in the project was a really good friend Matthew Willis who was acting as dramaturg. At the time it was funny because I was dramaturging his play and he was doing mine and so we would spend like entire days like eight hour long days just talking back and forth about theatre and our plays. And then I came back to Mexico to live so this was like my last few months in Canada and I was developing the play further and I had the help of Kathleen Flowerty from Playwrights Theatre Centre. It was only like one or two like email like an exchange and what happened was that she asked four or five really difficult questions and I spent like six months crying over them and freaking out and they were so helpful, so helpful to, it just made me realize just how much I needed that help. It's really interesting what Emilio was saying before about kind of challenging this idea of like this director figure person that I had absorbed my whole life. Like you think of a director and it's this guy and he knows everything and so trying to fill those shoes has been incredibly scary and just not helpful and my journey through theatre has been deconstructing that idea that as a director and playwright I have to be the one person who knows everything because it's really hard and it's not true. So with this play what I found was first in Matthew and then Kathleen was kind of like a company that would be with me developing the play and being responsible somehow for the play and I was not the sole creator of the thing. Then we, here in Mexico was working with my producer Jimenez Alpil who's an amazing theatre producer and she acted as a kind of non, she wasn't aware of it at the time but she was acting as a dramaturg as well, asking questions about the play and then kind of asking me to to apply for the Vancouver fringe. We applied for it and then the play which was born in English and was then performed by Mexican artists, Mexican actors was flown back to Vancouver with the team, a design team that was all Mexican with Jimenez who's also Mexican and the only I think the only Canadians involved were Matthew and and the UBC Players Club who were producers for the show as well, this university club helping us produce and it was really interesting to see how that experience further developed the way we couldn't taking it across the border we couldn't really it's a play about people killing peoples we couldn't really take a lot of the props through immigration and the airport because that would have been really hard. We ended up making a lot of the set pieces from junk that we found on back lanes and the actor who got there earlier went, Matthew took her on this like tour through the Vancouver back lanes trying to grab suitcases and stuff and what was interesting there was that we found the place aesthetic basically through not being able to do it the way we wanted it to and that that happening we realized that the play was a play was meant to be made through junk and through the things that we stole and borrowed from the firm so that was really interesting and just how the play ended up developing and then we brought her back to Mexico and in that case she had a theater and in 2018 she presented herself in the El Enico theater and it was wonderful to see how something that had been pieces of box of cardboard and also having the money to be able to produce as we wanted but informed by the previous difficulties and that process I think as my initial idea of what a director is or a director is, it destroys a lot in these like processes that I have found that you do it in parts, it will never be perfect at first, this idea that you have the correct answer immediately does not exist and then these difficult processes in which there are many people collaborating in which you bring this idea back, that is to tell the story of the editor Björg Weaver is a long story because it just has that as all these lines that cross within her and to understand the work that I wrote when I had 23 right now that I have 30 and understand what I felt about the English idiom when I wrote it right now that the truth is that I wrote in Spanish and I no longer write in English almost this and understand that trip at the time of translating it to us tells us that her final audience was also Mexican, more than anyone else, although at the time I wrote for the Canadians, I can't take away from what I am, no, so discovering that her audience was finally always very interesting in Mexico and if it has been a process that I continue to understand, the one that I do not have, that's why Emilio called me a lot, the tension of this lens figure that knows everything and rather I think that these processes of dramaturgism of that it is incredibly difficult and that many people are putting their ears and that it does not arise from a single event, but apart from the inform of the different their different trips in the work there is a moment of a trip, the characters travel to a world of fairy tales, to the reality of Mexico City and when it is presented in Vancouver to the reality of Vancouver and I think that that trip was very informed through the trips that we made physically by getting on the plane, I think that there would not have been a trip if we had not needed that trip from Vancouver to Mexico, so it simply seems interesting how the understanding of how the works, going through phases of that type, grow in an impressive way and also destroy the idea that I as a creator I have to be able to get it complete as it is when it is not true and there are so many people involved and also I think it is quite therapeutic for a creator to know that, that is like my experience as to understand also therapeutically as a creator that it is not necessary, it is like a single voice, but voices and then that was the process of your believer and it's one of the things that I'm proudest off because we were okay with it not being okay until it finally was. Thank you, that to me is such a great example of how like literally crossing borders, the theme of this conference, influences your work as an artist, like your identity as an artist and like your artistic process, like that to me is fascinating and now I'm realizing we only have about two minutes left, I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to like summarize our discussion, I feel like we've really just scratched the surface, I'm hearing a lot of like similarities between like what's happening up north, like up here and what's happening in Mexico, like the common things I'm hearing is like how people define dramaturgy to find themselves of dramaturgs and almost need a little convincing in that regard or need to be convinced that they work dramaturgically or are a dramaturg and my work as president of LMD Canada I'm always trying to convince people to join and they say oh but I'm not a dramaturg I'm like well you don't know it but you are and we all kind of work dramaturgically to an extent right and can benefit from this like network of people which is essentially why we wanted to bring this panel together, so in our last minute or two here I wanted to thank you all and I wanted to offer if anyone had any like parting words or anything they would like to leave everyone with or gosh if we need to do like a part two of this conversation maybe next year or something or if anyone has anything to share or any last questions or anything please please take the floor Isabel Emilio did you have one last thing very quickly just as a follow-up of what Dan we said and Carmen for a certain generation of theater makers in Mexico in the late 90s and early 21st century actually Quebecois theater was the sort of inescapable thing Michelle Marushar, Larry Tremblay, Carol Fraschage, Genevieve Villiers, and John Miton were the playwrights that were being translated and staged here in Mexico and as Paola just said for a generation of theater makers here that was part of who they became or who they want to became and I think at this moment it would be thrilling to have Carmen's Daniela Pedro's work being translated perhaps by Paola and staged here because as Carmen you really really moved me to think yes we were doing plays like Quebecois playwrights and although I might be mistaken all of them white so the thing has to be it has to be kept moving and I do this very panel is a very promising path to keep the conversation going thank you wow thank you if oh man if if something came out of this like translations exchanged like that means a big check a big success thank you so much everyone oh Brenda's popped in I'll leave it to you Brenda hello thank you Catherine didn't mean to interrupt but what a fantastic panel we just witnessed for an incredible panel this will inevitably happen Catherine for supuesto I just want to let the attendees know that now we're having a break for lunch and if you want to join your regions for that lunch we're very pleased to have you I will see you all soon thank you very much