 Quick announcement, we are starting a couple minutes late but that is in the spirit of a TCG conference. We're in keeping the traditions. What? It's going into the computer? Yeah. It's reverberating or something. Because we're so good at technology and that's why you're here to learn from us. We're having those kind of problems just to show you that, you know, we don't know what to do. We aren't actually trying to find a sound cable because we have one of our panelists of things skied in, which is very cool and it's part of kind of how you did this work. Learning as we go, but we need a sound cable so that he can be heard. Otherwise we'll be hearing him, he's great. You won't know what we're saying. So if you'll just be with us a couple minutes and we'll get started as soon as possible. Okay. Thank you. Oh yes, we should. Absolutely. I think the only thing that we want to do is just say hello to the audience. You can only see through the computer. We can get started. What can we do? You can hear us tonight. You can hear us. We can hear you. We can hear you. We can hear you. We can hear you. We can hear you. We can hear you. He can hear us. We can hear you. We're still waiting on the sound cable so we can take a break from our talk. I know what you're talking about. Well then I'll actually do it quickly. The audience knows. Because they emailed him. And he can hear us that you can read his notes. And I was like, what can I do? So that will be wonderful. So go left here. Oh yes, an audio cable. I think. Yeah. Maybe no phone. I think it's ours. But how are we still going? Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. The audio? The audio? Yeah. No, no. The audio is coming. Yeah. We're going to get started. I'm just going to... Ok, great. Thanks. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Ok. He's muted us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Let's do it. What do you think you can do? Abigail is going to run me far quite because she just created the video herself. Sure. Yes, can you just one second? No. Come on! Guys! I'm in a restaurant. Okay. I think we should. Do we need the mic or can you folks hear us well enough? Are we good? Right on. Okay, one little thing. Okay. Okay, so hi, we're going to get started with our discussion. We're waiting on a power on a sound chord, but Lela Grimas who is calling us, where are you, Lela? Is he in Illinois? Yeah, I think he's in Chicago. He's crazy. Who is reaching us from beyond. Luckily sent us his notes. Worst comes to worst. I'll be reading his notes and he'll be lip-syncing and it'll be a kind of performance. That was Lisa Porte's idea. We're having a little bit of feedback or power on. So, you are here. Thank you for joining us today to the conversation called El Movimiento Will Be Digitized. And first we're going to introduce ourselves. My name is Olga Sanchez. I'm artistic director for Milagro of Portland, Oregon. And I'm also a steering committee member for the Latino Latina Theater Commons, which is basically what we're talking about today. Hi, I'm Abigail Vega. I'm the director of the Artistic Collective Theater Luna. And I'm also the producer of Latino Theater Commons. I'm Jamie Galeon. I'm the associate director of HowlRound. And I have been working closely with the Latina Theater Commons since its inception. Hi, Niga Lo. I'm Lisa Portes. I am many things. I am a director of the head of the MFA directing program at DePaul University and a founding member of the Latino Latina Theater Commons. Hi, everybody. I'm Shantana Rodriguez. I am the programming director for the Los Angeles Theater Center. And I'm also an adjunct professor of theater at Loyola Marymount University. And I'm on the steering committee of the Latino Latina Theater Commons. And Lela, do you want to introduce yourself? And we'll try to, even though you're not loud enough, we'll repeat what you say. Introduce yourself. Lela. Oh, can you please introduce yourself? Hi, this is Mark. Okay, hold on. Great. Lela Grivas, currently calling. They heard it. Oh, they heard it. They heard it. Okay, good. Yay. All right, so welcome, everybody. Right, so welcome, everybody. You, you, you. Okay, title this. I think many of us are familiar. Back in the 60s, there was a slogan that came up. And it was, the revolution will be televised. And the reason for that was because, basically what emerged was the photographs that started coming back from the Vietnam War, in particular the photographs of the caskets of the dead soldiers, dead U.S. soldiers, and how that really, that those images and that ability to see those images were really a part of the strong anti-war movement that then began to take shape. And that's, of course, when they decided no more pictures because they didn't, the government didn't want that kind of anti-government activity to be fomented. That's a really brief encapsulation of what that was. The other side of it is, of course, el movimiento, the first part of it, which is the legacy, in particular, the Chicano-Latino movement of the 1960s wrapped around the struggles for the United Farm Workers trying to form their union. But more than that, the fight, the struggle for visibility and for appreciation for acknowledgement of this large community that had, well, if you talk historically, the border had crossed them, not the other way around, and they were being viewed as the infiltrators, and it was quite the opposite. And so it was about building the visibility and appreciation for this cultural history, legacy, and strike, both an empowerment for the community itself and a statement to the community at large. So in that spirit, in that honor of that heritage, this title, el movimiento, will be digitized because now what we're talking about is raising the visibility of our community and our work, empowering ourselves, expressing ourselves to the greater community, in essence, through these new tools that are available to us, which would not have been available five years ago, even as shortly, as recently as that. But just a couple of words before we continue on. One of the things that's really critical to remember in all cases is that this, even with all the tools, this is ultimately a human endeavor. This doesn't happen without human beings taking on this challenge and making it all occur. And what we're gonna talk about is how the human beings use these tools to raise our voices. I feel like we're much less. Oh no. I want to thank TCG in particular because part of where this emerged from, this movimiento was in large part, we talked about this a bit yesterday in our Intergenerational Leaders of Color meeting, where so many of us used to gather at previous TCG meetings under the tree, or over by the stairwell, or whenever we could, those lunchtime meetings, those famous lunchtime meetings, and we gathered around our communities, our identified communities, to share, to meet each other, to share our stories. And this was a national gathering of artists who basically probably only got to see ourselves here at TCG at best. And we're gonna talk a bit more about other events that were happening. But this was part of the strengthening of what we think of as a regional representation because a couple of years ago, we started a project through the Technology of Conference 2.0. I'm gonna be brief. There's no question. Oh, that's just readjusting. It's readjusting. Okay, okay. Sorry. We're so into Conference 2.0, which is a tool that we use now quite frequently, but it allowed us to create a group that was called Latinos in Theater that found representation and meeting, in particular in the LA area. We had meetings in Arizona. We had meetings in Miami. We had meetings in Seattle, and meetings in Portland, at various center theaters. And they won an LA, it really took hold in this. And it's now basically from the foundation of what we call a host committee, to a project that is emerged out of the Latina Latino Theater comments. But many thanks to TCG for writing, at least a place for us to gather, and the technology for us to continue that conversation that then has left forward here. So I think that's all I need to say. I'm gonna turn it over to Shanta. Great, so welcome, everybody. I am going to give a very brief history of the Chicano Latino Theater movement, just so that we can sort of see the continuity between these major waves in the Chicano Latino Theater history and how this is really a subsequent wave that has been informed and inspired by all those who have come before us. So a lot of people think that Chicano Latino Theater is a new development, and it is not. Since the mid-19th century, truly, in the United States, there has been coast-to-coast influence and performance in theater by Latinos and Chicanos. At the time, they probably weren't called Chicanos yet, but there were touring circuits that existed from New York across the country to Los Angeles. They were doing primarily Spanish melodrama, Sarsuelas. From the 1920s to the 1950s, we started to see more Mexican garba tent shows, variedades or variety shows during the Vodger era. And so there was a really rich and thriving theater and performance culture amongst the Latinos, Mexicanos across the country. It's really in the 1960s, I think, that most people identify the specific Chicano Latino Theater movement. Understandably, so the catalyst of this civil rights movement truly really launched the African-American sort of renaissance of arts, Native American, Asian American, Latino theater and performance really all sort of started to spark in reaction and in response to the civil rights movement. When we talk about waves, I see particularly sort of waves along the West Coast and waves along the East Coast that are very broad, sort of bi-coastal movements, but really it was happening across the United States. But in the West Coast, we primarily saw a lot of theater, so small individual little collective sort of that began to pop up really with El Teatro Javacino being the first, right? When Luis Valdez comes to, as Cesar Chavez says, I wanna make a theater of, by and for, farm workers. And it really started a grassroots, you know, on the back of plebid trucks and mobilizing out of a sense of urgency to bring the farm workers out of the field and to join the picket line. So there was this real sense of political urgency and then it really grew over the course of several years, hundreds of these theaters, these small theater collectives popped up all across the Southwest and there were hundreds of them. To the point that in 1971 an umbrella organization was created called Tenaz, El Teatro Nacional de Aslan. And they became sort of this umbrella organization that then started to create national festivals that would mean annually to see all of this work together. Similarly, on the East Coast, things were happening as well. It was primarily Puerto Rican, New Yorkan, and Cuban American theater companies that were being developed at the same time. A lot of street theater, Ajaprop theater, and really theater that dealt with the cultural reaffirmation in response to the discrimination and prejudice that was being felt in the 60s and 70s, you know, even through today. So we do have a shared history amongst Latinos of using theater and performance as a way to reaffirm our culture but also as a tool against oppression. So this, you know, happened throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s. In the 80s and 90s was really the height of the multiculturalism movement in theater. And I just wanna talk about two very significant moments that have launched the careers and really sort of launched our contemporary theater movement, the Hispanic Playwrights Project of South Coast Regulatory and the Latino Theater Initiative. One of the co-directors is here with us. We felt very influential and in developing so many of our voices in the American theater truly. And we see it as sort of the subset of Latino theater but truly these voices have been powerhouses in the American theater. So we are coming from this large wave of artists who have worked collectively and when we lost these two developmental labs, really, it really left a void in the American theater. That's where I pick up, yeah. That's where I come in, yeah. So this wave, we're talking about El Movimiento. So we're looking, you know, with Chantal, way back to where it started, this big movement, right? And then we take that, takes us all the way up to HPP and LTI, Hispanic Playwrights Project and Latino Theater Initiative, right? Those went and they carried them all forward, right? And then they collapsed. The institutions let them go. And then essentially what happened is we kind of all hung out in the regions, you know? I think that the Latino, Latino theater movement at that point kind of became much more regional because we lost what was, you know, I think what was for the theater is a way to kind of get other artistic directors and folks interested in Latino work. But for us, it was our, those festivals were our nucleus. They were where we convened Latino and Latino theater makers around the country. So when we lost that nucleus at that point, we kind of went a regional. So cut to, is this where I come in? Well, this would be where Tlalac comes in. Yeah, cut to, Tlalac writes a blog post about something that happens in Washington, DC. Can we skip? Maximize him, sir. Maximize Tlalac. Can you guys hear me? Speak loud. We're going to maximize you. There's a volume. Wait, just a sec. Hello, can you guys hear me okay? Just a second. Okay. There you go, okay. Yes. Can you hear? The kind of production of them was set on a reverb, major character, use names that had been made up by director even at Sweeney, and those names were one of what was used in the three parties. Because the names were considered demeaning and even derogatory by Latino theater artists, many of us began a discussion online. Hey, Lelac, can you hold one second please? Can everybody hear me? There it is. Fairly. I'm going to repeat what you just said, Lelac. I want to repeat this. I want to see where it's just one. You want to get closer? Yeah, get closer. No, that's right. Okay. Bring your chairs up, make a little circle. You may have to repeat what you just said, Lelac, it's just a little bit. We have to be careful at this point. We're live streaming. Here we go. Like over here, yeah. No, I think that's perfect. I think you can see it. Digitized and intimate. Thank you so much. Great idea. Is it too close for you? Oh, she's telling us something. Because they're live streaming. That's what I was doing. Oh, wait, our gentleman is coming to the rescue, perhaps. Here's the audio cord. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Yes, please repeat. Can I just say one thing before you repeat, Lelac? So what's important about, wait, Lelac, wait, Lelac, wait, wait. You can turn around. We need to turn around. Oh, thank you. Okay, yeah, I just want to say one thing, which is that this is where you see the first, okay, this is where you see the first kind of entry of technology right here. It's a blog post. Lelac is writing in response. Then there's highlighting technology. Okay, go. This was this week. It really passes. It's a blog post. I'm coming to you. I'm coming to you. I'm coming to you. Thank you. Tell him to stop. Stop. He's done, he's done. I miss you guys. You have no idea. So we're plugging you in. Down the top. Okay. Yay. He's talking about that. I'm going to need to use this. Yeah, yeah, just leave it here. Okay. I'm going to last him. He loved. It's huge. It's like this. Yeah, thank you, love. Who did it? Did we unplug you? Luis. No, I didn't touch it. Luis? You guys, I love him. There's no play for me, yes. I love you. Have a sound designer. Oh my God. This is the third. Shelly, shelly, shelly, shelly. Oh. Shelly, shelly, shelly, shelly. The guy left? Where'd the guy go? He's celebrating. He's covering my back. Oh, okay. Is he kidding me or not? Oh, no. No. Okay, well, I'm glad you did. Let's unplug him. Go back to your vision. Sorry. It was exciting for a second. No, I'm fine. No, keep going. We got you. You love this. This is important because it's you. My mental is silent. Exactly. That's exactly right. See, he put the movies. So can we go from the three-hole that's one? Oh my gosh. No, no, we can't go from there. No, no, we got to the part where. The eloquent respond. Mr. Khan, eloquently responding. Mr. Khan responding. Mr. Khan responds eloquently. The response from Mr. Khan to the community. Yes. Good job. 15 second pause to connect you again with better wires. But should I go ahead and talk? Because this is me now. I think it's going to be distracting. If he says just plug it in, right? He's going to plug it in just so that it works better. Otherwise he's moving while you're talking and you don't have it. I cannot stay. I don't think so. I am. I'm giving you the right one. We haven't looked in here, so I'll have to go back here. Can we just go around you and put it here? I'll plug it in here and find you. I want to say something cool. Keep talking. Keep talking. Yeah. Talk. Testing one. Thank you. Should we go ahead? No. No. Just keep talking, plug it in here and back here. Maybe we have to raise the volume for the back. Pardon me. Oh, so it's just the volume's not right? The volume, you don't know. We hear it. The volume with the laptop? No, the volume is back there. We hear it. Keep going. So one important lesson about all this is to work with your toys in advance. We couldn't get in here earlier to do this and get the set up. There is a kind of irony. Yes, there is. Exactly. That's exactly right. But we thought it was important. We were hoping that it could be here at the conference. It couldn't. But we thought, let's do this. This is like this thing in action. And this is what enables us to have a national conversation. It's not perfect yet. OK. Let's take it away. Beautiful. OK. So now Lisa. Oh. Great. OK. So this is an instance where, as we're talking about with all of its troubles and anxieties. So it's a blog post that then leads to action. Right? But then as Flau'lach says, inspires Karen Zacharias to ask the arena stage to bring eight Latino and Latina theater makers to DC to discuss the state of the field. That just happened by email. There's no big technological who-ha going on there. But in that meeting of eight, we decided one to form the Latino theater comments. Two, that we want to do four things. We want to launch a website. Technology. We want to launch a website called Cape Onda. We want to create a convening. We want to broaden our leading to 100 or so Latino and Latina theater makers from around the country at a national convening. We want to create an encuentro of 10 world premiere productions by 10 Latino companies in Los Angeles. And we want to create the kind of festival of new Latino work. And we decided to do it at DePaul. We just decide all these things. We just say we're going to do all this stuff. And mainly to one, pick up where HPP had left off. We wanted to find a way, really in the end, to find a way to convene again. To find a way that we could serve as a nucleus that had been lost. To take the baton and move it forward. And this is in a second going to be what technology does. But we structure ideas around restructuring the American narrative. And what we mean by that is two things. Restructure the way we're seen. Is that right? Restructure the right word? Update the American narrative. Thank you, Jamie. Update the American narrative. One, about how we are, what is Latinidad and how are we perceived? And to kind of help folks who are bewildered, confused, misguided, just don't know, understand Latinidad more deeply to advocate for ourselves in the field. But also this idea, and it was actually David Dower, but it was a great idea, which was because we are already a by-try of polycultural, because Latinas are already a by-try of often polycultural people, and you see it in our dramaturgy, you see it in the plays themselves, that we seek narratives, or we seek new narratives and new structures that articulate that polycultural experience, with the nation moving to 51%, however many years, that people need us, that this country needs us right now, that this country needs the Latino community to update the American narrative because of our already innate polyculturalism and the way it articulates itself in our dramaturgy. We move forward with this idea, we see all this great stuff, we all leave, and we think, okay great, that was great, that was awesome. I wonder what will happen. The next thing that happens is we decide, oh, you know, Pauly says, apply for this grant, so yeah, we apply for this grant. Now this is where technology starts to come in, because Pauly and Jamie starts saying apply for this grant. Paulock says he's going to write it, and he does write it. He hands it off to Karen Zacarias and myself, divide email. Karen Zacarias and myself edit. We send it back to Jamie and Pauly at Pau-Round, and they submit it. And then we get this grant, which is to make the convening, to create the convening. So we get this grant from George Duke, and now we have to get moving. Now suddenly, we have a thing to do, and we have to get moving, and we're all over the country. How are we going to do it? In steps, it will be meant that we'll be digitized. Technology. That's great. Yeah. So the meeting of eight at Arena Stage came at a really serendipitous time. We had just recently founded Pau-Round, and it was originally a project of Arena Stage, but myself and colleagues were moving up to Emerson College in Boston, and kind of decided to move our work there. And so we read a particularly interesting point of movement and transition when this meeting happened. So really, we had been working in a certain frame, and we had started to develop this frame of the kind of work that we wanted to do. So Pau-Round has essentially, thank you so much, has essentially provided infrastructure for the Latino Theater Commons, Census, Inception, and for those of you who don't know Pau-Round, we essentially build online platforms that promote knowledge sharing and aggregation. We're trying to build the knowledge commons for the theater, which basically means we're trying to pool resources together in the hopes that new collaborations will come that we're all going to be better off together than we would be separately, right? So our approach, the frame and everything that we do is we use a commons-based approach, which basically means that we want to allow as few barriers to access as possible. We want to be radically transparent. We want to basically try to encourage anyone and everyone to bring what they can, when they can, to the table. So this was essentially the model in which the Latino Theater Commons started working. So a commons, we throw the terminology around a lot, but it's essentially a form of wealth that we inherit or create together that no one owns and that is shared in order to benefit a community. So normally what we think of when we hear the word commons, it comes mostly from the eco movements, right? No one owns the ocean, no one owns the air. There's a certain amount of common benefit that we all have and we all need to be stewards of everything that we do on the planet. So the strategy that we use is essentially, in all of our platforms, it's peer production, it's peer-to-peer, and so that means that anyone can contribute. It's essentially open sourcing, right? And that anyone can use what's out there, remix it, do whatever they want with it in the sense that essentially we're all going to be better off if we have access to these pooled resources. So this is the whole context in which the Latino Theater Commons came into being. And it was sort of just the serendipitous marriage of ideas that were both, you know, in our world at that point like fairly heady and philosophical, but then the meeting at arena really sort of brought it to bear in this very real world context of, okay, how do we operationalize these ideas? So the key ideas behind both the Knowledge Commons that Helena is trying to build, and by extension the Latino Theater Commons is that the community sets the agenda, the community, not one person, not a kingmaker, not a curator, the community. Every participant is a stakeholder. Everyone co-owns, co-creates, co-develops what it is that we're trying to do. Helena's role in this is really one of being a steward or an infrastructure designer. So we already have these tools that we've been working on. They're open to anyone, and we're just going to make sure that they get used to the best of their ability if it's useful to that particular group of people. And last but not least, really the point of all of these is that we're trying to unlock abundance. We're trying to say there is enough for everyone. We're trying to promote a non-scarcity mindset of competition and, you know, feeling like we all have to go after the same things, the detriment of other people, right? And we're trying to sort of say there is enough that's all raised together, right? So the key benefits of this, it's revelatory. There's so many people out there doing amazing things that thanks to technology, that you can now find out about. So many people who, people, companies, just across the country, across the world, it's a really efficient use of resources. If you have one sort of common infrastructure that can exist for many, many people, you stop replicating the kind of things where, oh, every single theater needs to have, say, a live streaming channel, every single theater needs a blog, every single theater needs all of these things that take resources ultimately out of the hands of artists and put it into the sort of traditional overhead number, right? It's trying to say, no, we can create a common infrastructure that we can all benefit from. It galvanizes the community because everyone's empowered, they have a voice, they can contribute what they want to contribute, when they want to contribute, and very importantly, it creates an accessible archive of current practice. So everything on HowlRound, whether it's written content, live stream video, you know, the new clay map, the data, everything lives there, right? Thanks to the internet, it's all now accessible, you search for it, and it's this growing body of work and documentation. Okay, let's go on. Yeah, we'd like to hear from Gleilok now. We want to open up to you. Is this a place where we'll open up to questions? Oh, we can't. If anybody has any questions at this point, because we don't want to save them all to the end. Yeah, and actually we want to make that available to you at any point in this conversation that it really become a conversation and not just us talking to you. If there's any of you who would want to stop for a little clarification or just, you know, like whatever, please just stop. I wanted to say that, I forgot to say that was on my little list, is that, so once we get to a place where we get the grant, we have to then form a steering committee, and this is really when technology and the tools that James is going to talk about in a second come into play, because we have to form a steering committee of 50 people, so we go from 8 to 50. And at that point, we start really using certain tools online beyond emails and phone calls to begin to form the steering committee and then from the steering committee to move forward to create the convening. But I want to say, and it can't bear, it's never understood, it can't bear, it can't not bear repeating, mer. At this point, technology helps make the Latino-Latina theater commons happy. At this point, the baton, which has been dormant for since 2002, I think, right? 2002, 2003, I think it was. HPP and TI died, right? It's been kind of dormant. It's technology that allows us to pick up the baton and move forward and create a community again, a national community again. We hadn't been able to do, even six years ago, some of the technology did not exist. Great, so speaking of technology, we'd like to invite Lala to talk a little bit about one of the first manifestations. We'll talk a little bit about the so Jamie will address this a bit more. There were sort of internal tools that were used among the sort of the planning team of the steering committee and then external tools that allowed us to communicate with the whole field and keep us all informed and participating. And one of the primary external tools was the creation of this web page called Cafe Onda. And so I'll turn it over to Lala to discuss, share a little bit about that in its philosophy, et cetera. See, it's you, Lala. Can you hear me? Take it out. Oh, I see. Just I'm going to plug you in. I'm just going to plug you in. Just going to plug you in. I'm just going to plug you in. Go ahead. Oh, are you kidding me? So yeah, I agree. So it's not funny, can you connect? All right, I'll read the interest of time. Cafe Onda contains articles, blogs, live streaming of theater events, and it's linked to Halloween. It is an online journal, which is an online journal of the theater commons. Using a commons-based approach. Wait. Hold on. Lala, hold on. Okay, I'll keep reading. Using a commons-based approach is an online mechanism for community-sourced contributions and feedback from Cafe Onda under the careful eye of the newly appointed managing editor, Georgina Esquire. That's actually a new edition of Cafe Onda, but in essence it is the tool through which people can really write out the ideas, share some news, share some ideas. So a perfect example to launch, in essence, was that blog posts that Lala wrote at the very beginning saying, hang on a second, I think we have a problem here and they're being response to that. And there's been articles along the way about various elements around the theme of theater, scholarship, information about the gathering that was happening, a lot of information sharing. So it recently restructured, I'll jump to this, it recently restructured with an editorial board that represents the geographic diversity. So it's now expanded and it allows for anyone in the work in the field to reflect and report on stage work and activism happening across the country. It's intending to communicate, to invigorate, to nurture and elevate the work of Latina Latina theater makers to disseminate and illuminate questions of latinidad, including, what is latinidad? What does it mean? Is there an aesthetic that we can define and share that isn't tied to or defined by a dominant culture's drama culture? How can we promote and share work with the next generation of Latina Latina theaters, that artists and others? That's this element that started opening that kind of dialogue and that level of dialogue around the country among theater makers. So I think we move now to internal and external tools with Jamie. Any questions so far? Any questions? Great. Comment. So, you know, essentially Cafe Onda is linked to HowlRound. So it's a part of what we're, what we currently call, you know, essayist practice and opinion. So it's journal pieces, blogs, and I'll eventually have new court reviews, but essentially it's an external tool to communicate not only to the Latina Latina theater community, but to the American theater at large using, you know, the advantage of having a wide audience that already influenced this particular site. So let's move to this one quick. Okay. So what are the actual tools that we started using? So internally, you know, as Lisa mentioned, we formed the Syrian Committee to plan the first convening and it was, you know, roughly 30 to 50 people depending upon how you looked at it, all over the country. So how are we really effectively going to work together to pull off this major initiative? One of the first things that we picked up was obviously conference calling. So the great thing about this particular tool, freeconferencecalling.com, is A, it's just that, it's totally free. You can also record the conversations really easily and they turn into MPPs that you can then upload. So not only can you have just an archive of it if you want to listen, but if people can't make the meeting, it's a really good way to keep people sort of in tune and able to, you know, participate afterwards. Great. Other internal tools, Google Docs, many of you probably use them, and Dropbox, you know, but essentially creating an easy way so that whatever people are without having the same internal server or what have you, people can easily access that. Our biggest savior, I think, in this whole endeavor so far, has been a project management tool called Basecamp. There's many different versions of that tool, but it's something that we started using in 2010 or 2011. And it came out in like 20, what, how did it start Basecamp? Like 28, right? 2008? As a tool? As an available tool. Not very long ago. So essentially it's a project management software and so what it does is it provides a sort of centralized place where you have a calendar that anyone can add to. You can put people in different groups. You can essentially send messages. You can upload files. And it's just a really great way to sort of keep one particular project. In our case, it's turned into many projects all working together via the internet. It has a great app you can email in response to messages and it'll show up on the actual site. And the beautiful thing about it is that it actually, then you have a record of literally everything as it's happening. And so it's not, exactly. So it's not about, you know, going through your work right now, or your personal Gmail, to try to find that one thing from, I think, William years ago. There's another shot. Okay, Sam. I wanted to mention one of the most things that happens is that you can also find these links to Google Docs. So there are documents as you see, Boston's Committee 2013. That's a Google Doc because it's an Excel spreadsheet model that then allows you to have the contact list for the people that attend. The contact list for the people who participated externally in a long distance way. What the agenda was for that meeting and who handled what element of that. So that's also, I found, incredibly useful that it worked with other platforms. Really interesting. And as we said, as an archive, so if you go to Fouser, it's not going to go. You'll see the original Doris Duke document. You'll see all the documents that we've created in this process are in base camp, which means at any moment any of us who need, for example, to find language, you know, talking points needs to write another grant. One wants to remember what we said last time. It's all there. And all our conversations are there. Meeting notes. Meeting notes. It's all there. So this is an incredible tool. This tool, I don't understand if you like it. But I would say this tool of all the tools is what made everything that we've done as far as possible. Yeah. It allows us to stay organized and be contacted. No, it's fine. The other great thing about base camp is I'm a big list maker. And if you are, say, a project manager or a producer, you can assign anyone who's on your base camp project a to-do with a deadline and they'll get an automatic reminder email that basically says, you have this milestone coming up. Like, don't forget to do it. So if you're me, at various times, I would go in and make, like, massive to-do lists and just be able to ping everyone, right? And it's so much easier than, you know, sending 20 emails saying, hey, remember that you were going to do that. So it's really about efficiency, putting everything in one place and it's very user-friendly. And it doesn't require a boss, right? Or anybody, you know, again, it's common space but it allows us, from around the country, it allows Jamie to ping me and say, hey, remember that grand deadline? Do you know? So again, it's a way that we can network together across the nation to get work done. So now, I'm going to just touch briefly on external tools, which we already touched a little bit on. But first of all, we have the Latino Peter Commons webpage, which currently lives on HowlRound. It's sort of the standard place that you can go to find out about past initiatives. It has links to everything that's sort of relevant in the background. And then the next one, so we have the Cafe Onda page, which essentially is the aggregation of all Cafe Onda content to date. It's also accessible via the archive on HowlRound. We're actually in the process of doing a web redesign this summer. And so there'll be a new sort of iteration come fall of both Cafe Onda with a more heightened presence as well as making HowlRound content easier to dig through. Live streaming LTC events. Look at the lovely Lisa Puerta. That was with the Goodman. And then, of course, we have an open Facebook group, which we very purposefully keep open so that anyone who wants to join can join. And we also do quarterly email updates, which is to an open list of anyone who wants to pop on board. All right, so now we're going to talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts and how some of these tools were used as we move forward in planning the convening. Because, as you remember, there were sort of four things that came out of that group of A and one of the big ones. Now we have a web presence. It was the next big gathering, ideally somewhere that had been about a hundred theater makers from around the country. And so there were a variety of committees that had to be implemented that were performed out of the steering committee of 50 and those were fundraising because the doorstep provided a certain amount but there was more than needed to be done. Programming, what were we going to do over this convening that was going to take us about a long weekend? Outreach, how were we going to communicate all of these plans and invitations to the field at large? And then we had an issue with facilitation of people who did not know how to work with these tools. And then planning satellite sessions that happened in conjunction so that we were, even though there was a convening happening in the room, it was only a hundred people and we saw ourselves bringing members of the same job to this as delegates in the field. How did we bring other people pretty much like we're attempting to bring in fellow into this conversation? How did we bring in others into the room at the same time through technology? So I'll turn it over to Lisa first who's going to talk about fundraising. I'm just going to back up for a second. The initial steering committee of 50, there was a skitter step. So the initial steering group of 50 met as many of them as possible in Boston to actually come together because the thing is this has to move, technology exists and we use it as tools but it has to kind of create moments that we come together. It can do only so much of the work and then it allows us to figure out how we come together. So 30 to 50 of the original steering committee came together in Boston to then figure out what are we going to do in this convening and out of those came these different committees, subcommittees, right? But the process of getting the 50 and getting them to Boston, again we were using base camp, we were using conference calling, we were using all those tools. So then out of that convening of the 50 comes the subcommittee. So fundraising, I was on the fundraising committee and we researched, we thought five of us researched different grants all the different grants and all the ideas that came out of the meeting of the 50 went up on base camp, the Doris Duke grant and who was doing what so there was a to-do list. It was like who was going after Doris Duke, who was going after Goya, who was going over Southwest Airlines, who was going after what with little boxes and little deadlines and little check marks and emails that would come, yeah? And then when we would write a grant we would put it up online and we'd be able to communicate with each other and then I was in charge of pestering people so there was that and then there was a lot of calls you know and emails hey did you follow up blah blah blah but then we were using kind of all three tools to really it takes you know you have to do a lot of nudging to fundraise but the deadlines and the to-do list really I think made what we made allowed us to raise however many how many? 50? How much money did we raise? Around $50,000 in a very short period of time I mean between May and October I think we raised $50,000 so again tools helped I'm going to talk about programming programming was a really interesting process that had you know there were a variety of things that we needed to touch base about this was the first gathering of its size in what was it 20, 30 years 20 years or something the last gathering of even comparable size had been back in the 80s with the an organization called TENAS which was an association of Pedro Pedro Nacional Pedro Nacional de Asidlan mostly Chicano identified theaters but it extended as far as New York so of course this was Latino identified theaters and and and so this this undertaking it was it was huge and what if we want to gather at that point and so part of the effort again we go back to the human element a few of the members of the team and Kenan Valdez was the chair of this the programming committee met in California in person to talk over some of the ideas about what did we want to happen over the three days of this gathering and from that an agenda was created that then got discussed among the program committee which was a national committee and we would go back and forth and we'd have the teleconferences we would get in there we would change the documents but we'll all make changes and we want to spend this opening part how do we want to do with the second day what was the thing we were going to do and those even transformed in the room a little bit when we finally met in Boston in November but it was it was a process that we kept meeting monthly and then every two weeks a little bit closer until we refined it refined it refined it refined it to create our agenda for for that that long weekend and that was creating a book the program that had to be published in advance and had everybody that was attending biography and photograph and the agenda and the sponsors and all of that was done through these tools of sharing the document okay now it's a PDF okay but now we go in and edit it and just this constant revision of people just engage in getting it and getting to it and writing and getting your notes in and talking about it and talking through it philosophically on the phone and then tangibly through text what's the language we're going to use and it really helped us be very clear about what we were trying to articulate what our goals were with this convening but then talking through philosophically in a way that only the voice can there are two things that I think I want to highlight in terms of these tools most of them are totally free I mean if you need above a certain bandwidth then you usually have to start paying some sort of monthly do but for instance we'll give a statement to the agenda all of the information we got from the participants we got through Google forms which are totally underutilized but they're amazing you can make things require questions so people have to give you that information when you ask for it and it's really like the you know the only way to sort of try to map us all of that information in one place and it's great I'm going to switch it over to Flala if we can reach it now we're just connecting to each other okay so of course we don't have Flala so I'm going to talk a little bit about outreach and you folks or do you want to talk about there Jamie? No I was just thinking perhaps we should we should probably move yeah we should talk about facilitation for the elders yes and then talk about yeah switch it over okay I'll yeah I would say the technology aspect what it also showed us was that not everyone has the same access to technology first of all and then also not the same experience or dexterity with technology regardless of age there was sort of an issue and so I was on the advisory committee at that point and part of my role was then to help facilitate just naturally some people who couldn't handle that or if I was in LA I can meet with someone and put their information in for them similarly you know I worked for an artistic director who was extremely busy as most artistic directors are and so it allowed some of us on your advisory committee to start to learn some of this time management to help facilitate those who wanted to participate and we sort of became I was a stand in essentially a lot of the times at a lot of these leaders could go back and see what we had done but I was able to be a voice for my organization so it was also a lot of training that I think is really related to like succession leadership looking like long term how these things can help how you learn to juggle multiple projects and so that really gave me a sense of agency and a lot of the people in the advisory committee did that so it was both sort of facilitating for those who were not sure how do you do yeah a great learning experience that's what I did jump in because there's a generational question right have still been for the others and also transparency for the others right we were talking about the transformation before we get to the universe we just made one small comment which is one of the things that I appreciated about this effort is that it upheld a cultural respect that we have for those that came before us for those carved the way into the conversation thanks to that facilitation great but on the converse of that the idea that what we were hearing in the intergenerational leaders of color what we hear in a lot of these meetings is this gap right it's the young people saying how do I get involved how do I be my mentor how how how and technology kind of became this level right like all of a sudden people like people like myself whatever were given a lot of agency and opportunity to really start working with some leaders that we may not have been able to at least I can speak for myself right that I may not have been able to do in another time without these tools without these group of people right and bringing us together of us just level the play right and I'd just like to say it also gave us a level of visibility right you see Abigail's name in an email after like three weeks they're like oh I know Abigail but you know and it gave a sense when we went into the in-person then it was putting a face to that name and it felt like you knew these people after communicating for so long you want to talk a bit about the satellite? sure so one of the things and I can speak I haven't spoken because up until I'm talking about timeline I've been not involved she got involved I got involved at the convenience right before initially I came on because because the LTC decided that they shouldn't be the only people in the room that we're symbolic delegates and that we need to involve other people on Saturday Saturday morning Saturday morning session and so we skyped in a satellite in New York in DC in Dallas in Miami in LA in Chicago and and this was symbolic right because we want to we didn't talk a lot of people in Boston didn't talk a lot during that session this was about opening the conversation up to people from all over the country and so they contacted particularly us in Chicago and they said hey we're going to be facilitating this and this was before I was invited to the to the committee time and so we facilitated it at Goodman it's a space a few different facilitators I think it's one of them that's where everybody met IZI I left his face on the screen it's true I'm just going to say that that's where everybody met IZI and the group would, was that, yeah? Yeah, so it provided, again, a level of it, right? A level of playing, a level of playing thing. And so that's what we did. And I thought that was such an excellent idea because it was symbolic, right? It was this idea that we are being as open and as transparent as possible, just one of the main, main, main tenants of the LTC. And that this is, that we are a national community and technology, I'm just gonna say it over and over again, because that's what teachers do, technology facilitates a national community. And I just wanted to say a quick question. Yeah, and then really quickly with that, it also honored the fact that there had been regional movements that were starting simultaneously to us, right? So it wasn't like the national group then created movements in the region. The regions had developed these movements already. So in LA, in Chicago, there had already been this mobilization, so it honored that fact too that we've all been working at the same time. And we've been able to reach out. And that was the questions that were held in that Skype session, I'm sorry. We're about, what are you doing in your community to support your local artists and in what way can, and how, and then we had questions across. So it wasn't even just with Boston. It was questions from Dallas to Miami, from Chicago to LA, about things that they were working on. It was rough. It was challenging. It wasn't perfect. Not everybody had the same setup, but we did get it done and that was amazing. That's what we were saying. We should let Isaac ask a question. So Isaac and then Maya. I'm just to interject a little bit from someone who was in the opposite of this satellite doing, what it provided for those of us who were in Chicago at the time was what an avenue, which I think, I feel like it's a consensus in several Latino theater communities is different, especially views of color of very specific things went on and took a lot of time to them. And there are not many opportunities for them to come together in one space to say, okay, now what can we do for this city? And so the LTC having the same was a great opportunity for Chicago to come in and even for those of us like myself would only be under two months to come and say like, I want to get a part too. And being a part of this was the was, if, no, it definitely was the reason why I was able to become more involved. So this idea of access that has been reflected in this conversation and technology, had it not happened, had Twitter not existed, then those opportunities wouldn't have existed. Maya, you had a question. I just want to clarify, so when you did the satellites in the five different cities, were you using? Skype, yeah. So it would be like this setup. But much better, but it actually worked. It was a couple different things. One was we livestreamed the whole convening. So that meant that anyone could watch from anywhere, period. We also had Twitter hashtag so anyone could contribute to the conversation whenever they wanted. But then we just designated this specific Saturday session as a satellite check-in, but also to encourage people in their local communities to come together, have a watch party, talk about what they'd already seen from the previous day or two, and then be able to contribute. So we used Skype, we used GroupSkype, we pre-teched all of the satellite sites. We didn't pre-tech today, you guys. So it wasn't like- We couldn't get it. Like this. And it was a check, yeah, it definitely was a challenge, but it worked. We really did see, we really did see, there was 100 of us in the room, we really did see five different screens with five different communities of anywhere from five to 100 people. It was incredible. We heard Dallas. We heard Dallas. And we both touched on the other side, felt so much support from everyone there because of, you know, the, because of all they were only able to invite so many people to the convening, there may have been enough, but this was a definite opportunity for people to be included. And that's commons, and that's everything that we believe in is inclusivity and transparency and access. Okay, so we're gonna move forward, keep moving forward. So now we're at the convening, and as Jamie and Lisa mentioned, we had these various things going on there. I'm just gonna repeat the idea that it was about the people. One of the basic tenets is that we, we need to meet in person. There's nothing that replaces, it's how and why we do theater because we're in the room. You can live stream in, Skype it, whatever. We have five minutes. No, we have longer. No, no, no. We have to afford it. We're okay. We've got half an hour. So we have 15. Okay, we're almost done. Anyhow, the point is that some of the activities and things that happened in that room were on paper, were the creation of a timeline. If you could go back a couple of slides. There's a image on our, right there. Nope, no, no, phone for there. That, those, that colorful little thing, that was a series of walls, I guess, that people had put on little sticky papers, events of note in their personal histories as artists or in the history of Latino theater. And it was a timeline that stretched from one wall, I mean, across like, Like that. This wall, right? It was, it was really long and it was done in person and it was on paper. And people brought elements. There was an altar. We met right around the end of the month because we had an altar that represented what we were bringing to the table. Things that had to happen in the room. And it's, and so it doesn't replace that aspect. But we tried to extend that as much as possible through these other tools out, to share that out as much as possible. That's, I think that's, the only other thing I want to say is at the end of that gathering, we were given La Perilla cards. And at the back of the La Perilla cards, we were asked to please write our, our commitment. Our interest in what we wanted, we had talked about a lot of different things that we wanted to do. A lot of visions that we had for ourselves and for the field, for each other. And what we were interested in, what we would commit to doing. And these were then put on the altar and what was taken off the altar was what we had put on the altar and given to somebody else. So we were giving the gift that we put on the altar to give to somebody else as a gesture, but we left behind in the basket our commitment to this community and this effort to this community. That's all in person. Which then became digitized. Which became digitized. Yeah. So that's what we go to, right? And I just want to, I just want to note the pattern. The pattern is people together, tech, tech, tech, tech, people together, right here, we're all together. Do you know what I mean? But it's like those, and I think it's so important because I've always been like technology, it will replace my flesh. And in fact, we got all oogie boogie in there. Do you know what I mean? We did yoga together, we put stuff on a wall, we had an altar. Then we go back to super tech. So at this point, the community happens, it's fantastic. And it succeeds in doing what we wanted it to do. Which is provide a locus, let lots of people in, provide access and get something going. We all feel very energized. So then it's how do you, again, take it forward. And more riemiento, how do we take it forward? So we formed two committees on the final day. One was a restructuring committee because the final day of the committee, the steering committee of 50 dissolved. Yeah, at that point we dissolved the steering committee. This is a democratic process we dissolved. And also we realized that this is going to leave us and we need the hiring producer who happens to be here. So we create the hiring committee. And then we all leave, because we do this in about two hours and then we all leave. So how do we do the rest of this? So we go back to our tools. And at this point, Basecamp comes in the kind of strong use again, conference calling, Google docs, the hiring committee. And this is where we get to kind of what is online and what is offline. The hiring committee actually, because of the nature of the information and sensitivity, was an offline. It was not going on on Basecamp. Yeah, that was mainly by phone calls and private phone calls. It was not being uploaded because there's candidates and there's information and there's a kind of a search process, right? Whereas the restructuring committee is all actually on Basecamp. And we literally took to restructuring committee is to find the new steering committee, the steering committee 2.0. We're literally on the phone, on the conference call, I think once a week. Trying to figure out what the what form the Latino theater commons is gonna take. Who's gonna be involved? How do we decide we're a commons? How do we go about deciding who's gonna be involved? What is the process by which steering committee will come together, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we're meeting my conference calling, we're sharing documents, we're testing ideas, we're all kinds of things. And then we come up with the steering committee, which was launched in, steering committee 2.0 was launched, soft launched. January, January. In January. And then the hire happened. In April. So from October to January, weekly meetings. I'm telling you on conference calls. We took breaks during Christmas. We did. But we managed to restructure the committee and then we managed to hire a new producer. And that is where we are currently. And I think it's important to say just quickly about the new committee is that there was a lot of thought put into the idea of dissolving 1.0 because when we first got the grant money, no one thought beyond doing the convening. I mean, you know, I mean realistically, no one was going there. And so there had to be a conscious choice after the convening of, do we want this work to continue? How do we want it to continue? And what is the process by which we restructure so that it's, you know, reflective of our whole approach? Yes, and I forgot two things, go ahead. So 2.0 basically had a very, it currently has a very conscious split. Some people who were on the first steering committee and wanted to continue the work. Some people who expressed specific interest at the convening on the last day, working on a national level. On their lotteria cards, exactly. And then another subsect of people who had not been involved at the convening, had not, you know, been previously involved with the LTC at all, but, you know, had somehow sort of come into the world. So it was a very conscious, you know, reconstituting and the widening of the circle, right? Because the second it becomes exclusive is the second we stop being a commons, right? And so it has to have that intentionality going into the basic design for it to be successful. And also I should mention, Jcommittee 2.0 is a working committee. So we made a decision early on that the committee would be made of the people who were actually on other committees. So it was the lotteria cards became actually crucial to the process. Because if somebody said, I want to help with the LTC, I want to help with the Maria Irene Furnes thing. I want to help with, I want to help with the Encuentro. I want to help with the Café on the editorial board, right? Those are the, that we would put their names, you know, in various places. And those folks are the folks that became the steering committee. We made an early decision. The steering committee would not, would be a working committee. And it's made up of basically everybody who's doing the work on the current initiatives of the LTC. I mean, we should turn it over to Chantel to talk about one of the biggest efforts that is now arising, which is the Encuentro in the selection committee. Right. So I just also want to say what they're talking about also prevents burnout to a degree. That's been something that's come up in this conference and it is a major concern for everyone at every stage of their career. So that's been really helpful knowing that when you're on a committee, it has an endpoint if you need it to. So the biggest thing we came out of the convening with was that we wanted to create a national festival of Latino theater work. Parking back to the then stays. We need to have a place where we can all meet together and see each other's work. And this grew out of the desire that Latino theater while marginalized from mainstream theater is actually extremely vibrant. And we have major productions that go up in cities all over the country, but they're only seen in those cities and they don't necessarily tour. Yet we have many theaters that have a home base that have a space that could welcome other Latino theater. So we said, what's the problem? We're not seeing each other's work. We don't know each other's work. If we did, we could talk about aesthetics as a group in a certain way and then we could build relationships and create a touring network that could give these works longevity and give them entry into the repertory of the American theater. So that was really the artistic impetus. So at the convening, people suggested, on their Lothidia cards, they wanted to be involved. So we called those names together. Then we did an ask and some people then said no thanks or yes and then we created our selection committee which has 10 people on it. And it's a variety. We wanted to make sure we had people from sort of the four directions, people all over the country in different capacities. So they became a selection committee. We met primarily through Basecamp as well. We used Google Docs to have sort of a scoring sheet. The first thing we did was created the guidelines for the application for the Inquant Throw. We wanted the Inquant Throw not to be sort of a where we're gonna hand pick people. We want people to apply so that we can consider their work. We had about 73 applications for what then has now become 14 slots. And so we had this committee of 10 who read all those applications individually. They submitted their thoughts into a scoring sheet and then we had an in-person live meeting in Los Angeles in April where everyone came together. So again, we can all talk about things online but there's a difference in talking in person and really advocating for certain plays or talking about I've seen that work and it felt it moved me in. So we could not replace the human experience from that. But the work was so intense and so much work that then it continued offline after the meeting. So the selection committee, we called it down to a certain number of finalists then we reached out to the finalists, we asked them to submit more work samples or photos, things like that. And then we finally chose our final grouping. Some people were not able to come due to finances. There's been a lot of different elements that come into this and I think it really opened up the technological aspect opened up for across the country these selection committee members to understand sort of the nature of this festival and to still have a voice even from afar. And the other reason why we had to meet in person was so that they could see the space that we were talking about holding the festival in and know that play will fit into that realm, that proscenium theater is good for this play, that amphitheater should be here. So that's sort of what we did. And then that committee has since dissolved because we've made the selections, they're on postcard that you have on your seats. And so that committee is dissolved but several of them then moved to what we now have which is called the tertulia committee and tertulia is sort of a Spanish word for these like social literary events. And we have a committee that's planning additional programming around this month long festival and host committee. So it's a committee world out there but that's how we did it. And similarly to the hiring committee there was levels of sensitivity in which we had to take some stuff off of the public base camp when we're talking about each other's work we have to be very sensitive about that especially in a committee. And this happens on grant panels and things like that there is a level of sensitivity and privacy that we have to respect. So while we're being very transparent we also needed to protect certain people's safe space to talk openly about the work. So again, we were balancing online, offline, in person, digital. And that's how we made those selections. Well advocate I'll talk about the current focus. So one thing we did we had mentioned was that at the convening four things kind of came out as the tenets of the Latino Theater Commons. Art making, convening and networking, scholarship and advocacy. Those were the four things that we are always promoting in body. And so everything that we kind of take on as a larger steering committee or as a smaller committee has to follow those, right? We have to be always supporting this stuff. So a couple of things that we're working on one is the Encuentro which is happening at LATC in the fall. And the important thing to also kind of articulate is that we, because we're still kind of figuring out what we are, like we're always having this identity conversations as an organization. We have to define like what is our role? Like what is the LATC's role in the Encuentro? This is LATC's project, right? This is their idea. What is our role? It's supporting it. It's the Tapulia events. It's providing help with the selection committee. It's things like that. We're also doing a hard launch of Gapri Onlus. We've been kind of generating materials for the past year or so, but it's a hard launch that's happening in October. We've hired a managing editor. That was a very recent thing that just happened. We have an exploratory, so our next kind of project is that we have an exploratory meeting in New York City in August, which Jacob, everyone came to the committee and said, hey, I have this idea. I have this idea for this thing I want to call the Soul Project. This is my idea. I don't know what it is, but this is my idea. And so as an organization, we were saying, okay, well, we're not gonna produce these plays right now, but what we are gonna do is commit to your idea in as far as organizing and meeting and organizing a group of artists in New York City who are familiar with what they know theater in New York City, because I can't talk to that. Like, I don't live in New York City, right? But we can get those people together. We can invite them, we can get the space, we can get the food, we can get the coffee, and we can put them in the room together so they can talk and we can figure out what the next step of this thing. So that's happening in August. And then the Carnival of New Work, which is happening at DePaul next July, date pendant coming out soon. And this is a project that we're hoping, depending on, you know, how it was, that it becomes an annual effect. A bi-annual, excuse me, bi-annual. Oh, what's a bi-annual? A bi-annual. I'm really surprised. And that's, again, because of the nature of, I think the beautiful part about this organization is that it's like growing the flower, is that we're, we still have a little bit of freedom and that we can make our own rules. We can kind of figure out, as we get bigger and as we are responding to the needs of our artists, because that's ultimately what we are, right? We're only as good as the artists who are working forward with it and supporting their vision and supporting them in any way we can. So that's kind of the layout. I mean, but things are constantly changing. And right now we're developing, I mean, we're already in the process of figuring out 3.0. And what are the kind of practices of how we're gonna formulate that? Because again, for many burnout, there's gonna be people who, this particular 2.0 was really intense and that's they need to take a break and that's okay, but we don't need to, that's fine. Finding the new people, like one of the beautiful things about doing the quarterly update is that I'm getting responses for people who were forwarded the email from so-and-so, from so-and-so, from so-and-so, and they responded and said, how do I get involved? How do I, you know, I live in XYZ city that doesn't have Latino theater. How do I get involved? This is the perfect way to do it. Again, leveling the playing field, right? Making it as accessible as possible. Thank you. All right, just, please. I can clarify, right? So, I know this is probably a big question that I'm sure you've discussed at some level, but once that kind of all is over, then what? Well, that's the thing, right? Is that like, so the Soul Project, I'm going to Jacob submit, like he, that's somebody, Melinda. But we actually have a couple of people. It's the, what are they saying? Think Tank. We actually have on the staring committee Think Tank members whose job it is to think of the next initiative. Oh, right. So we're ongoing. Each committee is leapfrogging forward. I think you got to get to closings, right? Yes, exactly. So, and actually that's a perfect way to get into it. Because I think one of the key things to note about the way that the LTC functions, what I think is both what makes it so unique and also, you know, what is a challenge to the sort of hyper-scheduled over-programmed world that we live in is that it's really about what does the community want to do? And what is their energy for? And who wants to be a champion of X or Y project, you know? And so we very purposefully, I mean, we've been saying LTC is an organization. It's not an organization. It's a community of volunteers who all have full-time jobs who are working in the theater, who are, some of them are doing multiple jobs who are actually coming together out of passion to do this work, right? It's not, Abigail is the only staff member, right? I mean, it's not, and this is sort of, I think what we've been trying to say is also the power of the organizing principles behind the comments, right? It's the effect of use of energy. And so for me, working for HowlRound, including, I just want to say that the LTC has been just an incredibly fulfilling experience for me to be able to work on as someone who's been trying to get these sort of ideas into practice and into the larger national community over the past couple of years. And I think it's been the most concrete manifestation so far of putting a commons-based approach, which is behind everything that HowlRound does, into practice. And it's been the true sort of operative, operational, operational, operational, manifestation force of these ideas that anyone, who's not going to get behind access, right? But it's actually, you want to see how you can do it, here's a model. And it's our hope that the LTC will, in future years, I hope be a prototype for community organizing in the arts, I mean, anywhere, for any community who wants to come together who has an energy and a passion to make change in whatever way they see things. So, you know. So, if the affinity group could take this on. We were hoping we'd get other affinity groups here. It's the point of this, of us sharing it from technology to this panel is about how can this stuff that we've gone through the last years and even this experiment to try to connect Skype, how can this be used by others? It's just, and I think there is a movement, the Asian American Theater and Asians of the Island, they have started a movement, they're trying to do their first convening. They're similar models that are burgeoning. And also the National Black Theater. Yeah, there's. What's really important is that I think in addition to many things is that this technology and what the LTC comments has discovered is, and that's why I give this impatient, is you don't need an institution, right? You don't need an institution. We don't need a building. We don't need, and we have many institutions amongst us. We have many resources amongst us. We don't need one institution to give us permission to give us space or give us money to do anything. We don't need a building. We don't need an artistic director. We don't need, you know, we do need a producer. But we don't, you know, this allows us maximum flexibility to pool our resources and make whatever we want to happen happen. So whenever, when people are kind of like, oh my God, I've got burnout or better, I would say listen, everybody in Obama's, the bus is at the station, we're all going. You know what I mean? You can just go. If you can pool your resources and use the tools that allow you to connect to one another, you can just make stuff happen, which is what we're doing and what we hope many, many other affinity groups will take on. And then we can all hopefully do together. Have lots of babies. I just say, you know, kind of piggyback on everything and the idea too of like, yes, there's a producer, but it was always very clear when I was here that this is a two-year thing and then somebody else does it because there needs to be new blood. That's the, that's how this will continue to grow, right, is that there's always constantly new people coming in and providing their two cents. So, I mean, that's, I think one of the most beautiful parts of this is that it's not going to be personal. I like doing it because it's ultimately all about the comments. So, and I would like to close out. Thank you so much, everybody on the panel. Just going to wrap it up. And we have space for comments, I'm sure. I want to thank Leluk. I'm going to wave at him because he texted and said, I'm watching on TV. No. Even though we couldn't make the Skype work completely, he was able to participate and be with us through HowlRound TV. I want to thank HowlRound, Jamie, everything that they've done, everything that we've all done to make this thing happen and move forward because many of us here in this room have been part of making this thing happen from the beginning. And I hope you'll take this information and share it in some way or use it. Come back to us if you need more information from us. Contact Abigail. Or find us through, you know, or find any of us. I'm sure we're happy to share whatever we, whatever tools we have in our disposal with you and your efforts. We're more than happy about that. And I think ultimately it is about people talking to each other and raising our profile. So with that, any final questions or comments before I say much of gracias? Can I just say that I feel like maybe one of the things I learned today was that even with all technology and what I feel like is happening is that you do need vision. Yeah. And I, like, I love what you said, Jamie. I think it needs to, the vision can come from the community. So maybe it's not an artistic director, but you do need vision. And I think what we've witnessed today in a way is that vision comes from a lot of different places. And that they're still an aesthetic. They're still a form. There's still art to be made. There's still elevation of the art. But that doesn't necessarily have to come like this. And when it comes like this. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. There's really just cheese against it. Because he just reminded me, I wrote this down, in the radical outreach conversation that I was at just before this, something that was spread through the room was that communities themselves can be the best protagonists to their concerns. Yeah. And that's true. That's exactly what this is. It's a way to get those, that shared vision articulated, honed in, like writing a mission statement together, everybody does that. But you do it together so we have all the final. And even this, this document that I've been passing around, this one sheet. This was a bunch of us wrote it. Yeah. You know what I mean? A bunch of us wrote this. And I just basically ended it all together. But it was all through base camp. Some of this is Juliette. Some of this is Kinan. Some of this is Olga. Some of this is me. Some of this is Karen. But that's what you're saying is this is, we are our own artistic director. We are our artistic director. And it is, and I'll say it, but now, go back and say it, the movement that Chantal started talking about, which then hiccups for a while and dissipated, got picked up again because we could network again through tools that developed about five years ago, actually. So it's incredible. Just think what we can do in 10. That's right. Woo-hoo! OK. Laluk, thank you so much. Thank you for coming. Oh, thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I think they want one of these. You have one? I have one. It's a same one. A same one. Anybody?