 and we will be recording this panel in one second. Okay, we are good to go. Hello everyone, welcome dear speakers of IDL and welcome everyone else who's watching us. This is LMDA's conference 2021, day two of two of the synchronous virtual content. My name is Brenda Muñoz and I am happy to welcome you to the IDL session. This is titled international dramaturgy lab, connecting dramaturgy across borders. And this panel will be presented in English mostly, but I remember that we do have oral simultaneous interpretation if you need to do that. You can download the app on your phones or gadgets or also connect to your desktop now. Good morning to all of you, watching us from some Spanish-speaking country. My name is Brenda Muñoz, I am the coordinator of this conference, LMDA 2021, today is the second day of virtual content. And this panel is international dramaturgy lab, connecting dramaturgy across borders. It will be presented in English, but we have oral simultaneous interpretation for all of you who need it. You can download a web switcher pro and the access token is in the chat box. If you have questions, you can send them through the chat or through our social networks. And Hannah, I leave this panel to you, welcome. Thank you, thank you. And lovely to be here at the conference. We have been aiming for this day for a year, just lovely. I actually just want to start with a quote from one of the ideal participants who shared a poem. Linda Rosario's poem, poem where she writes, did we cross the border or did the border cross us? Which I think is a brilliant way into this panel. So my name is Hannah Slettne, I am Swedish, I work in English, I live in Northern Ireland as part of the UK, but on the island of Ireland. I am a dramaturge and I have dramaturged and facilitated artist processes for over 25 years. Nearly for as long as that, I have dreamed of a project like the one we're talking about today. Connecting dramaturges across borders, specialism experiences, theater traditions, languages and cultures. The international dramaturge lab was born out of the collision between that deep rooted dream and the pandemic, the cancellation of last year's conference which opened up a new space. So in this session, the steering group of the ideal will share with you how we fill that space. The process of creating and facilitating the ideal, balancing between structure and leaving things open. And of course, what happened in that space? What do dramaturges get up to when you give them that space to connect, reflect, make and think? Before we go into what happened across the project, I want to pose a question to you all because the ideal is all of ours, whether you participated this time or not. So the question is really, what would you want from an international professional development project? What are your needs as a dramaturg? Are you, as you listen to the presentation, I would love you to consider that so we can have a discussion about the future of projects like these. So to the international dramaturge lab, I hope you managed to catch some of the short videos on the ideal platform that introduces the partner organizations. I represent the dramaturges network in the UK, but we also have LMDA Mexico, US and Canada, the FENS, which is an international organization, the Danish dramaturges network, and stood the Finnish directors and dramaturges union. So that's the organization partner organizations. The steering group is made up of about two people from each organization with some overlap. And we have become a little mini ideal project in our own right in figuring out how to do this along the way. And the main thing I'm going to say to introduce my colleagues, I will introduce them shortly, but I just want to say that these guys in the steering group are the most reliable, competent, inspiring, brilliant bunch of dramaturgs. They're the best people that you want to have on your team when you do something like this. So in this project, we started with an open question. What does it mean to work dramaturgically across borders? I think it was Jonathan Meth from the FENS who formulated the question very early on. And we're going to talk about how we managed to get 90 odd people involved and how we divvied them up into 14 groups. That's what we started off with. And all of these groups, including the steering group, quickly had to contend with the challenges of multiple time zones, the centrifugal pull of English as a language and therefore also cultural context and many, many other things. But I will hand over to my fabulous colleagues on the steering group who all will focus on a particular aspect of the project and what we have learned from it. So I will first pass on to Laurel Green, who here is representing LMDA Canada. Thanks, Hanna, and thank you for your kind words. My name's Laurel Green. I use she, her pronouns, and I'm speaking to you this morning from the unceded Coast Salish territory of the Lekwungen speaking nations, now known as the Songhees and Esquimo Nations in Victoria, British Columbia. I want to take a moment to acknowledge that the digital tools we're using today aren't available in many rural or indigenous communities and that technology has a continuous impact on our land and waterways. I want to be mindful and make shared use of our time together. Thanks so much for having me. I'm a white woman in my 30s with shoulder length brown hair, bangs, and turquoise glasses. I'm speaking to you from my computer desk with a bookshelf behind me. I'm wearing a black shirt. I will try to speak slowly and clearly, and I want to give a big thanks to our conference interpreters and all of the volunteers. I'll be sharing my perspective with you today as a member of the IDL Steering Committee, a member of LMDA Canada, and an artist dramaturg who is part of one of the IDL groups. I'm going to be focusing on the digital tools that were used for collaboration and creation throughout the project. I really want to take a moment to uplift all of the incredible work of my colleagues both here on the steering committee, as well as all of the artists that made up the 90-odd IDL participants, the 14 groups Hannah spoke about, a two-day context showing of projects that happened in February, and now 11 digital artifacts which have been shared on the LMDA conference portal. So much deep, generous, innovative collaboration, so much growth in our digital literacy as dramaturgs across the sector, across time zones from week to week, month to month, as theaters closed, as shows were canceled, as the world stopped over a year, we met each other at IDL, hopping from digital platform to digital platform. Busting any assumption, the dramaturgs are only analog creatures and dismantling preconceived notions about our role as creative drivers, innovators and primary authors of our own stories. Our dramaturgical lines of inquiry connected us and took on new forms. So we're here today with a rich and rigorous library of resources, transmedial prototypes of emergent thinking that reflect the values, curiosities, practices and unique obsessions of each IDL group. This is an archive of time spent together in community, ideating and creating, interrogating and evolving the future of our craft because as dramaturgs, our process is our product. IDL's invitation was to join a working group with no fixed agenda. The steering committee asked applicants to fill out a brief online form and indicate a few keywords to describe their interests. So I remember looking at the air table spreadsheet filled with this vocabulary of practice at an early steering committee meeting. We sat together in a Zoom, which was determined by a doodle poll and we made a list of all this nomenclature in a Google doc. We translated the words across all of the working languages of the committee. On a whim, I fed this very long list into an online word cloud generator and we watched what emerged. So these keywords became the next round of invitation to identify what fields of interest participants felt drawn to and groups were made with catchy titles like movement plus somatics plus sports, social justice plus politics plus disability plus gender, sound plus hybrid plus immersive. It was a way to kickstart a conversation. The IDL committee sat carefully with our spreadsheets. We tried to ensure that each group had a cross-section of memberships, identities, experiences and intersections of practice. Once assembled, these groups were connected and began their own independent collaborations. I've already named several digital collaborative tools used by the steering committee to assemble the IDL groups and while the novelty of a doodle poll is long gone, I still rely on it to negotiate across time zones. There's a certain artfulness, I think that can be appreciated about these administrative platforms and the bespoke dramaturgical algorithms that emerged during this curatorial process. In February, the IDL convened a sharing event called Context, a show and tell amongst the working groups. Over two days hosted on Zoom, it was the first time we shared space and got to peek into what others were busy with. Projects took a variety of collaborative forms from a jam board of seven things we would take to a desert island, a mural board mapping dramaturgical cosmologies, a podcast series on dramaturgy, meaning making and storytelling with simultaneous translation, video collages, a laboratory of digital and transmedia workshop sessions, writing exercises, essay paragraphs, comparative play analyses, case studies, working models, drawings, sensory explorations, audio experiments, script fragments, explorations in AR and VR, and this is to name only a few. Projects developed with email, Zoom, Google Docs, Google Translate, WhatsApp messages, phone calls, groups worked synchronously and asynchronously, met when they could, paused when they needed to, and proceeded with care, moving at the speed of trust. These presentations were recorded and they now provide us with an archive of that moment in time mid collaboration, complete with saved Zoom chats and PowerPoint slide decks. This is a Google Drive living library of our emerging practices, which has really become the artist papers of our time. I'm curious to know how future dramaturgs will make meaning of these when digging them up out of an old laptop hard drive one day, and what will we make of them as a community when we look back one year from now? Catching a glimpse of the other projects, galvanize the final stretch of the collaborations, which have culminated in the 11 digital artifacts available on the LMDA conference portal, plus one video that reflects and introduces all of the partner organizations. Here, the digital tools used to bring the groups together became the delivery mechanism for sharing their outputs of process, creation, discovery, and hold many, many questions. So I want to give you a small teaser of each digital artifact, something that jumped out to me while visiting the mall, and something that might entice or invite you to have a look if you haven't already. And to make this very meta, I'm gonna try sharing my screen with some screenshots from my engagement with each of the pieces. So stand by for it, there we go, starting screen share. So I'll begin with the mystery of Rachel Sinclair, a zoom play with multilingual episodic structure that uses a range of theater tools, including scenographic virtual backgrounds, including these excellent watermelons, singing and archival images to travel from country to country through the drama. The cocktail hour ninjas used their digital tools to create nonverbal interpretations of Ibsen's play, The Lady of the Sea from three continents, including silent film directions, football playback, playbooks, tango dance steps, and an emoji Twitter thread for each scene of action that was inspired by teen culture in Brazil. Disability access and dramaturgy collage their Zoom sessions to share provocations to offer multi-audience, multi-channel access, challenging existing power structures and Anglo-centric disability models, confronting class and linguistic barriers. I'm especially interested in their discussion of sensory engagement through VR touch boxes and how the aesthetics of access can make work better for everyone and not assume a conversation with able-bodied audiences in digital space. Yes, I wear glasses too, seen on this card here, created a highly visual music video with their shared lens. They ask how is gender related to culture and race? They share mood boards of inspiration, femme makeup videos, personal expressions, and playful dance parties. Lost in Translation has launched a podcast series called Dramaturgs through the Looking Glass to explore a dramaturgy, meaning making, and storytelling outside theater. There will be between three to six episodes, each led by a pair from the group, so we'll stay tuned. An untitled group of collaborators shared their slide deck of expressions, poems they had written, excerpts from unwritten plays, dramaturgies of dance and friendship, and post-it notes filled with amazing unanswerable questions. Serendipity Strategies approached the oblique strategies through shared discussions and discoveries. And this group really asked the question of the past year, how much unknown are we willing to accept in a process? Time Zone for Seven shared their groundworks for taxonomy of digital theater, laboratory of digital workshops, exploring how virtuality replaces the physical as the space where the theatrical event is generated. Among other topics, they highlighted the poetics of Zoom and its public and private theatrical opportunities. Constellations, the group I was in, wove together our mapped dramaturgical cosmologies into a video, audio, and tour through our intricate gather space, a 2D video game style map where as an avatar, you can literally run around inside our process, interact with references and journey between our locations to explore our new terrain. Translation between language and cultures provided an essay with insight into how the group members navigated their approaches to translation. Their Zoom meetings have now evolved into a practical experiment that will be tested post-IDL. The Dramaturgy of Fragility Group expressed their investigation in an arena content board as a resource to explore fragility whilst it was happening, to see what patterns emerge, asking, how are we going to heal and rebuild the sector? How can we serve and support a new generation of theater makers at risk of being lost? A provocation that resonated with me from this group was how technology can be used to bypass gatekeepers and empower ourselves to create. So I'm struck by how form and content are woven together in these outputs, now available on the LMDA conference portal with English and Spanish subtitles. I'm struck by the interplay of media modalities and the deep work of digital placemaking that has taken place in these IDL groups using digital tools as social technologies to connect, communicate, and create. Dramaturgs as cinematographers, editors, designers, directors, content creators, interdisciplinary builders, connectors, thinkers. These digital platforms have become our meeting spaces, our studios, our work rooms, our space to imagine, our moments of stillness, our place to experiment, disrupt, challenge, and play. IDL gave dramaturgs the chance to lead art making and put our curiosities and visions for the future at the fore. As theaters restart, as we reenter our dramaturgical rooms as we pick up these roles again, I hope we will continue this liberated, process led, generous, adventurous approach to collaboration, to be brave, try something new, to share our work and ourselves with each other. These are some new models for Dramaturgy. I'll now pass it back to Hannah and on to my other colleagues, and I look forward to further conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much, Laurel. Tour of the whole sort of output, it's wonderful. Now that output did not happen just by itself, I wanted to go back and to just look at how we, the steering group, navigated this sort of unknown route for ourselves. And Christopher, this project was pretty labor intensive and it required a good team and we worked in relay and I would love to just hand over to you to reflect on the process that started the project. Yes. Hola, my name is Christopher Spender and I am a Danish dramaturg working at an institution theater in Norway. I am a board member of organizations in Denmark and Norway fighting for the dramaturgs. I came into this process by a coincidence because the dramaturgs network, my English sister organization, had talks about an international project and I volunteered to participate because connecting people cross borders both theoretically and practically is a huge interest of mine. I have been a part of the process primarily in the beginning, but due to severe illness in close family I have been out for a while. But now I'm back. So if this speech is not right on the spot this is the reason why. I will speak into a group that needed to focus on how the formal participation and application process would be beneficial to first the participants around the world but also to make it easier for the steering group to pair the applications. It was important for the group to be as inclusive as we could be and also to outline a world of possibilities. No problem is too big, no solution is too small. The application process that you, the participants, went through in order to participate in this project and why you are here today were fought out by my group. We came up with a system where you made five keywords for you to concentrate your focus but also beneficial for us in pairing the groups. So if, for example, two people wrote the same keyword it would be possible to make a match. Some of the rules served as guidelines of how to pair the groups and it was important to spread out the participants in different areas of the world. In order to understand that the way I define and understand the methodology around dramaturgy are different everywhere and also should be. It is important to talk and to take time, the time that you need. Therefore, it was also important to follow up on different groups through the process. As I can see and hear today, some fell apart and some new people came in. And for me, the process in that way has been dynamic, flexible, learningful and meaningful in huge connection to how the surrounding world are looking today. Thank you very much, Christopher. Christopher was also part of the team that envisaged how we were going to connect people in February for the first time, the event that Laurel spoke about that we were getting people together. And it was great to have such a large steering group because we could break out in smaller groups and focus on different things, which was actually a big learning point along the way. So, the next thing I want to then focus on because a part of this, already we have had many languages that we've talked about and I think this was one of the biggest challenges. How do we collaborate on an equal footing across languages? And I'm going to pause on to our colleagues, Martha from LMDA Mexico and Sarah from the Dramatex Network and also representing the fans here today because I know you've looked specifically at the language aspect of this project. Gracias, Hannah. Hola, yo soy Martela Lazo. Soy la orgullosisima representante de LMDA México en el comité directivo del laboratorio internacional de dramaturgismo. El día de hoy les hablo desde la Ciudad de México, México, Tenochtitlán, tierra de los pueblos originarios, michtacos, zapotecos, trichis, ñaños, mas aguas y nahuas. Soy mujer en mis 30, de Tesclara, pelo castaño con unos mechones blancos recogido en un chongo, ojos verdes, una blusa rosa pastel, aretes dorados, largos y detrás de mí hay una pared gris clara. El día de hoy, Sara SIGAR y yo les vamos a hablar un poco sobre cómo operó la traducción, las lenguas, los lenguajes en procesos de el LID. Voy a compartir una presentación para apoyar lo que vamos a compartir con ustedes hoy. Y es una presentación que no tiene más visuales que el mismo texto, las mismas palabras que estamos nosotros compartiendo en el audio que hablamos. Entonces, traducción, lenguas y lenguajes en el laboratorio internacional de dramaturgismo, 2020-2021. Como ya explicaron un poco, nuestras y nuestros colegas, el comité directivo decidió tener comunicación bilingüe, en español y en inglés, con todos nuestros miembros de el laboratorio internacional. Y esto surge de dos cosas. Primero, en esa solicitud preguntamos en qué idiomas trabajan, no es los dos solicitantes y las solicitantes, y hubo quienes mencionaban que únicamente hablaban en español o trabajaban en español o español y otras lenguas, pero no inglés. Entonces se volvió indispensable que toda nuestra comunicación oficial fuera en ambos idiomas. Y la segunda fue para generar una invitación a los grupos siempre, no solo al inicio del proyecto, pero cada vez que tenían que interactuar con el comité directivo, en poner atención a la diversidad de idiomas, en sus procesos y en sus contenidos, y que nuestros integrantes y nuestros integrantes de México y de otros lugares sintieran esa comodidad de decir, yo puedo trabajar o partir de la base de mi lengua materna. Algunos de los contenidos que compartieron los grupos que están disponibles en la parte asincrónica de la conferencia y altísimamente recomendables, estos son algunos de los temas que surgieron en relación en estos contenidos a traducción y lenguas. Lo primero, evidentemente, la comunicación no verbal, que esto se vincula mucho con cuerpos en movimiento y lenguaje corporal, que algunos grupos trataron esto muy dirigidamente con todos los retos que la comunicación digital tiene al respecto, muy interesante. También surgió el tema de la descripción de audio que se ejemplifica cuando una describe quién es, cómo se ve, todo lo que quienes no tienen acceso a la parte visual necesitarían saber para poder entender de la mejor manera lo que se está compartiendo. La importancia, el valor de los silencios fue algo recurrente también. Y en contraparte, el exceso de lenguajes, el exceso de lenguas, el exceso de información que también hizo que los grupos tuviesen que discernir, más claramente, qué se necesita, qué tanta información se necesita y en qué momentos. El tema de la incomodidad que siempre los múltiples lenguajes traen y eso es muy interesante. El tema de la lengua franca, en este caso inglés, en la mayor parte de los casos, y hubo grupos en donde nadie hablaba inglés como su lengua materna, pero era la única manera de comunicarse y esos grupos hicieron un uso muy interesante del inglés como lengua franca y al mismo tiempo la dominancia o predominancia del lenguaje en otros grupos y cómo se transitó esto. Aquí les comparto tres ejemplos que me parecieron fascinantes del uso del lenguaje y de la traducción en tres de los grupos. Como ya nos platicó Laurel, el grupo del misterio de Rachel Sinclair es una representación en Zoom, una obra en Zoom, y que trata del tema de la desaparición de esta mujer y el tema de la desaparición de cuerpos en distintos contextos, violencia, género, etc. Pero en un momento se alterna entre muchas lenguas, algunas que yo entiendo, otras que yo no entiendo, y de pronto me cayó el 20 y dije, claro, al alternar entre muchas lenguas, el sentido mismo aparece y desaparece dependiendo de cuántas de ellas entiendes. Y eso fue una dinámica que creo que capturó de una manera magnífica la historia que se estaba contando. También ya sé, una disculpa, ya se mencionó a los cocktail hour ninjas que repensaron a Ibsen en el lenguaje de adolescentes brasileños traduyéndolo a emojis, que también fue un ejercicio fascinante, me parece, porque no nada más te da una noción de todo el espectro afectivo, y sino que todas estas nuevas formas de comunicación que nos obligan a replantear cómo se cuenta una historia a partir de ese espectro afectivo. Y por último, el grupo de traducción, hay estas dos prácticas, la traducción y el dramaturgismo, a veces se colapsan entre sí, se confunden, se usan, una se asume dentro de la otra, y creo que nos hace falta como dramaturgistas o como traductoras y traductores, a veces, de tenernos y decir, a ver, cómo es que estas dos prácticas se alimentan entre sí, cómo se asemejan y también cómo se distinguen. Y creo que el ejercicio que nos ofreció el grupo de traducción en este sentido es muy, muy valioso. Entonces, bueno, estas son algunas de las cosídes, nada más la punta del iceberg de lo que nos ofrecen y nos ofrecen los resultados de este trabajo en términos de traducción y lenguaje, pero, Sarah, if you want to take it from here, let me know when you need me to change moves from the different slides. Okay, thank you so much, Martha. My name is Sarah Siegel. I am speaking to you from London. I am a dramaturgs network board member in addition to being on the IDL organization committee, I'm also a member of the fence. I am a white woman in my late 30s with medium brown hair, wearing lipstick, which is sort of a reddish orange color for the first time since the pandemic. I'm wearing a crumpled gray dress because I've just gotten off an airplane a few days ago and have not yet unpacked. So excuse my appearance. So I'm going to weave in some of what Martha has just been talking about so beautifully about translation and how it's worked in this project. And she spoke about the macro and I'm going to speak about the micro. So I'll speak about language, translation and collaboration within a working group. I was in the Lost in Translation podcast group and I worked with people who were based in the US, Canada, one person who was partly in Canada and partly in Columbia, Mexico, Scotland and then in Germany. I was in the US and then the UK and we, so I worked with Lewis Fender, Bruno, Zemudio, Liam Rees, Daniela and Tensia and Cassidy Kep and we worked across English and Spanish and here are some strategies that we employed. So our first decision was that all of our emails would be in English and Spanish and that really set the tone for the rest of the project. And for those of us who weren't as fluent or knew the other language at all, we made good use of Google Translates and sometimes that led to hilarious mistakes, but it was fine. We submitted all our work to the committee that we needed to send in in English and Spanish. We conducted all of our Zoom meetings across both languages. The dominant language was English and because it was a language that everyone spoke to some degree but we did make use of both. And then we ended up making a podcast called Lost in Translation and we made that in both English and Spanish and I'll talk about that next. So next slide please. So making the podcast, because we did so much discussion of our different dramaturgical practices in our different countries and some of us had worked in translation and what it was like to work on translation processes, we started a discussion around commonalities between dramaturgy, translation, meaning making, how dramaturgy is meaning making, making translation is meaning making. And so we decided that's what the podcast, we would make a podcast, we've made the first episode, we hope to make more and we divided it into English and Spanish. So the first episode is about translation and the others will be a bit about language, a bit about meaning making, a bit about dramaturgy outside of theater and performance. We actually decided to begin in Spanish because it became so apparent to those of us from the Anglophone sphere that English is such a dominant language, we wanted to turn that on its head and start in Spanish and it was conversational. We experimented, we kind of went back and forth and we decided against having literal simultaneous translation because we didn't want to interrupt the flow and we wanted to experiment with what is missed and what is gained and what you can get from context and we use what we called linguistic bridges. So there were some people in the group who were bilingual and they would create bridges from English to Spanish so the other people could understand what was happening but there were chunks that if you didn't speak both languages that you would miss but we tried to make sure that like in our discussions we had as a group we wanted to make sure everyone, all the listeners would get the general gist. Next slide please. And there were some interesting lessons that we learned along the way just from this experimentation. Not everything has to be translated simultaneously and or entirely. Martha was talking about accesses of language. Maybe you don't need to hear everything. Maybe you don't need to understand everything. Context and body language and facial expressions can be really useful. A, it's especially if you're live or you're on Zoom and you can see each other. Sometimes someone of us would get something even if we didn't speak the other person's language and we would laugh or make a face and then they would laugh. A lot of it you could kind of piece things together because we were all familiar with the context of performance in theater and dramaturgy. So you go, okay, I think from my own knowledge I think I know what that person's talking about and that was quite nice. And again, I sort of mentioned this in the previous slide but for those of us who exist in the Anglophone world we were more aware of working into languages and living in that uncertainty and living in the shadow of I don't know what that person is saying of our own privilege of living in the Anglophone sphere and the dominance of English that we just assume when we travel everywhere we go everyone we speak English or things will be translated for us. And it was nice in a way to be on the back foot. For instance, I don't speak Spanish and it was nice in a way to just give over to other people and say I'll do my best to keep up. And what this really was was a collaborative approach it was a bilingual conversation it was dramaturgical but it was collaborative and we were really found strategies for relying on each other in order to make something together and it was a really wonderful experience. Thank you everybody that's my half of the presentation. Thank you so much Sarah and Martha. For anyone who hasn't listened to the podcast I really recommend it for all the lovely stuff that we've just heard from Sarah but also I think that the first half of it is probably a very good representation of a conversation that happened in many of the IDL groups as you start to go, okay how do we present to the LMDA conference what we have been doing? Our conversations that have been meandering everywhere how on earth do we shape this into something that is understandable and that we can and it's a beautiful, beautiful little moment in that podcast I absolutely love it so I recommend that very strongly to everyone. There was, yes there was like the group that I was in for example we didn't have Spanish but we had so many other languages between us many of us having more than one it was very interesting to see how we navigate that and also what that means from a cultural point of view and I think that all reminded us how it's so much more than just a language and I wanted to then maybe use that as a link into the next part of this because not only did we have to reflect on culture and the environment and that we were operating in ourselves but so much happened during this pandemic across the world that challenged us and made us reflect on access, equality, culture and all of those kind of things so I'm gonna hand over to Phaedra from LMDA US to reflect on this aspect of the project. Hi everyone, thank you so much Hannah and as she said my name is Phaedra Scott I use she, her pronouns. I am based in the land of the Muncie Lenape I also have some connectivity issues so if I fall off please someone let me know and I'll just repeat myself. I also wanna take a moment to acknowledge the very often unacknowledged labor of the African people who came over here as a part of the diaspora who helped to create the nation of the United States and whose labor is actually a part of many of the buildings that I do my work in including the building that I am in right now. In terms of a physical description I'm a black woman in my late 30s or not late 30s late 20s and I have mid length curly black hair I wear glasses and right now I am wearing... So we're hoping that we're gonna get... Yes, here, are we back? Yes, so we got to your glasses. Okay glasses and I am wearing a pink shirt a millennial pink shirt is what I like to call it. Also Juneteenth is tomorrow so happy Juneteenth to anyone that's celebrating myself included but I wanna take a moment to talk about to kind of overview what my colleagues have already been saying about some of the general outputs with the IDL including this de-centering of the English language as well as figuring out how to work across different time zones different languages in general but I think another kind of really awesome and really unexpected but pleasantly so output of this has been dramaturgs developing friendships with people all across the world with other dramaturgs. I found it so inspiring during our context meeting to hear some people just talking about yeah we meet weekly and sometimes we just... Dramatic pause and hopefully we get her back. Thank you. Yay, are we back? So I was talking about friendships but then also about how... Really about having a project at the end and that sometimes the project is the process itself which means interrogating what dramaturgy means across different borders. Now what people think a dramaturg even is to other dramaturgs as well as dramaturgs becoming creators and we talked about people who created podcasts who created theatrical work who are creating like almost language glossaries in terms of how can we talk about art making across different borders and how can we use those tools that we're learning from people all across the world in order to enrich our own practices and in order to really become a part of this global artistic community. I think what the pandemic has shown me is that we do very much live in a global society and that it's a part of our obligation as artists and as dramaturgs to kind of figure out, well, where does that put us? Where does that put the art that we are making? And that's been a really wonderful output of this I think across the many different languages, many different countries, many different people. Something else I wanted to mention was dramaturgs as leaders, dramaturgs as the people who are going to be spearheading many of these projects who have spearheaded these projects and using a model that's outside of a hierarchy, one that is really about seeing the other person that you're working with and working together. That's something that the steering committee has definitely done. I just to give you like a microcosm of what that was like, I found it really awesome to be able to rely on some other people. When things in our lives happened, it was nice to be able to like, okay, I cannot do this for the next like three weeks, but then someone else would always show up. And I think that's something that not only in the steering committee, but in the individual groups, we've been able to see and that there are so many different ways of working and learning. And it's just so inspiring. It's making my heart warm, even talking about it. But I highly recommend checking out all of the presentations. Like there are so many with so many specifics that it's almost like it's impossible to say them all without spending like four hours doing so. Probably more than that. But that's all I have for now. So thank you. And thanks for the technical difficulties. Thank you, Phaedra. That's absolutely, I concur with everything that you're saying. And I think there's some wonderful sort of representations of the conversations that people had some groups really focusing on what happened to them week to week, month to month during this pandemic, things that happened in the world and just picked that up and reflected on that. And again, just as Phaedra is saying, strongly recommend you to go and look at all the incredible contributions in the platform. Now that was, we've sort of very much looked at how we created a network as part of the steering group and then wider and all these satellite groups and connecting the partner organizations. But there's also been interest in what we are doing from outside, from theaters and from the industry. And that is another thing that because I suppose we've been so busy focusing on running this project and see what would happen with it, that we have sort of, we're gonna pick up on towards the end, the last face of the project. So I'm gonna hand over to my colleague, David who is representing Stu, the Finnish directors and dramaturgs union to talk about this last face and connect connections with the industry. Thank you, Hannah, nice to meet you again steering committee, hi guys. And it's lovely to see such a wonderful warm turnout for this event. So thank you all for participating and making this happen. As Hannah said, yes, we have been working on a networking event. I can talk a little bit about that. It's during the process while the groups were working together some very professional houses in theater, internationally started to demonstrate a growing interest in what the IDL participants were collaborating on. So this is quite tricky for me because I'm a trustee of a board which is the union of Finland's directors and dramaturgs which is also part of us a larger collaboration of a union called Temme and I need to give you some background to that because it's a trade union Temme. It stands for the trade union for theater and media Finland. So what we do there is that we have 5100 members in Finland and they consist of people from theater, dance, film and television production as well as circus. So my background as a dramaturg coming from the UK after graduating from Central in London I come to Finland and I live here and start to align myself in this society and start to get work. I have to say I've been very privileged in that way but I have managed to learn on this journey that that privilege needs to be acknowledged and to echo the comments of my colleague Fedra who I've learned an enormous amount of information along this journey. When she's talking about the future leaders of theater I believe that this trade union that I represent here in Finland has actually addressed that particular issue by embracing the work that happens amongst dramaturgs, amongst directors be it nationally or internationally such as the International Dramatogy Lab and starts to bring it into a particular policy and fight for those kind of advantages for its members legally so that it would become part of law. So from this background you can see that my interest in networking and bringing an industrial perspective to this process is quite strong. I can't mention the houses that I've approached already but let's just say that I also work as a dramaturg for a production company which is also a literary management agency and in that context it gives me a certain amount of ability to talk with certain influential professionals across the world on a regular basis. The work that has come to my attention so far from the groups is absolutely amazing to see that we could start from a point where Hannah and Sarah who approached me originally started to talk about well we don't know what we're going to do it's a laboratory. This was really exciting to hear someone say that we don't know where we're going. It was so refreshing we're focusing on the process. This was repeated to me time and time again and I really start to like that and now we're going in that vein we can see from these presentations that these groups have dedicatedly put together to share with you. You can see the outcome of following that particular methodology. It's not necessary to have a prescribed goal and similarly for the networking event we're going to have a prescribed goal for that either but we can say it's going to happen in the autumn and we can say that there is a number of prestigious theatres that are very interested in the work of these participants but what we're not going to do is decide how this event is going to happen. That's going to be left to you and the participants and the industrial guests who will come together and discuss. So please do check your organization's websites and do check in with us at the international dramaturgy lab because I think you'll be very pleased to see the kind of networking event that we're putting together for you. Thank you. That's wonderful. Very exciting for the next few months. Thank you so much David. So I want to say thank you to my colleagues of the steering committee and I'm just trying to share with you the journey that we've all been on and I also know that there are a couple of participants from other ideal groups that are on the call here that we were going to call on to come and talk to you a little bit about their groups. So that's Walter and Pamela and so I'm going to call on you shortly and whilst we hear from them before the Q&A, we're moving into the Q&A afterwards. So as you formulate your thoughts I just wanted to sort of reflect for a minute on what I feel that the project, this project has highlighted an areas that could benefit from more focus and possibly more problem solving. I do think that actually just on a practical basis translation tools that can be used more in this kind of collaborative ongoing artistic environment, they're just not there which is why it was great to hear how Sarah and her group have sort of started to solve that but I feel that there must be people out there who can look at that. The other one is obviously this was very a time sort of intensive project all done on volunteer basis which is why we could keep it so open and could allow it to be its own thing which was great. But the challenge for the future is how do we sort of create a project that fits in to these kind of ideas but also to funding funders structures and aims and objectives. I think we have now collated evidence fantastic evidence of what happens when you do let a process be open like this but that can form a basis on how we do this in the future. So it's the question about how we build on the idea to provide more long term and flexible ways to create these dramaturgical spaces of exploration nurture and growth spaces where we can be professional allow our professional minds to be fragile and to have questions to try things out to say the wrong things because we haven't formulated the thoughts yet stumble on the serendipitous to be lost in translation to think big to think globally and just listen and just be and just to stop the world for a little while without the pressure to produce how do we harness the best from the idea for the future so those are the things I would love to hear your thoughts about but I wanted to see if we could hear from Walter first who was part of the team who produced this wonderful play online play Have we got Walter here? Hi, I'm here. Hi Anna, hello everyone and I'm Walter Byung Seok Chun I am a dramaturg from South Korea and I'm currently based in Ithaca, New York in the United States I thank you all the organizations and the idea to steer committee for creating this wonderful opportunity is called Arario which is a word from the Korean folk song Arirang and I was in the group with Davide Giovanzana in Finland Rachel Parrish in California US and Tanya Santos in Mexico so just to share a little bit about our process the title of our process ended up as the mystery of Rachel Sinclair which is a play or performance text so when we first got together we started sharing our interests in dramaturgy or what we would like to get out of this wonderful opportunity across nations and even continents so we realized that we would like to create a performance text that reflects all of us, our cultural backgrounds and all the languages that were in our group which included English, Spanish, Korean, French, Danish, German and Italian and also a text that reflected the themes that we were interested in which included multiplicity, mother tongues, the sonic quality of language haste buds, excess different versions of borders and the slippery sense of time so with that those common interests in mind we thought we would give each other writing forms to get started on what kind of a story emerges from all of our interests and backgrounds so I share just a few of the initial forms that we gave each other write about a time that you had someone impose upon you ideas about your cultural identity and what you were supposed to be because of that that were inaccurate or inaccurate to your lived experience choose a substance like water and write create a phrase of it in its three basic states as a solid liquid and as gas please describe the three stages of self in words image, video or any other possible expressions the past self who you were or you thought you were the present self who you would think you are and the future self who you will be, would like to be or are afraid to be describe these three stages about border and teach each other something of your native tongue or culture like how to cook a certain kind of food or speak an aspect of your language so from these initial forms as we kept writing and sharing there emerged a story about this person Rachel Sinclair who is a Canadian journalist and a creative writing teacher she was working on an article about Mexican female journalists she recently broke up with her boyfriend and one day she eats eight watermelons each in a distinctive manner and then she disappears so as dramaturgs we asked the question what happened to her and how do we develop further develop this story that came out from all of our backgrounds and inquiries so far it was a very open process to kind of liberate ourselves from the border so to speak from our identities as we connected and see what emerged but now that we had a foundation story which we shared at the event in February now it was time for us to refine develop and create this into a piece and add some structure so from then on we gave each other more specific prompts or instructions such as this piece is a story with a plot and character we are all ourselves and also a character in this story yes we asked some dramaturgical questions what happened to Rachel suicide, murder, is she still alive and we also explored these notions of being alive, disappearing in our own cultural backgrounds and also we each of us what makes us part of her and also we placed ourselves in the investigator role so as our investigators what is our relationship to Rachel so as we were putting this piece together and as we were writing scenes, adding our own language and exploring what does it mean to to have intercultural connection that is centered on a protagonist, a mysterious protagonist like this we gave ourselves the final prompt create a satisfying journey that reflects the questions we explored our cultural heritage and our artistry so the piece that we ended up recording which was about 16 minutes long with four scenes is the result of our process that lasted several months and we met about every other week or every three weeks and we shared and and eventually had a version of a script that we recorded with video images with singing, with different languages and we are excited to continue developing this piece together thank you That's fantastic Walter, thank you for sharing it's wonderful to hear all those exciting questions that are being asked because we see the end result it's absolutely lovely, thank you so much I'm going to now hear from also Pamela you worked in a very different group that focus not so much on making a creative sort of project but looking at dramaturgical issues around disability and access have we got Pamela here, yes I can see her I'll hand over to you Hi everyone, I'm coming to you from Dublin in Ireland and my description is that I've strawberry blonde hair I'm wearing glasses, I'm a white woman I have a top on with white black and red stripes going horizontally across and some ear buds as well so it's lovely to be here and the very first thing I want to do is to say thank you to the steering committee, Dramaturgs Network, LMDA and all the fence and all the groups involved in putting this together because the timing was amazing during the middle of the pandemic so I'm coming in to hold you in the middle of your practice and I suppose the first thing when we came together in our group that's Katie O'Reilly, Marilyn Simard and Marcus Fetz and myself it was just that feeling of connection was the very first point and we all worked as dramaturgs at different points with artists of disability in creating new work so there was kind of a meeting point straight away for us to talk about and we were using English as our shared language to talk about all these issues and things we had in common so we did struggle I have to say with the time difference because we had UK time for two of us and Canadian time for Mark and Merlin which meant that we weren't connecting as much online maybe as we hoped but that was that we shared a lot of offline documentation so we could keep the intellectual conversation flowing and then come back and have the kind of verbal things together and touch base together so I guess the first point where we started from is that we were in the middle of a pandemic and practicing and so that was tricky because we had to do this pivot that I think a lot of us have had to do in the middle of our practice and change what we do as dramaturgs in the room so from my point of view I was working with a mixed ability group and we would be working with some Augusta Borrell Theatre of the oppressed approaches in physical movement on the floor and I would be collaborating in that sense in the room with an ensemble of different verbal abilities within that room of practice and then coming out of that, because that was not allowed with Covid and the pandemic, we then shifted online and so what do you do because now you're in a verbal space and a visual space so I have to say the group were extraordinarily excellent in being wonderfully supportive sounding board and they were very supportive about that at that time because the pivot came into one about translating we're talking about languages and translating a lot translating into images and graphs and visual, an awful lot of the kind of core principles of dramaturgy we might discuss when you're kind of structuring story in terms of people trying to create their own narrative a lot of the work was becoming more demanding and also rewarding I would say at the same time Merlin for example was working with visually impaired people and how to create access to virtual technology, you know, VR goggles type work for the visually impaired and of course we as a world moved into those virtual spaces a lot more, there was a lot more questions being asked of him about how that work was going so Katie was amazing as well to talk to because I think somebody mentioned earlier on about the aesthetics of access being incorporated into the work and into the processes and practice of dramaturgy so Katie is hugely experienced in this field, she is herself a player of disability and has written many extraordinary plays for those who haven't come across her work Peeling for example will be a very well known one I think in the UK at least so again to have that knowledge within the room about how you reinvent a practice at this particular moment from somebody who has been inventing access in practice for the last 10 years is just fantastic to have somebody go don't give up, keep going keep reinventing which was wonderful so when you asked Euron about the ideal and wants the needs those were the needs in the room straight away so the first few sessions weren't really anything about blue sky thinking or anything like that, they were very much of the moment of practice as we had these kind of exigencies to engage with which perhaps looking at some of the other presentations was a little different from other folk but also as time passed and then we had answered some of those questions for ourselves we did get to kind of expand our own thinking into sort of beyond barriers in a way and what does that mean because the thinking around disability and access is relatively new in my country I know it's more advanced in the UK and there's a kind of a different conversation in the Americas as well but it's also housed in particular types of language and it's interesting when you're talking about translation and language so we tend to have binary focus in this the idea of ability or abled body and then the disability and the interest in just discursive conversations around the medical and the social models of disability and who does the inclusion and who does the exclusion and that those two things aren't as obvious as you might think but also we had a couple of languages we didn't actually have Spanish in the group but we did have Merlin whose I was going to say her main language was French and then we were working through English and in Ireland and so I also speak Irish and I also use that work in my own work and I work bilingually that's a different section of my practice but what we discovered was that the language and the words for disability in both French and in Irish were different and had different connotations than in English and so they were they don't have the exclusionary context of difference in those languages and it made us question our own definitions of what assumptions we were making in our own work and so in the wider context of ideal I'd be very interested to ask that question of peoples languages and how we can think beyond those assumed understandings Pamela I'm going to just because that's a very good question but we have four minutes left of the session so I was just thinking that is a brilliant question and I know having sort of seen a lot of the material that that is a question that we have asked in nearly all directions you know like between not only language but culture and all of those kind of things I just to sort of thank you so much for sharing your journey with us Pamela that's really interesting to see how utterly different from the other from Walters group and how you made it into what you needed it to be which is exactly what we aimed for I am obviously not very clever because I'm not sure if I have figured out where any questions might have appeared from other people so if someone is there any questions that has come in for us in for our last few minutes a couple of questions here a few people asked where they could find the podcast and if it was in the hub and there's the answers in the chat that it's in the group Lost in Translation and you know it's that one because it has a little audio icon on the right and then the other question that I'm seeing here from Emily White but somebody correct me if there are previous questions what is the future of IDL will there be opportunities for more dramaturgs to participate in future iterations of the lab this is the big question that is the big question because I think to be honest we are fairly exhausted now after a year of running this on a voluntary basis but also very inspired and excited but as I mentioned before I think this is a discussion for us in our own organisations and to continue as partner organisations that have this conversation how do we facilitate this how do we expand it into other parts of the world as well other networks and colleagues and how do we get the funding to run it on a continual basis because it's incredibly amazing the outcomes from it but now it's a question of finding a route but again and I'm sorry we're running out of time here but please keep in contact with us because any ideas any thoughts about this you can send them to Brian Moore at the LMDA or to me I'm Hannah at dramaturge.co.uk and then we will see if we can organise the continuation of this but for all the IDL participants who have been part of this journey this year we have one more event for you and we shall let you know about that as we come up so thank you everyone on the panel thank you to the LMDA for hosting us and thank you to all of you who came for all the work and labour and follow up on this thank you