 to say hi to you already. So let me just introduce the much clever folks on the panel with me. So Jocelyn Prince is our Connectivity Director here at Wally, which will do is you were formerly producer and residence at Mixed Blood. What is your current title to be on? Still Producer and Residence. Awesome. Producer and Residence, you're two. Rodney Kanwai was our producer and residence at Wally last season and is now our producing consultant. So Rodney and Jocelyn have been quite involved in the connectivity programming here at Wally. And Jameel has been very involved in the radical hospitality program at Mixed Blood. So I want to make sure to give these folks some time to just sort of break down the basics about what those programs are. But mainly, because we're all colleagues here, I want to make this as actually useful as possible to you all. So I'd rather start by just doing a little bit of engagement with you all and asking what's most valuable for you to talk about, to ask about, to learn right now? Because there's a lot of friendly stealing that goes on between our two companies, I think. A lot of sharing, a lot of stealing. And in the last couple of seasons, I think Mixed Blood and Wally have both done a lot of, as we said the other day, throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, doing a lot of experimentation. And I think at this point, we're sort of in the measuring and analyzing phase, trying to figure out the impact of all of these experiments. And actually trying to figure how to crunch that data in an effective way, listen to the data, and then adjust our behavior to get closer to the outcomes that we're intending. So for us right now, I think it's audience engagement and whatever your fancy word for it is. It's all about goal setting. It's all about being really specific about what it is that you're trying to accomplish with regard to your audience and your community. So I guess the basic examples that I'd give of that goal setting for us are questions of how many, how many butts are in your seats, how many audience members are you actually recruiting? Because I think, just about every cultural organization right now is in that panicky moment of is our attendance declining and what come to you about it? So how many is one question, I think? How is another one, how are you engaging with your audience dramaturgically before, during, or after the show? That's a really different question, I think. And then the third question that we talk about a lot is who, who's actually in your audience? Is that the audience that your artists are intending to create your work for are those the most exciting potential people to respond to the piece? And that I think is really interesting to talk about from the point of view of a new point theater because it's one thing to be producing a piece of work that people basically know what it is. It's vaguely familiar to people who sort of consume culture routinely. And it's something very different, I think, to be doing new, innovative, unfamiliar, strange work. And so a big part of what we talk about, I know, is how to make the language that I use is how to make innovative work intentional, exhilarating, and valuable for your audience. So what can you do to empower your audience to make meaning of new, innovative, unfamiliar work and take ownership over it and value it and become an advocate for it? Does all that make sense so far? Yeah, okay. So of those big questions, how many audience members do you have, who's in your audience, and how are you engaging with them? Can we just do a show of hands? Like how many people are interested in talking about just how many butts are in your seats? Bucks, bucks. A few. Cigarettes. As Pete Miller, our board member, says, empty theater seats are evil. So it's okay to say the most important thing is just to get your seats filled. Okay, so a few people, how many are interested in talking about who's in your audience, okay? And then how many people are interested in talking about how you're engaging with them? Oh, wow, interesting. Great, okay. Well, I will do a little bit of adjusting as these folks talk. Initially, this is actually a great segue because I'd like to start out by asking Ronnie to talk a little bit about how we engage with our audience members on presented work because I think even for us new play insiders, I mean, I know for me, when I look at a piece of devised theater that's not text-based, I sometimes have a hard time sort of knowing what signposts to look for when I experience the piece, making meaning of it, trying to determine what the goals of the artists are and becoming an advocate for it myself. So Ronnie worked very hard on a piece that we presented this past season called Areas with a Twist. So Ronnie, can you talk a little bit about what that means for you? Yeah, sure. So I was meaning to talk a little bit about for most of my producing residence at Willie Mammoth, I was very focused on Willie's presented work. So all the companies and individual artists that come to Willie that are not necessarily text-based. So before Areas with a Twist came, we did a lot of talking about what Areas was and what it meant to talk about a work like that isn't scripted. So just to give you a little background on the show, Areas was a partnership between Baz with Twist who is a well-known puppetry artist. Areas with a Twist was actually part of a Baz with Twist festival in DC at Ford theaters, I went to a studio. And the other artist was Joey Areas who is known in New York, more in the downtown scene for his work as a drag artist. But as a singer, and in his kind of depictions of Billie Holiday, he's actually toured around the world, performed at Carnegie Hall. So their partnership was really this mix of cabaret and performance meeting puppetry. But in terms of its structure, it was really a series of songs that kind of lately reflected Joey's life, everything from Genesis to Billie Holiday. So contextualizing something like that for our audience was something that we knew was gonna be a challenge. Even though the actual experience of the show was really exciting, it just was using a whole different set of tools. So actually the way that Connectivity started for that show, I really think was really among the staff because what we had was a DVD of the production. But it really wasn't a very high quality DVD because of course, you know, you're in the back of the downtown video of it, it's not gonna sparkle the way that the show live is. So even talking about it and getting excited about it amongst the staff required a little bit of a different approach because it wasn't so much a script to be passed around but a DVD. So some of the things that we did among the staff was to show a documentary that was made with a filmmaker about Joey's history, about Basil's history and that was kind of an interesting road in for us because we realized that the appreciation of the piece really deepened as soon as you knew where these artists were coming from and that each one of them was bringing this whole depth of craft and depth of experience into this show. So once we all understood that, then it became okay, what are the most important things we need to let the audience know before they come in? There was a marketing question of what do they need to know to make them understand that this is what this show is and get them excited about it and then just giving them tools to be able to talk about it. So we tried to put some of those tools in different places for different purposes. So in the program note, the focus of that was really to give the audience a sense of where these artists were coming from in terms of their history. So a little bit of background of who they had worked with. But then in the lobby experience, the approach we took there was really try to get the audience awake to the fact that this was gonna be kind of a glamorous, yet raunchy, yet sit forward in your seat rather than back in your seat kind of experience because for the first couple of previews, it was very interesting to see how the audience wasn't sure what to do. You kind of want to like it, but you're not kind of sure how to engage with it. So we'd initially started with a red carpet from the glass doors all the way to the box office to kind of say, welcome, this is gonna be a different kind of experience. But then as we went on, we started to add some kind of sexy table tents that kind of hit on you as you were sitting there that said funny things. Oh, of course I'm not coming up with any at the moment, which is probably fine, this is a new video it takes. So that was really fun, like excerpts from the show that were kind of coy things that Joey would kind of tease the audience with to kind of let people know that that was gonna be part of the experience. And then we added on to that even further with these kind of dry erase boards that were kind of like the characters you would see in bathroom signs. But without this area, the people could kind of draw whatever they wanted to to kind of understand that that was a major part of the experience. So we kept kind of ramping up a little bit more and more in the lobby experience to let people know, you need to kind of shake yourself up a little bit for what you're about to engage with. So those were some of the tools in terms of the lobby. And then in addition to that, we tried to add events both after the show in different ways to kind of highlight the different things in the show that we really wanted our audience to be able to take away from it. So we had two events with the puppeteers that were them talking about their experience of working on the show. We had them demonstrate how to use some of the puppets. But one of the events that I was really excited that we actually managed to pull off was something called the Glamazon pageant. And that involved working with DCs or Leskin-Vodville community and to bring them in and kind of see the show and then do something after the show. So we actually in the lobby here made our own kind of makeshift runway and had the EYGAs who were part of a group here called Brightest Young Things that are kind of a young fantastic group here. We had some of them being the judges. We were the company members judging the pageant. And essentially we had some Leskin-Vodville acts coming down this runway and kind of competing to be the top Glamazon. And it was really fun because you had it kind of operating on a number of different levels. First there was this audience who was coming out of the show realizing, oh there's actually kind of a DC component to these New York artists who we have coming in from out of town to do this work. So that was kind of exciting. And then Basil and Joey actually came out and were watching the Glamazon pageant. And so after the pageant there was some interaction between the two of them that was really exciting from kind of our local to the New York community. But I think the most exciting thing was kind of just seeing this audience kind of put together all the pieces of, oh that was on stage there but this is on stage and this is from the local community. And it was a lot of fun, ended in kind of drinks and general chatting and things like that. But I think it was kind of an example of how beyond kind of your talk back there's a different way that you can kind of engage and respond to a work. So a lot of the things that I've been thinking about over the past years, how you contextualize something for the audience not just in terms of content but also in terms of aesthetic. Because something we've kind of realized the more we've been talking at Woolly is that your audience member won't necessarily perceive the difference between presented and produced but what they will perceive is a difference in what that experience is. So really trying to give your audience tools for that just to help them see what the value is that they should be pulling out. Because I know here at Woolly we have an incredible number of smart audience members but it's always if the engagement is civic discourse and text and ideas, switching that same kind of investigative rigor to a different set of aesthetics can be something that anyone needs some more tools with. So that's been an interesting aspect of connectivity that I've been looking at and I've been doing. That's great. So that was, thank you Ryan, that was great because I think you hit on a lot of the many, many different tools that we use in connectivity. Like lobby engagements, pre-show emails communications, after parties, alcohol, all of these things are actually really important in terms of getting people to sort of let their guard down and engage with the work in a different way. So I think I'd like to go a little bit further and ask Jocelyn to go a little bit deeper into some of those tools but just to back up a little bit and clarify those initial goals behind connectivity from our point of view. This program really started with a 30th anniversary conference that we did a few years ago here on theater and democracy and engagement in the 21st century. And that was a moment for us to sort of pause what we were doing. We had just moved into this new space right off the mall and think about the significance of making new work in Washington, DC. And we realized that the next horizon for us was how to more directly insert what we were doing, the work that we were making into the civic discourse that was already happening in Washington. That was what we were really interested in. And we realized that most of the playwrights that we were really passionate about working with wanted to provoke a conversation that doesn't usually happen in Washington or that doesn't usually happen in this country. And so the most exciting artistic conversations we were having was with those artists saying, okay, so who are you really making this piece for? Who would you be really curious to hear respond to this piece? Who would be the most exciting people from the Washington community to get in the room here? And how can we make that happen? So this was really about who it is in the room for us. And it became, all right, well, can we use that to increase the number of people that are in the room and the quality of the interaction that they're having when they're here? So I think the first big, and we had no idea in concrete terms what that actually meant, but I think the first real palpable success that we had with connectivity with these experiments was when we did our original production of Clyburn Park, which our directed. And we did what seemed like a really simple experiment that was a stroke of genius, I think on the part of Rachel Grossman, our original connectivity director, because the play is about neighborhoods and how neighborhoods change. There was a very direct opening for people to relate the content of the play to their own experience here in this city. And so Rachel came up with a really clear question that illustrated that relevance, is your neighborhood Clyburn Park? And that was on all of our posters. And while we were in rehearsal still for the show, she went out and found neighborhood bloggers, people from every ward in the city who are sort of like already at the center of those conversations. And she said, I want you to come see the show during a few weeks for free and I want you to write about it on your blog and I will give you a discount code for all of the readers of your blog to come and see the show at any time during the run. And that did unbelievable things to our attendance because the makeup, the composition of those audiences nightly were magical. And that was something that we just sort of stumbled on. And we sort of stumbled on other magical moments like when we did Robert O'Hara's Playbooty Candy, we just realized that the show was running during the Capitol Pride Festival and there was a Black Pride family picnic that went on in the city every year that we weren't even aware of, but that connected very directly to the content of the show. And so we realized we need to go to the picnic and we need to just hang out with people and give them really tangible ways of being invited to the show and making it easy for them. So at this point, we know what success looks like and we're trying to get a little bit more consistent about the tools that we deploy to achieve that kind of success. And so in a minute I'm gonna ask Jocelyn to talk a little bit more specifically about some of those tools. That I wanna take a little bit to ask to be able to talk about the goals and the basic tools behind rap hospitality because I think it's very related to this question of who is in your audience, specifically which neighborhoods in your city are being represented. And then I think we probably wanna open it up to questions and then I wanna, and don't even have a watch, does anybody? Just wanna make sure we have enough time to talk a little bit about a lot of the experience that you've already been experiencing out here. When do you wanna high sign? In 53. Thank you. And we have until, oh, okay, great. So could you just give a little wave when you've got like 15 more minutes? Thank you. Okay, so Jocelyn, can you talk a little bit about these tools like audience design, the CLAC, lobby experience? What does that mean when you talk about that? Sure, I'll do my best. So, I'll talk about the CLAC first. So the CLAC is basically a group of about, we have about 18 members of the CLAC right now. They're sort of highly engaged audience, woolly audience members, who serve as sort of part advisory board, part focus group, part volunteer pool. We have about five or six sort of mandatory meetings that they come to every year where they actually sit and do a round table reading of the upcoming show that we're doing. And then we sort of brainstorm with them as Miriam was mentioning before, sort of who is this play for? What are some of the things that we can organize around this show to get people in the community excited about the show? What are some special events that we can plan? We talk about the blog, we talk about all different ways to sort of engage with the audience. And it's a great way to get a sort of semi outsider's perspective on the play. And then we ask CLAC members to serve on what we call working groups. So we have a working group around each show that we do and that working group meets four to five times before the show actually is up on our stage. And the working group is comprised of CLAC members, board members, staff members, interns, community members, people who might have a particular interest in the show. And they actually help me sort of execute the connectivity initiatives for the show. So the CLAC, they're wonderful. They act as community ambassadors for the theater, reaching out to their networks. The CLAC, one of the things that I've been doing since I've gotten here is sort of diversifying the CLAC both in terms of where they're employed, in terms of their ethnicity, in terms of the neighborhoods that they come from in DC. So they're a really important part of making connectivity sort of work. The lobby design, I think, is a really important element. One of the things that I've been working on is trying to engage more with the visual art community. We have an amazing space, as you can see, with lots of wall space. So I've been thinking about ways that we can get visual artists to either commission them to make work, particularly for us, that are related to the shows, or to find artists who are creating art that's related to themes and plays that we're producing and try to figure out a way to display that work. So to try to connect the visual arts community with the performing arts. Can I energy for a second to stand to check specifically about Mr. Burns? Because this is another really great example, I think, of using a lobby experience to sort of unlock some sort of puzzling aesthetic or stylistic aspects of a show. Because this was a play written by Anne Washburn that we did called Mr. Burns, a post-electric play. And one of the really, the narrative is very deeply submerged, as you probably know in a lot of Anne's work, which is why we love it. But there was one really important element of the narrative that we thought the audience might miss, which is that the times skipped forward twice in the play. So the first act happened very, very shortly in the future. The next act happened seven years later, and the next act happened 75 years after that. And the play made zero sense that you didn't get that. So, so Daphne actually mentioned. Right, so we got this grant and we used the grants, I think it was from the Humanities Council, but we wanted to try to figure out a way to help the audience understand that sort of time shift in the play. So the first act sort of is about, tomorrow after the apocalypse. And the second act is seven years later after the apocalypse. And the third act is 75 years later after the apocalypse. And so what we did is we commissioned three DC artists. One is a painter, one was a more of a graffiti artist, and the third artist was a collage artist. And so we asked them to consider three basic sort of infrastructures and how that they would be affected in the events of apocalypse. So we had one of them focused on electricity, one of them focused on water, and the other one focused on sort of structural engineering, like what would happen to our buildings. We paired these artists up with members from that community like PEPCO, the electricity company, DC Water, a structural engineering firm, so that he could get sort of the scientific sort of context behind it. And then they each created three paintings. So what would happen seven years later if we had no water? What would happen 75 years later? What would happen tomorrow if electricity went out? In the gallery up on the second level of the theater, we sort of laid out these paintings in order so that the audience coming in could sort of take like a time traveling kind of journey looking at kind of the deterioration or the evolution of what would happen after this apocalyptic event that Anne describes in her play. So I thought that that was a really great way not only to involve the visual arts community with what we were doing, but to also give context and give kind of an entry point to the aesthetic and the structure that Anne has set up in Mr. Burns. Do you want to talk a little bit more just about the notion of audience design and what we can get there next? Yeah, sure. So audience design is sort of from this impulse that just like we design costumes, we design sets, we design lightings, there's a way in which that we can design an audience for whom the show is going to have the most, we call it explosive engagement, essentially for whom the show is going to resonate with most. And we think that that's important, not only for these sort of highly engaged audience members, many of them new to Willie, who will be coming to see the work, but we also think that it provides a really, really powerful experience for our sort of regular subscriber base in our regular audiences who are going to come to anything that we produce. One of the things that Aaron Posner, who's one of the directors we work with a lot, says that when he came to see Booty Candy, because of all the outreach work we had done in the black gay community in DC, he said that the audience that he was watching the show with actually taught him how to watch the show, just based on where they were laughing, where they were shocked, where they were squealing. Like, I think he had a very, very different experience with the show because of the people that he was surrounded by. So we think that it's really important to engage very specifically around audiences. So when we're going to do a production, I spend a lot of time thinking about and working with the playwright and the director about like, who is this play for? Who ideally, you know, demographically, psychographically based on interests, based on, you know, where they work, what their professional lives are like. Like, who should see this play? Who is this play going to resonate with most? And then I do a lot of community out, just basic community outreach, community organizing work around the show to create those audiences for the production. I mean, some of the tools that I have is I have a lot of complimentary tickets, quite frankly, that I, you know, I give away hundreds of tickets for free and try to focus on preview performances, hoping that getting those audiences in early is going to spread word of mouth around their own networks who may have similar interests. Do a lot of discount coding. I try to work with organizations on special events. So if it's like, for example, you for me for you, which has anyone seen that yet? Okay, so the show, you know, is about North Korea. We engage with the Korea Economic Institute, which has a lot of work around sort of panel discussions and policy discussions around North Korean issues. And so they were really interested in not only bringing a group to see the show, but they were interested in setting up a pre-show panel discussion, something that they would do anyway with their organization and including the playwright on that panel. So that the playwright, so all the panelists read the play and the playwright was there and they talked about the ways in which the play sort of illuminated real world implications of what's happening in North Korea and South Korea today. And it was kind of a really important time for that organization because the South Korea elections had just happened, which you're having strong locations on North Korea, South Korea relationships. So those are kind of some of the things we think about in terms of audience design. Like who's this play for? How can we engage them and get them into the theater? And that's a great segue. To ask Steve Neal to talk a little bit about those initial goals behind radical hospitality and how that related to the question of who's in your audience. So for Mixed Blood, since our founding, it's all been about breaking down artificial barriers that keep people from succeeding and excelling in society. I think a couple of years back, our board sat down with the R2C director, Jack Roller, and it's hard when someone's like staring right at you. We're doing it right now, man. So our board sat down with Jack, and we're really saying, so what are the barriers that we are still, that people are still running up against, right? And how can we, as a theater whose mission is to break down these barriers, what can we do? And I think they came through a lot of that analysis and said economics, the economic barrier to going to the theater is a huge problem that people are still suffering from. I think all across the country, but specifically, our theater in Minneapolis, especially where we reside within the Twin Cities community. So they got together and said, hey, you know what? What we're going to do? We're going to get rid of the ticket price. And they challenged Jack and the staff and Mixed Blood to make it happen and make it happen for impromptuity was the challenge that they laid down. So forever, people don't have to pay for tickets. And we've run with it. And it's been a lot of fun. It's been a lot of challenges. And we initially had a grant from the Legacy Fund and some other people to help us subsidize that first year. And now we're doing it on our own. So now it's how do you, and it's interesting to hear Jocelyn and Ronnie and Mirren talk about it. But how do we find those audience members that we want to come and see our show? And now that our theater is not about selling tickets anymore, but it's about presenting work as a social service almost. How do we go when we go about finding them and letting them know that the theater is here for you to explore, for you to see yourself reflected back on stage, to learn more about yourselves and those that live in your community? So how can we do that better? And eliminating ticket prices is one of them. And now also what we're going to. So now that they get there, we're finding that a lot of people, now that tickets are free, this is the first time they've ever been to a live theatrical event. So what do we do now? Now that's where we are now. What we try to do, we try to, on a smaller scale, change the way our lobby looks a little bit too. We've upped our social media presence. We have taken to Twitter. In a really, really interesting and fun way, thanks to 2AMT and New Play TV, a lot of people in that Twitter sphere connecting to them so that we can help get our messages out there, but we can also find our audience, our possible audience members. And how can we go about and engage in them in conversation? You don't ask people to turn their phones off during the show. No. Jack Ruehler hates curtain speeches, so we don't ask. But actually, sometimes we even ask people to tweet. You know, we do tweets each week. We have the back row in our theater set aside and say, hey, and we let everyone know when they come to the theater. Don't look behind you. You don't want to be distracted, don't look behind you. There are going to be people who are going to be on their phones tweeting, live tweeting, the show with us. We try to make people feel at home in whatever way we can do. And as soon as they step into the door, our box office experience, we're trying to change the way people interact with us. It's more conversational as transactional. The transaction is the free ticket. But we are welcoming you into the space and saying, be with us. We want to learn from you. And we hope that we can share that experience with you. Our post-it wall, which is as simple as a sheet of sticky notebook paper with five post-it stacks in front of it and some Sharpies say, hey, we want to know what you think about anything that you have. We only have three bathrooms. So sometimes we get posted while it's like, shit, the bathroom line was too long. But that's exactly what we're looking for. That's exactly what we want our audiences to come in and talk to us about. We want to know how we can learn from them because we hope that when they get into the theater we can help them learn something about themselves. Twitter screen is always visible in our lobby. We have found in the work that we do that all of our intended audience won't always be able to make our show for whatever reason, whether we're talking about persons with disabilities, people we found, especially when we livestreamed one of our performances that spoke specifically to autism and those on the autism spectrum. We found a large portion of our audience on that new play, TV live streaming, commented via email or via Twitter and said, we've never been able to see a show because my son or daughter is affected by live performance or doesn't feel comfortable in the theater. So being able to see a show that spoke to our experience through the internet was so, so powerful for us. So now we have to say, hey, if we're going to do anything, our postal conversations, we tweet out. That's a way to integrate and connect with people. And we found that to be really, really exciting that we are finding new ways with this new way we're going about our work, letting people in for no cost. It's changing the way that we have to think about the theater work that we do in our events and who we are as people, how we attack our work, the supplemental events that we have, those are all types of things that we're doing. Right now we are thinking about how can we better serve our audience now that the transaction isn't financial. And you all have the transportation fund as well, right? Yeah, so anybody who self identifies as a person with a disability can call up a Red and White cab in between, oh, box office. This is why they're right there on the side. They call up our box office and then we set it up with our cab service, I don't know if it's a Red and White cab. But, and then we will arrange for them to be picked up, which is really, really great too, right? If you have a mobility issue, get into the theater on a Friday or a Saturday night may not be the easiest thing in the world, so having that service that you don't have to pay for to get you to and from the theater safely is great. And we see that a lot of people are taking advantage of it, you know, sometimes you know that we all know you can give your tickets away for free and have, you know, tons of programming, but if no one knows about it or they can't get to it, what's the point of it? So being able to not only have these programs, but be able to find ways to get people to the programs, that's what it's about, right? It's just about getting people to where you are. But we are now trying to find more ways to actually get us to where they are. And I think the work Willie is doing with connectivity is allowing the lines where we wanna move to as well, right? Where we can go out and find those communities, get our hands on people in those communities, take our work out to them, which is some of the stuff that we do with our touring program as well, where we tour all through Upper Midwest and take the work that makes blood to those shows. You know, could you talk a little bit more about that too? Because I felt like just the other day when you were talking with Jack, I felt like, oh, I understood radical hospitality so much better when I understood the financial analysis that you all had done to sort of lay the groundwork for it. And that involved, as I understand it, taking a look at all of your revenue streams, not just ticket and income, and figuring out, you know, stabilizing all of that, predicting how much revenue would actually be lost if you took away ticket costs, but also the distinction between, so you've got multiple revenue streams like touring, which you do charge for from the organizations that you work with on the individuals who come see the show, right? Yeah. And then you've got the cost of marketing, the dollars that you usually put into marketing a show when you've got, you know, when you're looking at your return on investment in terms of ticket price, and that changed as well. And then the other piece of it seemed like was, you know, does the actual work that you put into marketing the show when you've got no-cost tickets change? Are you spending more money on advertising, or less money on advertising on the personnel that you've got actually going on telling people about the shows? And also the distinction between no-cost reservation, fee, and pass, could you talk about that? Yeah, sure. So we still have, the S word's a bad word, so I'll whisper it, subscription, you know, people still can get passes to Mixblood. We've had a program that's running for a long time. I think if you, and was it 76 or 78 or something like that. If you signed up for, you know, season passes out a certain year, way back before I was born, Jack, if you signed up and you said that, you know, you'd be a season subscriber back then, you can still get the tickets for very, very cheap. But so people have passes, and we're looking at our passes more. Be a supporter, be an investor, and what it is that we do. You know, these are guaranteed tickets, you know what day you're coming on, but what you're really doing is that you're really paying it forward. You're paying for the next person to go and see the show. So people still can, at the beginning of the year, say, here, you know, I want to buy a season pass or an ethno-metro pass, which we have an agreement with a couple of theaters in the area, in the Twin Cities. I said, hey, we have someone buy tickets for our show. Can they also buy tickets for your show? Which has been a really, really great collaborative opportunity for us, so we still have those. For anybody who wants to come, if they're coming from Wisconsin, which is about an hour away, or from the upper suburbs, southern suburbs, not necessarily in the Twin Cities, and I don't want to take a chance at first come, first serve tickets. We can reserve for a fee, so it's 20 bucks to reserve a ticket. But that's only half of our house, right? So we don't go past half of our house. And two hours before the show, it cuts off, right? So you can't call at, you know, seven o'clock for a 730 show and say, hey, you know, I want to make sure that I reserve a ticket. Hey, I'm sorry. You know, so if buy 530 for a 730 show, we've only, you know, reserved 20 tickets. Well, there are 180 tickets that we're going to give out, first come, first serve for our show. So it's really, really interesting. I mean, as far as budgeting, you know, we still say, well, hey, we think that we're going to get, you know, 20 people, you know, a night or whatever. So there's still, you know, there are still budget implications, right? Like, we're not all willy-nilly about it. But we also have like the On the Job program where we are taking the work that we're doing and working with corporations. I know a lot of theaters are doing it. I said, I think it was read in American Theater Magazine maybe in October and November issue that more theaters around the country are working towards that our touring program. A lot of the places that we tour, whether they're small community centers, universities or whatever, they are actually getting that cost subsidized as well, right? So whether it's private or government funds, someone is taking the burden of paying for it off of the shoulders of the people who want to attend. So when we toured to the upper Midwest, a lot of our shows are still free and that has been a really, really interesting thing. But yeah, the books are, the books seem to be fine. You know, we still, we just have to change the way we're doing it. As far as marketing, I think we too have advisory councils. Depending on the show, we have a couple of standing advisory councils or disability advisory council or Latino advisory council. We have a very active board. Like our board is like a great board. Like I love what they do. They can be a little persistent is the word I'll use to make sure that we are doing what it is that we intend to do. But that's what a board should do, right? Like a board should hold us responsible for living up to our mission. So our board helps us out too in getting the word out and being ambassadors for the type of work that we do. We have community liaisons. We mix blood, resides in a heavy Somali immigrant and Somali American Somali neighborhood. So we have a liaison group that works with that community as well. So a lot of word of mouth, but marketing is still very, very important. Again, like we said, you can give the tickets away for free, but if no one knows that there's a show going on at the specific times, no one's gonna come. I think we're still trying to end this new era as we're going to be at the wall, find out how we can better market what it is that we do. People still think of theater as the theater. So how can we break down the big T and make it a small T, but still be as dividing and have high production value, which I think also people think that because we give the tickets away for free that we're doing crappy shows and two-handers or anything like that. We just closed a multiracial production of Next to Normal, right? So with a five or six piece live band playing every night, so we don't cheapen the experience just because our tickets are cheap. We still believe in producing high-quality work, right? Like, excellent theater should be done no matter what the cost the audience has to pay, and that's what we're continuing to try to do. Great, great. Is this sort of getting at those questions of who's in your audience and how are you getting to them? Do you have some questions for any of these guests? I'd like to know more about your Metro pass and how that works, how many theaters, and if you've each charged different pricing on your tickets, how it all works. Yeah, great question. So, Amanda. You want to talk about the concern? Yeah, I mean, just the Metro pass is something that we devised about 12 years ago to try to attract an audience for culturally specific work, not just at our theater, but around the city. So actually, it is a higher price ticket, but we have culturally specific programming by both culturally specific organizations and by traditionally white organizations doing culturally specific programming, but we actually go to them and ask them for seats on days that they would have inventory that would go unused. So the theater gets no money. The other partner theaters don't get any money for it, but they get the audience, they capture those people, hopefully they keep them coming back and we've done it for about 12 years and I think it's a few hundred passes a year that allows people to go to 10 different shows at four or five different venues in the course of the season. And they don't have to pay or do they do pay? They pay us a pass amount which is slightly more than the pass we have and they're able to go to all these other places with sometimes they're unrestricted and sometimes they're strictly can go on a handful of dates. And how many theaters are usually involved? There's usually four of these, I mean. But it's changed who they are year by year based on programming. Thank you. Specifically, what did you do for audience engagement around edifice pre-show, during the show, and after? I could ask you the same thing. We didn't do much. Oh, okay. I am asking you. Fair enough, fair enough. Well, I wish John Baker was here because he was actually the dramaturg on the show. From what I recall, we began by talking with Louise about who this piece was for, what he was after. And he said, you know, because for him- Tell everybody what the piece is. Yes, this is an adaptation that Louise Alvaro did of edifice, called Edith Selray. It was a rolling role premiere. Obviously, we're slurring. There we go. So, Magic, Borderlands, and Wally all did it, as well as a bunch of other theaters went to the Victory Gardens as well. So we talked with Louise about the conversation that he really wanted to tee up with the play. And he said for him, what was interesting about edifice was this question of recidivism. Can you change your fate? Or does doing something wrong sort of mean that inevitably your track is, you know, your path is determined? And so he said, it would add meaning to the experience for him to actually engage with folks who had been incarcerated and who were working on re-entering society. And there were a lot of other, so that was sort of the content that we wanted to explore but there were also aesthetic things that we wanted to explore. I mean, in the community that Louise was writing about tattoos are very important, you know, especially if you've gone through prison, if you've been incarcerated, that's a way that your story sort of gets communicated on your body. And so our costume designer did a lot of work on that. There's nudity in the show, so the costumes really became the tattoos that were on the actor's bodies. And so we did things to try to create a combination and mix of people in the audiences who could relate to both the form and the content of the work. Like there was one, there was something we started doing at that point called Audience Exchange, which is an intentionally sort of unexpected combination of two different people seeing the show and then reflecting on it and sort of sparking a discussion with the audience. So one night we had, we had, I think, a professor of classics and a tattoo artist. We had a tattoo historian. And we had a lot of folks who had actually been incarcerated or worked with folks who were sort of straddling those lives. And so we intentionally created mashups of people who were responding to different levels of the show. And then those discussions would not go on forever. We'd have those people join that Rachel, the moderator on stage, or John. And then they'd answer a couple really, really brief questions about how they experienced the show. And then we'd immediately open it up to the rest of the audience. And the rest of the audience was always really curious about knowing more about the way that those folks experienced the show in relation to their own. Another very cool thing that Rachel and John did during that show was that we were very conscious of how your own personal experience was probably going to inform the way that you judged the characters. Who you believed was flawed, who you believed was redeemable. And so one of the things we did, it was kind of labor-attentive, it was very cool. We created three different playbills for the show, not just one. And so there were three different dramaturgical essays tackling the show through different lenses. One was through the lens of family, one was through the lens of community, and one was through the lens of the individual. Because Louise and Michael Gerseth, the director, and the cast talked a lot about the way that, you know, if you think about your lot and the choices that you make as an individual, it's very different from the choices that you make if you think about yourself as a member of a family or of a community or of the city. And so there were interviews with community members who, members of the clergy, people who could speak to those different perspectives, and there was actually a different cover on the playbill depending on which version you got. And we made sure that when couples and groups came to pick up their tickets, they got different playbills. So it was clear immediately that you were having a different experience from the person sitting next to you, and that did something very cool, but it, because it unlocked conversations between other patrons who did different stuff together, so you would sit down and you would see that your playbill was never the same person who sits over, so you would have to ask them, why is yours different? What's inside yours? And so that broke down a lot of barriers between these sort of, you know, unexpected combinations of audience members as well, so that was really interesting. I saw two things, they both advocate questions for it. Justin and Jamil? Yes, okay, so Jamil first, how do you, well, I mean, I think in a great idealistic YouTube fashion, this idea of making theater free, how do you still teach this idea of, I'm gonna use the word, training people to value a theater because we still live in a society which money is one way that that's created, so that was a question there. And then Fadass said, how do you, you know, of course I think all of us who work but say in a producerally capacity, want to sort of get at certain groups, but how do you maybe avoid that maybe unintentional effect of saying, this is a play for you, but this other play is not for you, and I think about once working at a theater company where the black play comes up every year and we get that community in, and then you don't see them again until the next black play the next year, and that always bothering me because we want those people to be part of an ongoing conversation, so how do you find that line in terms of, so there are two questions. Yeah, I mean, I think hopefully in my response maybe I'll answer, try to answer both of them, but I think it's value added. You know, what do you put around the show that hides the value of the show, right? First off, I think we pick plays that mean something to the people that we wanted to mean something to, right? We are intentional about representing the stories of the people who we want in our audience, so when they come to the theater, they're gonna find value in the show, right? You know, just with next to normal of the show, we make sure that we try to tell with the text and the things that we did and the people who we spoke to in the beginning and the salons and free forms, like what she was talking about, what we call the free forms. This play is about mental health and disability and how disabling the effects of mental illness can be, but we also represented with our multi-ethnic casting that this doesn't only affect white people that can sing, right? Like. Like. Like. Like. Like. Like. Like all of us and, you know, and it also, but what I thought was really, really great about our production was that we actually told how it affects the family, right? Like our play really focused on how Diana's mental illness affects her family and how, and then expand from family to community and how we as a community can help each other, those of us on either side of it, right? Help each other learn and cope and things like that. So we, in our post-show conversations and our free forms or in our salons, we invited, every Sunday, we invited a different group of people to come in and we let people know. So, you know, one week we may talk about how do you take care of the caretaker, right? So after the show, right? We hope that the show has value, but after the show, hey, if you're a caretaker for free, we're gonna bring in a counselor. We're gonna bring in people who, who they themselves are caretakers. We're gonna bring in people that you can talk to. You can have a conversation with, let the play be the icebreaker and now let you, now here's this value added experience and you got it all for free. And so that's what we're hoping that will keep people invested in the theater that we are putting on work that they believe in and that they wanna see, whether they know it or not by the time they get there and then afterwards we're providing them the opportunity to talk about it, to talk with other people who specialize in it and try to find a whole bunch of value added things that they can experience. So I hope I answered both your questions, maybe, but not, but that's why she's here today. Yeah, I mean, I think that's such an important question and it's something that I definitely think about a lot. I mean, I think one of the things that I try to address that, one of the ways I try to address that is just trying to think about individuals not in sort of two dimensional ways, like a black person coming to see maybe the convert by Denyger Greer that's coming up. Okay, so demographically you're black but what are you psychographically? What are your other interests? What else do you do? I'm also a community organizer and so I use a lot of those strategies and I'm right now incorporating a lot of the information I'm collecting in our database system but really doing one-on-one meetings with community members and finding out what else beyond the sort of obvious connection to the show they're sort of interested in and not being afraid to say, so like for you for me for you, we're bringing in the Sejong Society. We did a happy hour of that with them. They're a group of young professionals, mostly Asian, American who work around, we're hyper interested in North Korea-U.S. relations and so of course that's a great fit for this play but we're doing a holiday show, it's a comedy show called The Pajama Men and we're doing a young professionals night so we're going back to them and asking them to come to that as well to see The Pajama Men. So not just assuming, oh you're Asian-American and you work on North Korea so you're only gonna be interested in plays about North Korea but thinking about, okay well they're also 20s and they're 20s and 30s, you know, they're young professionals so there's another way that we can engage them so I think that that's partly it, just trying to think about people as not in these sort of like monolithic ways but thinking about their whole individuals with a wide range of interests and connections and ideas. Please. Just on that value issue because I think it's one of the biggest things that if you take value as on a continuum between cost and quality and you actually maintain or improve quality and eliminate cost, you actually optimize value not devalue it. I think that was really at the core of our thinking that value was what we got the most pushback on and got the most discussion of and we really feel like we increase value not devalue it by having quality work at no cost. Can we talk about some of the specifics here I'm fascinated about how financially it works in terms of percentages, can you talk up to that? In other words, how much of your running costs were the ticket prices and did you have a lot of different funding aside from this initial piece of funding that allowed you to do it? Now you're on your own so talk to me about it in terms of advertising. I mean, I'm putting you on the spot I'm sorry. I'm glad to be on the spot, I just can't say I'm curious as to how it works, do you want to be able to keep the lights on and do everything? We did, but really just like these touring programs that had a third party pair where the audience goes see it and some host. Sure. We just extrapolated that to our main stage where we find there is definitely a shift from unearned and the relationship between earned and unearned income. Of course. Significantly, but you're right. Our organization in the year before we started this had about 18% of our million and a half dollar budget came from ticket sales. Right, 18%. So it wasn't the main driver of the organization, we don't proselytize that everybody should do radical hospitality, but it worked for us and it did change who was in the audience dramatically and shifted the financial model slightly. Sure. But yeah, what Jack had said to me when I was talking about it was, you know, that was, what you remember that resident, he was just, that wasn't our main source of income. Anyway, so why not just go the whole nine yards? We actually decided to do it before we ever talked about how to pay for it. And do you find that the advertising has different implications from people that need to be given so money might spend on advertising or something? I would say that in the two years we've done it, we definitely shifted the way we found audiences. And I think that the numbers have just gotten better in terms of how the composition of the audience, but I think Amanda corrected me that this year, I think where we actually didn't do as well and who our core audience used to be, the traditional theater goers that go to other theaters is where we had the drop off. That's not terrible because that's probably an easier group to go back and find. Our demographics got better in terms of our aspirations and the theater going loyal audiences that we had have dropped off this year over last year and the year before. So we just need to work through that again. Jack, did radical hospitality help at all in fundraising? I don't want this to, it's just a different shift. Yeah, so we still see this by the same amount of dollars from individual gifts, but our individual donor base has tripled, right? So we're seeing way more people giving smaller amounts, but still giving what they can. So what that means for me especially, as I'm looking to usher in the next class of theater makers and theater goers, right? The fact that we are having people donate and we triple the amount of people who can donate. So now as they continue to believe in our mission and we continue to grow them over the years, we just triple the amount of people that we can get money from, right? So in an ideal world, the amount of dollars that we're bringing in will grow with them, right? A lot of our audiences now because of radical hospitality are under 30 or they're under $25,000, right? But then hopefully we won't stay there, right? Hopefully that we will continue to make more money and we won't die before we get there, right? The aposapocalyptic world that keeps reminding us about won't happen yet, right? So then we will be able to grow that base of support and turn those, oh, here's just five bucks, and here's 10 bucks. We get them in the culture of giving right now because the tickets are free. Five bucks becomes 15 bucks, which then becomes 30 bucks, which becomes 100, then it comes 1,000. Well what I'm thinking was specifically like if you went after, and I'm gonna use Minneapolis as an example, you go after these three ends up there. You go to three M and you say, hey, people who don't normally go to the theater can now come if you'll support us with our radical hospitality program. It is a difference, may I give you an honest answer? Just on institutional giving, the shift was from giving to support programming to supporting the users of the programming. So if we go to something like three M, which has a very specific East Metro residency, and we went to them and said, not only give toward the programming as we have in the past, but give us an increase so that people from these communities where the employees of three M live can come and we got a slight increase. And so we've throughout gotten some new funding, which is not about making plays, but about subsidizing audits. So if I'm hearing both of you all right, it sounds like what's really shifted is the story that you can tell to your individual donors, your corporate donors, and your foundation and government supporters, right? That it's a story that's unique. Clearly, we're all really curious about it. We all want to see how it works and what the results are that you get. And so it sounds like what you're doing is asking more people to support in a different way as opposed to just starting for that ticket. I think the idea is paid for, right? Like something that's probably the idea that will work. Even programmatically from last year, there was not a title anybody heard about of seven. And we did do next to normal this year, which had some track record and sort of on a percentage basis, didn't do as well as those new plays we did last year. All right. I'll tell you what it is. That's kind of a lobby engagement issue, which I'm getting really fascinated with, particularly the idea of the paintings to solve a dramaturgical issue. I think it's just wonderful. Do you engage the artists in that process? Did the director of the show, was he part of that discussion or the playwright? You know, this is actually a great set. How are we doing a time? I get to have 20 minutes. Okay, all right. We'll open it up again, but maybe this is a good opportunity to talk about your work with Song and that moment when he talked with the cast and how that sort of created. Another thing that we started to talk about, which is a united sense of purpose, a shared sense of purpose between the generative artists and the staff and the board and the audiences in the work. Yeah, so what we've done in the lobby is we've created a sort of exhibit of the work of Song Beak. Song Beak is an amazing North Korean dissident artist with an amazing personal story. He was originally a propaganda artist with the North Korean regime. And then he escaped North Korea in early 2000s and made his way via China to South Korea. Through that journey, he lost his father and his mother and his sister. He was basically trying to escape to look for food. He spent some time in the labor camp. And now he creates these amazing, as you'll see sort of these satirical paintings kind of criticized in the North Korean regime. So I first heard about him because he had a smaller exhibit here in DC at an art gallery called the Dunes and the Washington Post did a write up and the managing director came to me and he's like, wouldn't it be great if we exhibited his work in the lobby and I called up his manager and we just started talking and we thought not only do we want to display his work but because his personal story was so connected to what's going on on stage for you, for me, for you, why don't we try to bring him in and be sort of in residence with us for a while. So he was actually here with us, him and his translator, he doesn't speak any English, and his manager were here with us for a week and a half doing a lot of sort of creating a shared sense of purpose around the show both internally and then also acting as sort of a surrogate for the show externally. He spoke, did lectures at American University, University of DC and other colleges around the area. He took meetings with like the ambassador for human rights in North Korea. He took meetings at the US Institute of Peace, he did workshops with the Young Playwrights Theater, all the while talking about his personal story but also helping us to sort of promote and get people excited about the content of You For Me For You. What was really interesting in terms of how the artists were involved in this is before I did this I checked with Mia and showed her the work and made sure that she was cool with it being associated with the show and she was really thrilled. But when Song was here in residence it was really great because he spoke with our staff, he came to a staff meeting which created kind of a deeper engagement among the staff about the importance of what we were doing on stage. He came to a board meeting and spoke to the board about sort of his story and his artwork and then he also spoke to the cast which is really a magical moment. I think that I don't perceive to speak for the director but I think from what Yuri has said about that is that the cast was having sort of a hard time. They were sort of head plateaued as far as their emotional connection to the show and so we had during, this was during previews, Song come and just speak about what it was like to grow up in North Korea as a propaganda artist and to be starving during a famine and to be in a labor camp and what it was like to try to escape and to fail and then to try again. And I think that the cast really sort of awakened their senses to sort of the real world implications of what they were presenting to make it real for them. It's not just this sort of magical, fantastical play about North Korea but it's actually something that's legitimately happening right now in our world. It's like a very serious issue that's affecting lots of people around the world. So I think that connecting the visual artists not just in showing their work for audiences but thinking about a way to engage the visual artists with the artists that are creating work around a similar theme or similar topic. I think that's an example of that working really well. I think that answers your question. It does, yeah. And I would presume that the audience members have an emotional connection to the environment of the piece before the play even begins. Did you find that to be? Yeah, that's ideal. I mean, you'll see the television screens out there. They're not on right now but we're playing in a loop, a sort of six minute documentary about Song's life. We're just talking about his life and how he got started as an artist so people can sort of watch that when they're coming in. And I think it peaks a level of curiosity. I mean, you walk in the theater and you see this huge picture of Kim Jong-il dressed as Marilyn Monroe. I think before sort of like, what is this? We also, we also sort of have publicized the art exhibit as it's open to the public as long as the building's open and our building's open every day. And so we've actually got a sign outside and we've actually got people coming off the street. They see free museum art and they sort of walk in to start wandering around which I think is really, really great introducing people to the space and hopefully we try to get them to buy tickets to the show as well. Just so you know, thank you very much. And I think Jocelyn, you mentioned this but I'm so curious about the community bloggers that you were talking about and also the clack, right? The clack group that you have. And I'm just, I'm wondering about your methods of approach, like initial approach and how, and I think you did talk about that a little bit but did you just expand on how that initially came to be how you initially, you know, reached out to especially to these community bloggers to have them, you know, talking about what you guys are doing? Well that was actually during, during a season before Jocelyn was here. So from what I recall and Pete, maybe you remember some of this too. You know, this was, Rachel, our previous connectivity director had lived in D.C. for a long time so she was really familiar with the neighborhoods. But you know, I mean, she did your basic research of just getting on the internet and figuring out, you know, where are those conversations happening? And then it's not a mystery to just email people and figure out, you know, hey, you are the human being connected to this blog, can I have coffee with you? You know, and just talking with them about the way that, again, there's a shared sense of purpose, there's a shared sort of value system between what the artists are trying to accomplish and what people out in the actual world are trying to accomplish as well. You know, so it's not much of a leave to just say, hey, I think we're after basically the same thing. Let's get together on this. Particularly if you have something to offer them. If you're like, here, I want to give you this experience so I can cost you anything and here's some additional stuff that you can offer, you know, your constituency to sort of, again, add value to what you are doing anyway. But Pete, that term, clack, was initially your idea. Well, it's just stolen from French opera. It was like a very pejorative term when the devil was having a contract renegotiated, would go and hire people to clap enthusiastically performances, so the rates could be talked on. And the initial clack members were recruited by Rachel and sometimes me and sometimes other people just hanging out in the audience after show or in the lobby after shows and looking for highly animated people. This goes back, Zelda Fitzhandler told me once that when she was recruiting the initial board for arena, all she did was look for the most expensively dressed people in the audience. That still works. We just looked for the most activated people in coming out of the house and said, so did you have a good time? Why did you have, have you been to Willie before? And eventually about over three or four month period, about 12 people kind of self-identified in that way and that built the core. And yeah, and you know, as Jocelyn was saying, it's not a fixed group and I think it would be very bad if it became a fixed group because we need them to be sort of outsiders. So there's gotta be addition, subtraction over time. But that's how it could start. Thanks. You are a quarter tilt. We, I'm an actress express now and we've actually still in clack and happily use it on a regular basis and it's great idea, we have a wonderful group working with us. Jocelyn, I was really interested, you mentioned your database about how you're collecting this information and categorizing it and what tools you're using. Yeah, so, we've got some kind of an organization-wide sort of initiative. We use Tessitura for, but Tessitura is amazing. Like it does so much more than sell tickets. You know, you can store documents, you can attach pictures to constituents, you can search, you can add attributes, you can use it for fundraising. And so, traditionally in this organization, it's been mainly used by the box office and by development. And so what we're doing is incorporating other departments into Tessitura so that we can all have the same information. So we're working from the same database system. I know that literary, the department that Miriam runs has just put all of their playwrights and that information into the database as well. So right now, I'm working on, basically the connectivity data historically has mostly lived in like probably hundreds of Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. And so it's been very challenging to sort of, like reaching back to people that we've already engaged with. Then I have to look through like, 56 spreadsheets to get to the next six. So it's sort of maddening. So right now I'm trying to, one by one, sort of put all the information that we have about people that we've worked with in the past into this database and then creating attributes for the constituents. Like, were you a blogger? Did you receive a connectivity comp? Did you redeem a connectivity comp? Did you participate in a panel discussion? Did you help organize a house lights up event? Did someone from the connectivity department have a one-on-one meeting with you? And then because it's synced with all the other data, I can also see, is that person a donor? Did that person buy tickets to the show? Is that person a board prospect? So that we're sort of all, we all have the same information in the organization. I hope to be able to, once I familiarize myself more with the databases and can do, to be able to really use that as an evaluative tool to actually run sort of almost move management reports to see if someone is initially, gets the show through a connectivity initiative. How do we engage them further? Are they coming back to see a show? Are they making a contribution? Are they coming to a special event? Are they being a postcard distributor or being a site for a poster display? So, yeah, that's a different side. Great, yeah, exactly, thank you. Yeah, I'd like to talk about a technology that Jason asked me to share this with you. We have talked about ways to connect with our audience in new ways and we at Actors Express have been experimenting with a new way to create lobby engagement and engagement with the playbill and it's using an app that does image recognition and so we've created an app called the Theater Plus Network and what it does is it recognizes, here's a playbill from Wolves, which is Actors Express and this app went downloaded. When you view the playbill through the app, here, Freddie, our artistic director, it's hard to see but here we go. We look at the image and we immediately can... So we can engage here with lobby posters, we engage with the playbill itself, with the advertising in the playbill and we even can trigger actions such as called box office, go to the website. So this kind of technology, does anybody here have a smartphone? I already downloaded it. I think your audience does, too. And this is a way that we can take a look and engage the audience, connect to the audience directly on their mobile screen and it gives us a new tool, a new tool to reach out to the audience and to engage them both at the theater and I've had people who say, oh, I love this, I take the playbill home and show it to my friend. Freddie talks to me. The difference, he was showing me the different images on one page, like if you go to Actors Express here, you'll get the whole rundown on the whole season or if you go to like certain ads in the program, they give us direct links to your advertisers as well. And can I ask, was it a local tech, what was the tech company that... I've created this. Yeah, I did. The theater plus network. Theater RE. With an RE, yes. Theater plus network, it's in the Apple store and in the, of course, it has to be organized through the server side so I have to work with Actors Express. It's also in Atlanta now, the Alliance Theater is all their playbills are activated, the Atlanta Symphony, the Atlanta Opera and the Fox Theater, which is a presenting theater, are all activated. So all the playbills, the idea now is that one app, we're developing a group in the audience that go to the different areas and they're using the app at the Symphony and at the Opera and at the Alliance. And so we're beginning to see that pool of people that are coming together to have that experience. And we've even done things where it's not about the specific show image, like he's got one set up that's on a $5 bill, you can just show the $5 bill, put the $5 bill in your camera and then you get the Actors Express stuff pop up. So you don't have to be walking around with a Wolves Playbill in order to get the information. This is a great example of another super stealable idea. No, no, are we at time? We're about five. Okay, let's take maybe one more pose. Yeah. So I have a question about the logistical implementation of all these ideas, because these are all amazing ideas. Ooh, does it? Because for a lot of us who work at smaller companies, is it largely driven by marketing? Is it largely driven by artistic? How does it manifest? I'll throw this to Jill in a second because I imagine McFlitt is a different case. But for us, we've got a department called Connectivity Granted. It's a one person department. But this is actually something, a department that we essentially replaced our old education department with because we just had, during that 30th anniversary season, we had to come into Jesus' moment and we were just like, you know what, we're not making work that's appropriate for middle schoolers, so why are they gonna build it? Yeah. And so we just devoted those resources to engaging with adult audience members. And then like Jocelyn mentioned, I mean, you've got like armies of volunteers and staff members and board members and just people who believe in what you're doing to support you. Yeah, I mean, because I am a department of one, I mean, I have a couple interns, but you know, I try to engage the other departments in the theater as much as possible. And I also have in the dramaturge, I work very closely with the dramaturge of the show, you know, I have the CLAC, which is about 18, 20 people. I have a volunteer core of people who just sort of want to like do random projects, but don't want the commitment of having, you know, the CLAC. And you'd be surprised when you're, you know, sort of engaging with community members and organizations, how much that collaboration can take the load off of you. Like the Korea Economic Institute panel I mentioned, like they basically organized that entire thing. Like we just sort of provided them the space and some materials to market it. So I, when I collaborate with organizations, I try to create a, you know, a shared workload for organizing events, so that helps. You know, ideally in the strategic plan, which I just created for connectivity, like the department will grow and will hire, you know, connectivity associate level position, because it is a lot of work for one person. But cross departmental collaboration and the collaboration with volunteers is the way that I try to make it work. Can I add a tiny point to that? I mean, because I think we, you know, we went through this consulting process with through the EMC innovation grant program of this. And I think this notion that connectivity is a separate department is really, for us became in a way the big thing that I think we struggled with, that it wasn't a subset of marketing. And at the same time that it wasn't just an extension of dramaturgy, and that it somehow lived between those things and became a kind of cross departmental function. There was a point in our strategic planning at Woolley about four seasons ago. And this is actually where Pete was the head of our strategic planning effort, where we basically said to ourselves, all the important innovations for our future lay between departments, not within individual departments. And it was a big moment for us. And I have to just say that the challenge of addressing that has been hard. And it's really, in a way I think connectivity is so now well digested within the organization and so I think supported or more and more supported. But I think in the beginning it was a struggle to sort of carve out the territory to say that this notion of a sort of intentional audience design is really not the same as getting butts in seats. It's a different goal than marketing. And sometimes within a revenue driven economy, which we haven't gone to the radical hospitality thing yet, we're thinking about it. We do a lot of things along those lines. But within a revenue driven sort of goal, sometimes they're at odds with one another. And it was really important to recognize that and to sort of grapple with that. And I think it helped move us forward, but it wasn't easy. And I wanna make sure that we can do a chance to respond to that from the point of view of mixed blood because I get the feeling that it's not siloed in the same way for mixed blood. Yeah, no, because radical hospitality is ingrained in the fabric of what we do, it becomes everybody's responsibility. Everyone is charged with living up to that boy's decree of making it last forever. In the audience engagement work again, is tied directly to radical hospitality, which is tied directly to everybody's job. So it becomes everyone's responsibility to make sure that the salons happen and that the tweet seats and the tweeting out from, so it becomes everybody's job, which is kind of weird at times. Who's picking up the ball, but we have found that we all like holding the ball. We're like, maybe it's just because the Vikings aren't good, so they need somebody to do it or something like that. Yeah. I get the feeling we should probably go out. So I just wanna thank Ronnie Tinole and Jocelyn so much for those of you who are joining the Collaborative Literary.