 Okay, so if it's 7.25 we should probably put this on for you. Yeah, I got it. I put everything. You're all set? Yeah, I'm all set. As soon as we're ready I'll start. Yep, you're on line. You're on line. Yep. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Okay, we're starting in about four minutes. Thank you so much for being here. This whole day has been so extraordinary. We have gotten to pick the brains and are going to continue to see me pick the brains of so many wonderful people who are working for gender parity and parity of the disenfranchised in the theater. Some of the people who are with us today who are not going to be here tonight so I'm going to mention because we were so thrilled to have them join us. Lisa Tierney Q from Waking the Feminists, Carrie Purcell from Playbill.com, Linda Chapman from New York Theater Workshop, as well as a number of organizations. Laura Penn and Barbara Wolkoff from the staff of SDC, Wendy Goldberg from the O'Neill Center who is a board member of SDC, Robert Schengen who's on the Council of Dramatist Guild and start the Women's Planner Rights Initiative for National Theater Conference. Randy Reinholtz and Jean Grous Scott also from National Theater Conference. Sherri Eager who is, oh and I did not introduce myself, did I? Because I can't refer to the coalition until I introduce myself. I'm Shella Moonin. I am the co-president of the Women in the Arts and Media Coalition. Also on the board of the League of Professional Theater Women, but primarily a theater artist. And Sherri Eager is a special advisor to the board of the coalition and also in a number of these other organizations. Susie Evans from TCG and American Theater Magazine. Martha Waite-Stackabee and Judith Binus who together did the Women Count studies and continued to do them for the League of Professional Theater Women. Anna Landy from the Steterre Foundation. Marie Kospitz from the Tolman Foundation. Amanda Feldman from History Matters Back to the Future. There's a lot of work going out there. Marilyn Henry from the Preservation for the Society of Theatrical History. Pat Addis who's also a special advisor to the board of the coalition and also on the board of Girl Be Heard. If you don't know about these organizations, you should. They're all doing really important work as are all the people who are about to talk tonight about all of the things that we discussed today. This was pulled together this day by myself on behalf of the coalition and Martha Richards on behalf of Women Arts. As an extension of a conversation we had in Toronto last spring that was brought together by the Canadian Equity and Theater Movement. We're going to hear from them in a few minutes too. And I am just going to do that much of an introduction and refer to all the people that you're about to be introduced to who we're going to talk about all the many things that got discussed today. And Martha Richards, take it away. Alright, so I was one of the first ones who got to speak and my name is Martha Richards. I'm the executive director of Women Arts which is a non-profit organization that's been going for 20 years ago. I founded it 20 years ago and it's a long time. And our mission is to increase the visibility and opportunities for women artists. So I've written a howl round piece that is part of the series that's running this week in conjunction with this gathering. And so Sheldon has written a piece for it and several of the other people in the room that will speak later have written pieces for the howl round series. But mine was specifically about finances because I've been after doing this for 20 years and seeing how all over the country most of the groups I know that are collecting the data on gender parity have a heavy volunteer component. Non-profits in general are underfunded and women's organizations and organizations for people of color or any other marginalized group tend to be even more underfunded than the other non-profits and understaffed. And so there's a big burden on the people who are trying to do the work and a high burnout factor often. So the question I'm starting to raise is there's two things. Looking at the statistics on women in theater in particular, most of them have not changed that much in the last 20 years that I've been doing this work. So it's a little frustrating to look back and say, you know, we've done a lot of great work. There's been a lot of women who've been mentored. There's been a lot of individual artists who move forward thanks to our help and help with some of the other organizations. But the statistics for the field of the whole remain poor. So as I'm now on Medicare, as I'm getting older and starting to think like, what can we do to make the field better moving forward? I'm really considering the question of what is going to take to move the needle. And my own sense is that our movement needs to be staffed better. So in my HowlRound article, I posed the question, if you had $10 million to spend on gender parity right now, what would you spend it on? And the reason I ask that question is because it forces you to think about the infrastructure of our movement. Like, what is it that we actually need to accomplish? What kind of staff would it take? I mean, when I was running a regional theater and we were going to put on a play, the first thing you think about is, okay, do I have enough money to do bad cast size and that number of people and how much will the market cost? We thought about all that stuff and we would plan the shows and we would plan the season. I don't feel like we're doing that as a movement. And that's what I'd like to see us spend more time thinking about. There's wonderful initiatives all over the country. Can we pick ones that we think are the most effective, replicate them, pour money into them so that they move forward and up? I think that would be the right thing for us to be doing. So in my article, and this is totally not a particular number I picked because then you could say, okay, for that amount of money, often when I ask this question to a crowd, I get kind of dead silence. Nobody leaps out of their seat except for Elsa Rayell who had a suggestion. Usually nobody says, yes, here's what you should do with the money. Usually there's kind of a silence. They're thinking about it. Maybe it's too much money to even think about because we never raise it. My own suggestion is, and at those same meetings where people can't think of an idea, invariably somebody will come up to me after a meeting, some bright energetic moment will come up to me and say, I would love to spend my time working on gender parity, but I need to have kids and get paid and be health insurance. My rent is really high. So I feel like there's a lot of women out there who are either already working on it on a volunteer basis or who want to spend more time working on it and they can't afford to do it. So my thought is, we had $10 million. Could we somehow set up a network of groups where there would be, maybe it's 100 women get $100,000 each or 100 organizations get $100,000 each, and they use that money to build our movement and build the infrastructure that we need. So that all over the country, women and artists will know, oh, if I have a prop, if I want to figure out about legislation, I can go to this group. If I'm teaching a class and I want to have more of a curriculum about women artists, I can go to this group. If I am producing plays and I want to find more women playwrights, or I want to find actresses of a certain kind, or if I want to focus on women artists of color, they'll know where to go. I'm sorry. Yeah. Hello. I'm sorry. Okay. I just want to hand it over to you. So that's kind of my pitch. And so what we talked about today was a lot of the women in the room had great ideas of things they were already working on, and so this evening's forum is sort of to have a brief discussion where they can present their ideas, and we'll talk about them more in the future. Yeah, I pretty sure will. Julie Hemricus of StageSource in Boston. Well, I was part of the Toronto group as well, and really thrilled to be part of today and to have conversations, give you a little bit of background on the work that we're doing in Boston and New England. StageSource is a 30-year-old service organization, celebrating 30 years this year, as a matter of fact. And we have hundreds of individuals and over 200 organizations as members of StageSource. The year and a half ago, we started a gender parity task force, and so we have five different committees as part of the task force, one for data collection, one for, I wrote these down so you can remember, a strategy group, a university group, because Boston has a lot of colleges, you all might have heard that once in a while, and so how our students being trained, how our faculty responding, what's going on in that area, we just sent our survey about that today. And obviously the mainstream group, which is actually doing really interesting work, we have a thing called the standing O, so companies that meet three out of five criteria, and the criteria are a woman playwright, a woman director, a women, mostly women design team, a story about women or predominantly female cast, get a standing O if you meet three out of five of those. And we also have a data group. The data group came out with a report last May. But what we're talking about, and what I think you a lot about, because I also teach arts management at Emerson College, so I talk to a lot of students, and I'm thinking about what to do with this next generation and how to inspire them, is that this is a social revolution. And we all know this, 2015, we're not going back, right? Twitter is not going back to the bottle. Facebook isn't going to never not matter. Change can be affected by an individual more than it ever could before. And gender parity, that it hasn't been recognized or fixed in my lifetime, is just heartbreaking, and it has to stop. And our next generation needs to understand that this isn't just about gender parity, this is about social justice and equity. And it's part of a larger movement about that issue that everyone needs to care about, needs to worry about. Theater needs to and can be the leader in this revolution, but only if we start recognizing that we need to create the change in order to be the leaders we want to see. We can't keep expecting the status quo to be okay. In equity, being a status quo is not a right in 2015. So, I really believe that things we want to be positive, the standing o, what states your status, it's all positive. But the backbone of it is, it's a social revolution, I'm really proud to be part of that. It gives my life meaning, and I think it's going to give the work we're doing, meaning, and I can certainly figure out how to spend $100,000. I want Mark this idea to be the core point of everybody's great time. What we have to talk first is, but that's what we need to aspire to, big. Yes, go big or go home. So that's my two cents. Beautiful. Melanie Brooks. Melanie Brooks for New Perspectives Theater, 50-50 in 2020, and on her shoulders. So, talk this afternoon about a lot of the issues that many of you in this room have talked about, at least for the last 10 years, and those of you who know 50-50 in 2020, came to being in 2009. And yet, within that conversation of sort of rehashing some things or trying again to figure out how do we pull all this together into some kind of cohesive activity, Julia, personally just wrote for me, mentioned this notion of social revolution and the idea for radical change, and I'm all, I love radical change. But it reminded me that I sat on a two-year study group, you know, Change Initiative, sponsored by Art of York, the Alliance of Resident Theatres, called Theatres Leading Change. And it was right, it was funded by Rockefeller, and it was right after the economic downturn, the crash. To look at, and there was a real call, and there had been for a long time, but the economic situation made something actually happen, and the call for a paradigm shift in the way in which nonprofit theater is thought about, funded, and operated. And they hired art action research, which is a consulting firm that does really, very progressive work. And we've worked with Ann Donning, Julia's company has worked with Ann Donning, the League of Professional Theater Women is also now working with her. And one of the things that we wanted to look at, and I'll tell you that there's a report, it was a summer report, on the process of theaters leading change. That's on the Arts Action Research website. You can go read it all about it. But the fundamental, the kickoff notion was that the 501c3 model has never worked for theater companies. This was grabbed out of the air by Ford and Carnegie when they were establishing the regional theater movement in the 50s. And the idea that they would create these top-down, corporately structured theaters that as long as there was a ton of money coming from the government and from those two foundations in particular could function just fine. We could all have debates about the innovation of the work and sort of what they were replicating. But still, it was a model that could function. But when the money went away, when the compact was broken, and I love that language, which I think you use, somebody use today, the compact was broken in terms of the funding being available both by the government and the foundations. It became ridiculous for anyone to try to operate a theater privately funded under the 501c3 model. It is a corporate structure. It does not, in any way, show or allow for the many, many ways in which theaters actually operate. And one of the premises that Anne and her partner, Nellie McDaniel, talk about this theater is an essentially entrepreneurial enterprise. And in four centuries, that's what it was. And then until we got the 501c3 model in the 50s, suddenly it was done. And they... One of the other problems that happened in the 80s with the loss of funding was also the idea that there was a serious in this country move against the idea of non-profits anyway. That there was a move to eliminate them, that nobody believed in them. And all that was failed in our for-profit, there was a fetish for, quote, small business for profit. Those endeavors are always capitalized. Non-profits are always subsidized. So even in the language, we are at the bottom of the veil, right? And I think too that when we talk about Pairing for Women Theater Artists, we're talking about economic justice and paying jobs and all that. But in reality, certainly in New York, and I'm guessing that it is this way around the country, that women are not underrepresented at the bottom of the strap. And all the non-paying or low-paying jobs, it's all women, right? And that we are for all the other barriers that in Kinder Women's Freedom to really be creative and live the lives they choose, whether it's family, children, whatever, that we are stuck in this model of a 501c3 corporate-driven format that we then have to jump through X number of hoops in order to be able to to get the funding, you know, that someone gains to give us. And that if we were up from that model, if we really were looked at as true entrepreneurs, if we were funded in the same way that for-profit small businesses are funded and supported by the governments, by hedge funds and all kinds of investors, then we would see a radical difference in how the work gets done and that we could really begin to talk about eliminating the economic inequity if we had theaters funded in the same way that other small businesses were. And so the report does not get us to that point because it wasn't really the effort of the two years, but there were two important findings that we know just from the theaters that sat in that room, this was the sort of top level of nonprofit theaters in New York, not the big Broadway theaters and the sort of or the top level of off-off-Broadway and the lower level of off-Broadway, but it was all nonprofit. So that within that group of people, and there were two groups sitting at the table, there was an enormous range of ways in which these companies operate. Flexibility in their structures, in their management, in the way in which they program their season that is not accommodated by the funding rules, right? But they somehow, everyone was managing to do it. And also that every theater has a value system for the work that they do. And it is not measured in dollars and cents. It is measured in many, many different ways. And that when we force small theater companies or even just nonprofit theater companies to conform to a consumer market values, that we miss 90% of the story, of the impact of the value added to the community. And we can do all the studies we want on how we know that nonprofit theater is part of the economic engine of New York City that we know that the ancillary economic benefit, so even if the theater artists aren't being paid, the restaurants and parking lots and everything else are, we know all that. That's not really getting through. We've known it for a very long time. So in terms of reinventing how we structure ourselves and then we can then go out and advocate and fight for changes in the way in which funders look at us. Changes for the way in which the government looks at us. And so this was my aha moment today was to say, I know this. I've known it for years. I was advocating it as were many of my colleagues in off Broadway long before our New York decided to do this two year study. Now I left that exercise severely disappointed that the very first thing that happened after we were done with that was that our New York put out their funding requirements for the two grants that they gave and nothing had changed. It was exactly the same. It still fell within this very narrow corporatist definition. And so I sort of went on my way. New perspectives of celebrating its 25th anniversary. This is our 25th season. We've had from the beginning of our mission is implicit supporting works by women and writers of color that were all inclusive. And so we just went back to doing the work right on a small level that we do. But we measured and supported hundreds of women theater artists. Many who have been able to go on and do paying work elsewhere. So this sort of reinvigorated me when Julie brought this up. So this is my thing for for us is that we get back to this really really pushing for big change. Right. Next is Sheila Skye from the Associated Designers of Canada. So the first of the Canadian internal person. I love you New York Canadian cousins. So I'm all I wholeheartedly agree that we need seismic change. But until that seismic moment occurs I'm not content to do nothing. And I'm working towards incremental change. And this attitude largely comes from what happened to me in my own career. Back in 1990 I was Associated Designers of Canada in administrative role. I came back in 2010, 20 years later as the executive director and I discovered that many of the chief complaints and roadblocks that the membership had were still the chief complaints and roadblocks that the membership was still suffering. And asked you know that same organization which is this year turning 50 in 20 years made very few inroads. And I talked it up to the perfectionistic tendencies of design artists and that they had been looking for something that would be cataclysmic and had overlooked the opportunity for incremental change. And so we decided that we would try and use a collective bargaining process to create some gender priority improvements. And what we had noted is that set design and costume design by and large take quite a long time to do. Lighting design, sound design and projection design at that time were quicker, quicker jobs. And what we found was that costume designers were typically the lowest pay even though their work was on par with the, their workload was on par with the set designers who were among the best paid. And when we looked at our membership we discovered of course that not all but the majority of costume designers were women and not all but the majority of set designers were men. And so we went to our bargaining partners, professional association of pay and theater. And again it was in the height of the it's not really the height it is it was in the bottom of the economic pattern. And we said we need to make this change, we need to make it in a way that does not destabilize the industry. Putting my members out of work is not my goal here. And so what we agreed to do and it was ratified by our membership and I am so proud of them is that the lighting sound and projection designers took small cuts small incremental cuts and over the three years we brought up the costume designers so that they are based who was on par with set designers. And we allowed that to happen for a few years and then we went back to allies to see what had happened because of course based using all the things negotiated fees, what artists are actually paying. And what we discovered is that by and large we had it successful that costume designers were indeed being paid now and sometimes even exceeded what set designers were being paid. And then I went back and looked at it not merely by discipline but by gender. And what I discovered is that not only had female costume designers have substantial increases but that their male costume designers had actually the lowest fees at all and they had had the largest improvement. And at first that was a bit surprising and secondly was a bit disappointing until I realized that the other change we had made so that we could ensure that costume designers were fairly compensated is that we had made it now that a fee was declared for each discipline. Prior to that men were typically hired as costume designers were hired to do set and costume and we're essentially throwing in costume design for half price sort of thing because what the heck you only have to replay once, right? And then so that was devaluing as a whole. So it was not sort of just total rainbows and unicorns scenario that I could hope for but that instead of collateral damage which was the one thing really feared to stop getting work that would mean too much for the theaters we actually had collateral benefit and that we had created equity based on job description as well as on gender and we're continuing to look at these on a year by year basis and at this point the slight hit that the three other disciplines took they have since managed through negotiations out to the previous level so with only a short term sacrifice they were able to create this long term change for costume designers. I can't tell you how proud I am. It's so beautiful. Thank you. And now Rebecca Burton from the Playwrights Guild of Canada and Equity and Theater is going to talk about there were so many curves as well as so many other research studies that were reported on today. Yeah so topic of research studies. There have been many now. Australia, England, Canada we just researched at least our latest one in 2015 and of course lots going on here in the United States the Boston Stage Source the San Francisco Bay, of course the Count all of these studies pretty much tell us the exact same thing. So if we look at artistic directors, directors and playwrights women account for somewhere between 17 and 25% of the productions so we've heard all sorts of reasons for this for example there just aren't that many women playwrights or directors so of course we see that so I work for the Playwrights Guild in Canada our membership is 50-50 but last year in terms of our productions 25% of the play stage profession in Canada were by women playwrights so we find that artistic directors directors and playwrights are on the bottom in terms of representation for women and again this is a global phenomenon it's not unique to any of our countries we also found that the stats are much lower of course for people of color so more like 6% in Canada are women of color very low across the board we've also found that the theater industry is very gendered so the behind the scenes support roles, dramaturge stage managers, general managers tend to be overwhelmingly female by 70% designers as we occurred set designers lighting, sound is the biggest in Canada, 85% male so there's this real imbalance we've also found that it's completely related to money so the more money a theater company has the less the representation of women and typically where women show up the most is in TYA theater for young audiences which of course has the least prestige, the least money all that good stuff so yeah that's what we say we've also looked at colleges and universities because of course these are training grounds like why is this happening and we found at least in Canada and I suspect that it's similar around the world sometimes the programs are 70% women and 30% women especially in acting programs but the plays that are produced are overwhelmingly written by men even worse than the professional industry we're talking like 10% so you have these huge populations of women trying to train for theater who get no opportunities like at all and then you get out of school and you have no opportunities and of course it's a catch 22 situation so then we looked at theater audiences and again we find pretty much across the board depending on the theater and the place it's between 60 and 70% of your audiences are women they're buying the tickets they're going to the theater but the theaters are not programming for them can you imagine what the theater turnout would be if you actually programmed for the people who showed up to your theater I don't know, we'll have to try it someday same with we keep hearing about theaters dying and we're not getting the audiences and it's the same with people of color and other martial arts communities if we started programming work that actually would appeal to other people perhaps they would come to the theater and that would really change things so especially I think it's the same in the United States and Canada that white people are not going to be the majority soon so we need a cultural representation that reflects that fact and that might help us not only economically but even the art form, artistically innovation, fresh blood all that good stuff so all of these research studies they're very important because they give us the proof of what we've known all along so we can say no, this isn't anecdotal this is for real and we really need to do something about it Ramona Astroski from Hell Round who has also sponsored this entire Ginger Parity series this week that I've curated that started on Sunday and Martha's article and Julie's article and a few others that's who's going to be speaking later was up today and it's just a lot of great stuff you should go read if you haven't had the jazz to see it yet yeah absolutely so we're so happy to be running this week of content we're thrilled to be live streaming on Hell Round TV right now I'll just take a second to remind everybody that all of our platforms are totally open all of our content comes from the community so if you guys want to write a piece for the journal if you want a live streaming event you want to put your plays on the new play map go to HallRound.com it's all laid out on our participate page so that's a great place to put your awesome work out into the world so we've been talking throughout the day a little bit about the role of journalism in furthering the Ginger Parity movement so we had a representative from Highville here earlier who is talking about what what she's doing she has written a lot of content for Playville about women specifically on Broadway and in that community there is a week of content that she curated over the summer specifically about women on Broadway as well as a long-form piece about work-life balance and raising children while being a theater professional which is definitely worth checking out as that's all on Playville I'm lucky enough to be joined by someone from American Theater Magazine who consistently publishes information about Ginger Parity they recently put out a list of all of the TCG member theaters that had parody in their current season so I recommend you guys check that out there was a piece of literature company that where they interviewed the leaders of those companies about what initiatives worked for them and what they were doing so that's definitely worth looking at American Theater Magazine and all around actually have both also in the past two months or so put out some material about a new initiative called the Jubilee which was started by Kirkland down in Austin, Texas but it's really sort of a grassroots initiative aimed at getting every theater in the country to commit to producing only plays by women people of color playwrights with disabilities or LGBT playwrights in the 2020-2021 season so this is conceived as like a really radical intervention to sort of totally disrupt the narrative of what we see on stage and spend one year telling the stories that we aren't telling enough so I recommend you guys check out the material on that initiative and consider joining the organizing committee because like I said it's totally grassroots and open to anybody to get involved Thank you So next we have someone who I look at her in her art is her advocacy and she has been working for so many years as a fierce fierce woman theater artist Lisa Volpe Thank you So I founded the LA Women Shakespeare Company in 1993 and came out of this whole movement to have women and girls voices on stage in the world and I was kind of mentored into this group by Carol Gilligan and Kristen Linklater because they included me in Company of Women which was an international company exploring what if the women played the role of the all-male company had originally and I played Henry V after three years of exploration that gave me lots of tools Now I started my own company about the same time and I made it a mandate it should be all female behind the scenes and on stage and that it should be no more than 50% white and so we've done that for over 20 years and in the last few years gender bending is now trending internationally which is fantastic and with the support of the Shakespeare Theater Association which is a large organization of artistic directors and managing directors that my advocacy work has focused on for over 20 years because it was an all-white male dominated organization it worked very hard to open up the color lines and also to year after year shows superlative reviews excellent box office international reviews and resonance from a very small room always a little bit like the Wizard of Oz you know we can do everything and along the way lots of foundations said look out at least you'll get burnt out here's another grant application saying I would like to just have $15,000 a year that I could split with one other woman to help in the administrative roles of putting this work forward never could get that support was told it was a gimmick it's clearly not a gimmick now we're going back to Charlotte Cushman and we're going back to Sarah Bernard and we're going into the past and into the future so just a word about why I'm putting the yoke down for a while it may not be the Los Angeles women's Shakespeare company in the future because I wrote a solo show touring it around the world Shakespeare the Alchemy of Jember which explains the humanity that is revealed when a person has a great text and is supported by an audience that is wide open and listening and what happens when that person is resplendently and prismaticly heard through a great playwright well more and more and more this is being done so I'm traveling around the world with this solo show and what's happening is wherever I go, Indiana, Michigan London, Vancouver, Ontario trans people ages 14 and 15 are coming out of the woodwork that don't speak gender binary that are not of that time that are not white, they are a gender blend of ethnic celebrity where new people are being born onto the planet and we owe them a beautiful resplendent vision for the future so whether this is the women's theater caucus for change or a bridge towards seeing the humanity and the potential in every person certainly we have to uplift the situation for women and especially women of color in this country certainly we have to, I think we're all involved in that in some way finding funding is essential to preventing burnout both with the older people in the room who have given service for decades under a system where most of us weren't paid anything and to teach the next generation of young women not to give it away for free so what's happening is now universities all over the country are hiring me to come in because for instance NYU has 1200 undergraduate theater majors most of which are women very few enrolls to those girls so they invited me to do an all female production UCLA had a second year MFA program that only had one white girl in it and they only had two men in it so they hired me to do a gender flip revenge strategy now here's what I want to say about intersectionality when the men played the women who were raped they had to stop rehearsing they had to take a moment and say I never felt that I couldn't just dominate the situation punch that idiot out that I had no tools nothing could have humanized those young men more than walking a mile in the shoes of a woman and the women who were playing the rapists several of whom had been recently wildly raped themselves were mostly looking for love lines of empathy so they could understand how their loved ones could do that to them this was my friend my boyfriend my what was that rape how is he still walking around this campus my perp and I'm supposed to be up here I'm losing my voice so what I was very impressed by was the women who gained voice through walking in the shoes of another person in this case male it could be Jewish in Shiloh it could be black in a fella it doesn't matter what you're playing as long as you're looking into the eyes of another human being go I have you you are me oppressive systems don't work for us so we had a bit of a conversation about whether we can at this point even say that we're women without reaching out to our trans brothers in between A and B who were being asked to age 8 girls to this side of the room and boys to that side of the room to celebrate the human potential and move better than the shape-shifters in the theater world to say anybody can do anything to put your mind to it so my final point about positivity in the world just not to deny how hard it is to get the work out but that there is a cycle from woman to woman psychological violence that I have been in for 20 years as women rise up and are then pulled down by women which I think we could all make a difference in and we like to call that pipeline teach them how to get into the world without being shamed shut down or put into a situation where they have no voice and don't expect to get one in there or don't show us how many women of color showed up today and how was the value of these panels from defying in your life how was it in your bank account how to change the mind of your board and get some money to the tables so you can write more grants yourself do you know what I mean so I think the more that we really alive with each other don't distract one another from the bigger picture which is bridges to humanity that fully include the female voice children's voices the theater has three root words the place where you see God it's in all of theater, theology, therapy it's all where you see God so how do you define what is the spirit of community what is our responsibility to the planet and to each other to lead the healthier system what could we do with radical love that doesn't tear down our brothers that are also working in the theater and so I applaud all of us for showing up and you for putting this together and I do think that for the first and foremost they need support at the heart at the courage level we have to tell each other thank you for what you do it gets better it's better than it was and also have really big visions for the future about how we can make a difference and it does make a difference I'm here to tell you it makes a difference it has made a difference now one of the youngest people who was part of our conversation today so Teresa Lotz who is a playwright and composer and works for works by women the organization started by Ludwika Villahauser who is also here for some look today so you gave me a perfect segue but nurturing at the heart I'm under 30 years old I guess and I was so lucky in 2012 to be kind of taking it under their way and Ludwika here and if I had not happened I did an internship with VHT Aptical and works by women if that hadn't happened I wouldn't be here I wouldn't be sitting here trying to advocate for women in theater that mentorship relationship was so integral to my success as a human being and my success as a young working theater artist and I fully, fully believe in advocating for every single 20-something year old person who's in theater to have someone like Ludwika in their lives, someone like Melody these people who have taken tons of women underneath their wings and just been like listen we're fighting a fight right now and we need your help and you're the ones that are going to keep fighting and it's so important and it's been so empowering being here and just thank you for everyone that is making this happen for my generation I'm going to walk out we have a kind of unique fight in that not only is this part of it there's also this issue of intersectionality that was brought up very eloquently we are so imbued with so much information in our social media age that it's really difficult to separate what's actually a problem and what's people crying about if that makes sense and it's something that I personally am really interested in in trying to see how we can bring these different movements together I mean this year especially with the Black Lives movement and with the Black Lives Matter movement and with the trans movement there have been huge strides forward and I found at least in my own circles a lot of feminists have kind of been afraid of embracing those things as part of what matters to us as well and I think in my opinion in order to reach the under 30 crowd we have to embrace those things and to mentorship and intersectionality under 30 I think I've heard everything start the total conversation there were three people who are here tonight who were not able to be here during the day so they're speaking for the first time we're getting to hear them for the first time today but all three of them are very important the first one I can't tell you how much you were talked about today and that the women's voices festival in Washington DC was talked about as a model it can be done in a positive way we're so grateful to have you here Ned Barnett I feel like a bit of a mealy mouth I've come from my grandfather raised eight girls in Murfreesboro, Tennessee and I was about 35 years old before I realized somebody was treating me the way they were treating me because I was a woman because I never fought anybody had a choice I was just as important and right as everybody else in the group it has led me down some dark paths and some wonderful paths but most recently the thing that I have found is that I am thrilled that we're doing all the information collecting and we're putting all of that stuff together but I'm tired talking about it we're just going to do things it might not be the right thing it might not be the best thing but we're going to do things so I was lucky enough to be my day job my real job is as the executive director of National New Play Network those of you who don't know who we are we're an organization of over 100 theaters now that have a dedication to the development production and continued life of new works innovation and implementation for the new play field and it's been a great joy for me to land there because it sort of syncs up with my old philosophy and we've done a lot of things but we're going to talk specifically now about what's happened in DC which is where an NPN is based a group of the seven largest theaters in the DC market Arena Shakespeare's signature studio Roundhouse, Willi Mammoth and Bortz you think after all this time I can round this up those artistic directors are buddies they're six men and they get together on a regular basis they're friends and they have a great deal of respect for each other and they really do unlike any other theater community I've ever worked in there's less competition at least at that level for what's happening in the community they a few years ago had done a small Neal festival, they done a small Shakespeare festival where they kind of got together and went let's all do something on this theme whether they were had a wonderful premonition or whether they were just lucky as hell two and a half years ago they started talking about gender and women and women's voices and putting that on their stages about they brought in then a group of other theaters to talk about what they'd be interested in doing it as well here's the model it's actually kind of brilliantly simple you get far enough out in terms of programming that every theater that wants to participate can program in their own way at their own budget level their own mission of work by a woman all at the same time what actually ultimately happened where there were 58 world careers fully produced by women that played in a six week period in Washington DC there were nearly that many again events workshops, readings, panels discussions that happened about gender about power how we are doing the things we're talking about in terms of who is our audience, what do they want to see how do we empower students, how do we bring people together to have this discussion how do we get to the point where we don't have to have the discussion we are just now gathering all the information back but in round numbers there were almost 70 female playwrights that had their work examined, looked at not all of them fully produced there were more than 50 that had full productions there were also the staffs of more than 60 theaters worked together on the festival in various ways and we were able to raise a half million dollars in in kind of cash that the majority of went right back up into marketing for the festival itself and we're not marketing any of the individual theaters in the marketing the framework of the festival we're getting now audience numbers in we're learning a lot it is a model that we hope to be able to share we hope to see it replicated across the country and we are really interested in talking to people that are wanting to be a part of this it was an amazing thing that happened I will tell you the day that we had 25 of our playwrights gathered together for the cover shoot for American Theatre was truly one of the brightest moments of my life I was overwhelmed and didn't know what to do with myself they were from 17 to 70 they were in suits and curls and heels and cowboy boots and cut-off jeans and purple hair they were women who had never had a fight with these before professionals they were women who had had wonderful careers and they all were still upstairs but they also just couldn't be stopped and that watching that happen watching those young women talk to the more established writers watching writers who had seen each other's work for years but never been in the same room together watching all friends and people who saw each other every day all stand around and talk about the work and what was happening and how unbelievably proud they were to be a part of what was happening pretty special wow who's piece was out today and howl around is going to talk for a few minutes about her petition for arts funding being tied to parody so my name is Yvette Heiliger I'm a playwright and a producing artist and primarily a citizen artist that's what I call myself a citizen artist and I figured out early on that I had a dog in this fight for parody I didn't know it I started producing my own work just because I thought it was sexy and fun to do and I had no idea that I really had to be producing my own work until much later you know when I started seeking other opportunities and finding that the doors were not always open and the environment was not always hospitable for me so I'm fine I went about it I produced my own plays I'm publishing a book of my plays just because I don't want to leave the earth without someone knowing I was here so this is my second book of plays that I'm publishing and I encourage all women to publish but as you've heard from my Caucasian sisters already we get less than half of the opportunities of our white sisters and that's not a new story I'm the only African American person in the room and I think that's pretty representative of how we show up I don't know where we are I don't know why we don't realize the dog we have in this fight sometimes I think that people are just fighting for what they've got and they don't want to jeopardize it by stepping outside of it to fight for others I don't know what the situation is but when President Obama was elected or re-elected to office that was a blessing for my life in terms of this movement for gender parity I learned all about community organizing how important it is to fight for legislation existing laws protecting existing laws changing laws that would be great so I sort of found my voice and found a way to make a difference in this movement through community organizing and through fighting for change I'm a member of organizing for action and it's all about fighting for the issues that we all care about and it doesn't matter if you're Republican Democratic and it doesn't matter you're fighting for the issues that people around care about so those are skills we'd like to bring to the table in this fight particularly the petition I went on White House.gov and I was like oh petition I'll write one and I composed and put together a petition fighting for women for legislation and the petition wasn't perfect but with the help of the League of Professional Theater we got 719 signatures from all 50 states and I thought wow this is great it's very encouraging at least we got all 50 states so when I went to Canada I said that the one thing that I would do would be to do a new petition and to also look for precedents that would help us to fight for the funding and for gender parity and it was Gloria Steinem who sent me an email said well what about Title IX what about this what about that so she started putting ideas in my head to look for things that have already happened and so now I'm at the point where I found out about comply or lose your funding oh my god what a revelation I'm going to lose your funding maybe because it's rarely enforced but I think we can hold to the fire I can't remember the exact wording but basically that we would fight for legislation that would make parity for women of what's the word I'm looking for that we would enjoy the rights of other protected groups and that we would fight for legislation that included us and that organizations that do not comply would lose their funding I think that's really I guess that's it for me I'm a member of the League of Professional Theater Women 50-50 and 2020 the women's initiative of the drama skill you know I just went and looked for my sisters in this fight so that we could support each other so I feel like I've been sort of growing up a little and through it all thank you so much the person who's going to speak now and then we're going to do anybody can talk is actually the newest initiative it's so new some of you may not even know about it yet though many of us were on a panel for it just a couple of weeks ago the good to go festival Kate Camarata oh there you are I'm Nanuvi thank you so much for inviting us right, this is a new kids over blog it's a new festival it was founded by our founder and producing artistic director, Judy Zachi who would have loved to have been here tonight and she's traveling, she's on the road she had this vision of getting a producing platform and so all of these wonderful initiatives that are out there to actually put them together and try to get producers on board to make readings and actual productions happen she called me on board so I'm the festival producer and the literary manager for Good to Go which is really really exciting as a female theater artist as a producer and as a teaching artist as well and the DC Women's Voices has been really inspiring to us as I guess everybody else in the room so we would like to replicate what we've done on a national level so that's really our idea so the kickoff summit that we just had two weeks ago was an incredible success we have over 160 people attend and which was dynamite because as you guys all know if you claim the problem and claim it and there's recognition and then this community that we're all forming this community creates opportunity so I like what you said we all know the problem well now we're actually getting the engine and making it go forward which I find really really exciting so we're producing platform women producers although if guys want a producer we're not going to tell them not to participate come on board but to be like do rated work that's good to go and ready for full production so we're going to sponsor readings and we're going to invite different theaters some of the ones on board already go like the public Denver Center National Nucleic Network and to actually get these across the nation and full productions you know because if you don't have women producers or any producers what happens to your script stays on your hard drive and it never sees the light of day so that's what we're trying to do and I also teach theater arts at Stony Brook University I don't know mine which is why I could be here today and I have a lot of women young women in my classes and often at graduation they'll introduce me to their parents and they'll say things like you know it's so long because I keep telling my parents that I can have a career in theater and have a family because I have children and everybody knows I have children because I'm always talking about them a little do they know and it's like you know the obstacles the obstacles that it's very difficult so I want to do this as much for this next generation and for all of us and for the future wonderful talk is welcome to talk we'll get you first to announce but I'm going to ask you to come up here can we walk you up here? we can even help because I want to make sure that you're in the live stream and if you want to ask a question if some of you have already spoken we can easily stand up but I'm going to try and keep all of the people who are talking to this end what? no no no no it's fine by caps many years ago decided to give the money back to other women and did a play festival which I associate produced for her the professional older women's theater festival at the public which Joe Papp helped sponsor she's been doing this work for a long time okay a long time as a matter of fact I was delighted that Ludovica has mentored a young woman I think that is actually wonderful Teresa Locke's so yay hooray but one thing that has not gotten mentioned at all is ageism now this is I just turned a gait and on my birthday two weeks ago 88 I can't believe it even myself but I am 88 I find that even the plays that are done have as central character not a woman of age but of a side character's grandma or mama but the central character is not a woman of age the program that we did at the power festival this is worth a million coins of gold was the central character had to be a woman over 50 the central character I thought well we'll get 12 plays we got 15 fun plays now we did I'd say about 20% of them were women with shopping bags ok shopping bags women are ok these were not shoppers these were bag ladies the central character was a shopping bag woman and anyway we were able to get put on 33 plays half public I want you to know the audience was 99% women they adored the work they really really they understood what it was show them how to play with it I had a little 10 minute thing it was just it was a wonder please when you're writing your plays think in these terms too this is this is incredibly important it's another piece of the intersection I understand how many women I can't even begin to understand how many women have just given up because they cannot get roles after a certain age they just they just are not there I was at a staff party after a production at Queens College where I got my masters and this woman who was the wife of the producer knew every song and performed them beyond beautiful I said why weren't you working she said well I'm 45 I said what does that mean there's no work for me so what are you doing I'm studying computer to get a job this is where what's happening with the older women who can't get work they are they have to give up their work please think in terms of ageism it is such a a heart breaking heart breaking edition and thank you yeah you want to come through thank you hello I'm Jenny Green I came here from South Africa who I have worked with in a couple of different classes I am from Brooklyn so I managed to have this for a couple of years from which Astro Genius was the main surviving legacy and after that I started working with the International Women Artist Salon which is a multidisciplinary international organisation that provides numerous platforms within in all the arts and with them we do a radio show which I normally host because I escaped but that's a great platform for helping people to talk about their work and engage with other women artists it's very energising and very positive the founder is Heidi Russell and she will be here after the show to meet with people and we've also started doing an annual event called Salon Symphony where we we get obviously New York is a very international city and we get different women from as many different countries as possible to represent the work of a more well known woman artist from there the homeland that they choose to identify with on International Women's Day for the past four years and different venues do it each year in Dixon Place in Dixon Place on the main stage that's going to be our biggest mountain so far that's the right word should we talk about mountain? and we also in 2012 we started doing an event called Creative Lounge which was a day of promoting the health and wealth of women artists again it was multidisciplinary for women to platform to win in we had a gallery show we had kind of a makers fair we had workshops again to help women to present their work and to share ideas and to learn new things and skills and doing that again in 2016 on April the third which I think is around support so we're going to try and do it once one day we've not decided on the venue yet it might well be at Dixon Place so yeah part of the reason I only found out about me yesterday thanks to Vika is because Estro Genius has reached across roads because their original the executive director kind of stepped down so they had a slight vacuum in who was running the organisation so I was thinking that's an opportunity to maybe do something with Estro Genius because Estro Genius was founded it's a short play festival open submission short play festival but I was just thinking in New York it's kind of crazy that there is no broader women's theatre festival we have a fringe festival we have various queer festivals we have clown festivals we have women's theatre and I saw the marathon theatre edition about the what's going on in Washington and it was like why isn't that happening in New York there were so many great women's theatre companies here that should I think again in the conversation with Vika we realised that there's lots of people that are doing the same thing and we're all chasing the same ideas we all have the same limited resources so we should be working together this whole thing was for Martha and I was about bringing people together to learn from each other to connect each other up to continue the conversation and find ways to support each other's work and replicate each other's work and coordinate and publicise each other's work that's great half-baked idea but we're saying how what if one had ten you said million I said a hundred million I actually do that exercise for myself because sometimes it's not about money you know and so you were saying one option would be X amount of companies a hundred thousand dollars each and I'm actually wanting to think about it in a slightly different way which is why so it's a half-baked idea because it only came up from what you said beginning to beginning to beginning an idea I actually think what many of us need is a structure yes it's money but it's a support system a structure and sometimes it's space so if this supposed wonderful amount of money that we can imagine and want to imagine it is what we can make happen but I also feel that you could do that if you have an idea behind it so if there is a space if there is a support structure administrative help marketing the space where you do a radio show I mean the hundred million initiatives space all of it but also the administration because that's where the air falls short we're all trying to create websites we're all trying to do the social media we're all running around like crazy God knows what trying to do a hundred different things in our little corners as Jenny was pointing out which is also one of the reasons you said to put this whole everything that's going on but if there was a central place how we all plug into that I don't know because of course some people don't want to be involved in something that has to say it's like your company maybe is big enough but you don't need that but I know a lot of the initiatives in this room we're duplicating efforts and we're exhausted I know I am and I know most of you are because we all have this conversation and also if we want to effectively mentor people we need structure so and also with structure and organization and lots of people we have something called power because that's where the power comes into place it's in numbers you know what it is we stand, whatever it is we fall and meet and control every concept take a darling and don't do details but that's what I was talking about it's a concept and I think if this could come out what today was about I think we've achieved an enormous amount and maybe that's the next step in the conversation I'm going to go to make a place for melody I don't know the study that I had taught the working group one of the ideas that forwarded that there's been some preliminary work done on this idea which is shared infrastructure and that is companies that collectively individually no one can afford a real managing director an executive producer a casting department, a publicity whatever and that if you had like-minded companies who did it with similar missions or people who could get along well that there would literally be a shared infrastructure now the space idea goes so there's some preliminary information and of course the person that already did some of this work is Anna whose name has been mentioned that's right yes we need to yet again and what the space idea I think is also really critical huge but I came to New York in 1979 as a student at the women's inter-art center and Elsa but it was the building that is right over there that is now barely functioning 10 stories and the idea behind that was it was women theater artists there was a gallery, there were silk screen artists I studied integrated media arts there there was a whole program and again they didn't have the money to make it so and Marla was fighting an uphill battle and in the fight with the city over actually keeping this property and she had a plan for exactly this subsidized rehearsal space there was a theater there $18 million from HUD and the city fought her she spent the last 20 years in court knocking it right she spent so much time and so I think it's an idea that has come around again and there's a building sitting right there and it's 10 stories that's too big it has to be the 9 to 10 floors are still there some of the other people that have come in there but there's also space at the end of the block that our New York has a theater opening but also there's a lot of space around and we have no response for women theater artists it's incredible because you know these rework kind of spaces that exist now can you imagine where we could all be around a conference table, a common conference table and you get your own suite of offices so when you need it to be on your own you could there's one of the things that we recognize today is that these initiatives are all different and we need them all they're all doing different things they're coming at the problem from different directions and it's but that's an extraordinary idea yes, and the preliminary work is already been done yes wow, incredible and actually since she brought up Margo Lillerton and Elsa is here I want to say that the next play she was about to produce when everything fell apart and Elsa's play oh, really? my remarks actually started as a grant writing I didn't have any resources but I thought what if I created an organization that would do grant writing service and other kind of financial management stuff for theater companies run by women in my region of western Massachusetts so for the first 10 years or so that's what we did we had about a dozen companies we picked and then we just wrote endless proposals for them but it was very happening, funny that you're actually here I mean, it was working great we couldn't persuade the foundations to support us to continue doing it so we kind of shifted our but now maybe now maybe we were actually actually, I've gotten the idea for that partly from I think we worked for Roy Ashley Arts in California where we provided free legal services to artists and free grant writing would make sense but also there was a group called Pentacle in New York that was doing dance that was the model that Ann referred us to when we were 10 years ago so that used to be possible to do and to get funding for so we have a few things similar to that in Canada and I would encourage you to go look at these models and keep what you like and throw away what you don't yes, yes so we had something called the Small Theatre Administrative Facility which was subsidized by Provincial Arts Council primarily which was a service hub and it provided publicity, grant writing financial management and then also had a board room where you could meet with your board they would provide minute takers so you could participate fully in your own meeting and we had something similar also called Duo which was the dance umbrella of Ontario which did the same for the dance work in terms of creating collective space we have a few initiatives we have the Centre for Social Innovation which is a mixed model so it makes money but it also provides a meeting space below standard market cost for non-profit groups some of them arts, some of them other types of groups and recently they had begun purchasing buildings and they do it by selling community bonds so these are like regular bonds your interest rate is a little bit lower than what you could get if you were to go to a bank or a corporate bond but it creates this infrastructure which again is a shared workspace and then the last organization you might want to investigate is Artscape and Artscape has history of taking disused buildings and refitting them historical buildings sometimes in Italian regions in Toronto an old abandoned distillery area was refitted it now houses three theaters and homes about maybe 50 artists groups in something that has become a job hub for the city it was rocky and not easy to do where a lot of the money is coming for this type of initiative is from condo developers and it now has huge condo very often they want to build a condo a little higher than they're supposed to and in order to get the concession they have to provide community service states recently a condo did not alter their plans any but a student theater company in retrofitting a Carnegie library into housing a community cafe a gallery and two theater spaces theater offices so I would I would encourage you to go in the library I would say that none of them are perfect but certainly if you're trying to convince people that something is doable showing that it has already been done can smell useful small theater administrative facility they are currently changing their model to become more of producers training how they're not providing those services anymore so it's currently in the state of Flux probably I'll shake out I can't know at this point exactly the same topic just one more initiative in Canada that might be of use there's a group called CIPAMO stands for cultural pluralism in the arts movement Ontario and they just released a study called I can get it right thinking collaboratively acting collectively and it's all about shared platform resources that specifically go towards indigenous and they call it ethno-cultural artists but a brand new study lots of ideas about this because we're trying to do the same thing tell me about James there was also previous to the CIPAMO study the first step was Jane Mars and she released a study for the work foundation that was very similar shared platforms it's the Metcalf foundation it's online go read it great so this is another way we're all working we're in the same place I just want to address that there are initiatives like that in New York specifically around women there's nothing that's just for women but there's a ton of stuff happening right down the road the Hudson Arts it's going to be like a whole new city and there's an enormous amount of art space available downtown after 9-11 there was a tremendous amount of money put into that but what happens this neighborhood there's a lot of preserved there's Irish Art Center that's what 53rd Street is about and it's been put into the bottom of that luxury building the main problem with all the initiatives so far is that the companies that are benefitting from that are the larger companies they have the money to sustain the spaces once they get them and they're beautiful spaces but they are not they really are above where I think most of us are and it's not a collective sort of under one roof we do have art in New York but they are moving more towards what you said which is they've always been about making us into good little model 501C3 organizations they do not support the creation of the art it's actually sort of not even in their mission because they don't want to be in a position of judging their members output and so there's the League of Independent Theatre I think we should be involved with them I mentioned who was here earlier that was a new initiative that came about there's so many of them here and then you are here how long has it been going on? 2011 which was also trying to create a new model for the independent you can talk about that but they're also trying to do some real estate stuff as well and there is the last one to say it's NYFA the New York Foundation for the Arts used to do the administration but for individual artists they were funded by Ryan Feller they stopped doing that a long time ago but they were centralized, admin resource just to speak to you hi I'm Amanda Feldman I'm here with History Matters Back to the Future let me talk about that and I'll transition into LIT which is what Melanie just mentioned Melody, sorry History Matters Back to the Future is an organization that is very young and what we're doing is focusing on historic women's plays plays that were produced prior to 1960 because when you look back we have many many four mothers and they were going to have been recognized or celebrated and these are not plays that were written in a beast and no one ever heard of these are hulter prize winning Broadway productions of plays that are just not being recognized because of the pen and anthologies so we have a number of initiatives at the moment the organization has been focused on at the university level for those of you who heard me speak earlier my apologies for recapping but the first initiative is called the one play at time initiative where we're asking professors from across the country to dedicate one class period per semester regardless of the class whether it's an acting class or a directing class or a theater history class or a women's play and there are dozens of hundreds and then in addition to that as a almost a motivator to get professors from across the country to participate and to encourage the further study and engagement with these works for students we've created an award that we call the Judith Barlow Prize after Judith Barlow who was a professor at SUNY Albany and who was written three anthologies now that are both plays but it's a $2,500 prize given out to a student for a one act play inspired by the work of historic playwright we gave our first Judith Barlow Prize out this past May to a student from Norfolk Southern University Selina Flinger and she had studied Machinal and wanted to take that on so she created a play a one act called Pies on a Pirate Scape and it was beautiful so in addition to receiving a $2,500 prize the professor also received a $500 prize as an introduction to the students and who had a $1,000 on our prize as well but we included Selina in from Chicago to New York City and we did a reading of the play which we streamed up around and Kathleen Shaw Haunt directed it and I got a handle of all of the actors to act in it and it was a really special afternoon it was Sunday that May so it was a very special afternoon for Selina and all of us and we are so thrilled that the deadline for the Barlow Prize is coming up and we can't wait to see what's in it so we're really excited about that and the stream matters and you know I just feel like another so inspiring all day to care about what everyone is working on and I just I'm excited to be part of an organization who has like this little niche off to the side especially since in my day job I'm almost exclusively working with Living Clearance which is the nice sidebar and as an independent producer in New York City mainly working downtown I was a member of the Board of the League of Independent Theatres which Melinda mentioned started around 2011 by a gentleman named John Cransey and a few others and it its mission is unlike which is a 501C3 I believe itself this is a 501C6 and their mission is exclusively advocacy and so government advocacy real estate advocacy and actors equity advocacy because we're mainly working with the showcase model which is government advocacy and there's a whole slew of complications on that which I won't speak about here but in terms of real estate we have been able to secure spaces from corporations that are not using them and have created a rehearsal space grant out of it through the League which has been really really exciting we and then the League of Independent Theatres found to do something called the League of Independent Fund so we collected we asked independent theaters and any theaters who can participate to donate a nickel for every theater ticket spent and we brought together a fund and with it we're doing a whole bunch of some big grants to organizations who have big ideas to support those moving forward and it's exciting and one of the problems with real estate here in New York is that it's cheaper for a corporation to let a space go empty than it is to and then also in terms of occupying a space there's a lot of insurance questions and a lot of an individual's part time level it's really hard to absorb which is why the cost of maintaining a space in New York is really really difficult without the overarching structure or much larger organization there was also a community board initiative around theater space do you know about that could you talk about it since you're in that chair right yes there's there are a lot because of the condo development I'm tying things back that's important I'm missing things as they go along but the there are spaces whenever a condo wants to build higher that the community spaces I'm missing such as this exist but this city did a really terrible job of creating a database of where they are so a lot of them have gone missing or emptied or being used for or not sure what so there was talk at one point in time to work into tracking those down but I do not know where that district fund is that what you're talking about no the district fund had to do with I thought that had to do with rights rights in the broader so that's different just for the real estate developers who built those extra 10 stories and then put a room in the basement and no one tracked it is there a way to track this? I think there is there was talk about one of the city council members in terms of taking up that project I've since left the board of so I've kind of lost track of there is a database of affordable housing that's kind of integral to building isn't it and there is a database of that which the actors work on as information on this is a database of the community spaces that were created when builders were allowed to go higher it's slightly different and they should be available to art organizations to use but nobody knows where they are or anything we're ever really creating we got here tonight because Melody brought us here this is a community space this is a community space and thank you Melody for opening it for us and I just want to shout out that Steven Bergman at New York classical theater has had a donor buy risers and portable lighting on scaffolding and he's already made a deal for pop-up Shakespeare that's going to keep his organization because free Shakespeare in the parks open throughout the year and he's getting for free open spaces from real estate projects that are temporarily empty already done so if we needed a mentor I'm sure Steven can help in that way because real estate is expensive and it's sitting empty and he does have what he does have is portable track lighting and scaffolding and that kind of shared research as we talked about women's buildings and shared resources I need the truck with the scaffolding and the seating and the portapodies to show up here on this day and it's already one group of things that all theaters would probably need from soup to nuts and speaking of that I would actually like something else that did not come up today but was almost touched on when we were talking about younger audiences and getting them back into the theater the other flip side of that is getting theater into other spaces which I think is also really really critical in terms of how we keep the theater vital in the world now and so just throw that out because I don't think we have time or the mind space to address it but I think it's part of this conversation also which is where can theater be where can it go to get to people who don't normally go to the theater and don't realize how relevant the theater is or could be to their lives you want to talk? I just want to talk a little bit about action steps and I wanted to explain the structure that was created around women's voices we were talking about structure and not that it will work in every case but just to share how it came to be it's modeled a little bit after national new play network structure and how things get done there but specifically for women's voices the seven artistic directors who were part of that initial conversation got together and they agreed to each put $5,000 into a pot that's a lot of money for a lot of smaller companies but it could be $50 into a pot whatever and that was the money that they used to then to say how are we going to do this what is it going to be how is this going to work and they hired my then partner at and in PN and I we created a company called Fledding and Theater Projects and we then began to talk with them about what that structure might look like what the framework of the festival looked like and what it was going to take to get the work done because they're often two very different things so what we came up with was a three tiered system that had those originating theater artistic directors serving as our governing board there was a few months into our tenure a bit of a coup where the managing directors came in and said ok enough of you guys saying what are we going to do let us get in here governing the board became twelve because two of the theaters have managing director producer directing single paths so those twelve people became our system we then created task forces for marketing for development for programming and for education and each of those seven theaters gave us the head of their own department to serve on that task force right? could you say what the four task forces were? they were development programming which was in charge of all the ancillary work happening around the festival marketing, obvious and education which was a group of education directors who came together to talk about how we could have the festival have an impact both for younger and for older audiences through continuing education here then those task forces as needed as so there would have been seven people originally in that task force they then determined whether they wanted to expand or contract depending on the workload so at certain points other marketing directors from the other theaters were invited in to parts of it at certain points they narrowed it down and said these three people are going to make the decision but those were teams of like-minded professionals from all different strata everything from the theaters that were basically being created specifically for this to do a women's show in a church basement through those big seven and then the next tier was the participating theaters all those 60 plus theaters that were going to do something for the festival they each had to provide us and by us Flanagan the consultants that were hired one team member and that team member was responsible for getting information both into their organization and out of their organization so it really was we did this with a two person staff and brilliant that was in turn like a mentor she's brilliant it didn't take and with both Jojo and I being executive directors of other organizations there were times when it was overwhelming and there was a lot and there was a lot of times that it was just gathering the information and then putting the information back out so we're talking now with Hudson Simpsons and one of the things that we're learning as we think about how you might do this in other places is that you need to have a starting point right so like what they're talking about in San Francisco where they already have a bay area that's would be their starting point that would be their originating theaters so in the same way we had what we came to lovingly called the OTADS and the OMADS the originating theater artistic directors and the originating theater managing directors that served as our core the place that all decisions not they didn't make all the decisions but whenever we would run into something that seemed like someone needed to have a say because ultimately somebody has to be the boss so by having a bay area that can serve as that also when you talk about space those seven originating theaters every meeting we did we met with the OTADS and the OMADS at least once a month we met with each task force once a month and we met with the team members participating theaters originally once a quarter and then as we got closer to the festival it went to bi-monthly and then to monthly and then in those last few weeks whenever we needed pieces but it allowed us to create a structure that included all 70 of those theaters it also allowed the work to actually get done both going up and down what was your feedback on the festival when did you start like how long did it take you we were brought on at about 20 months and they were they had been working on it for a year in concept before then the fundraising really happened over the course of about six months and that fundraising just say over that half million dollars we talked about was almost equally distributed between in-kind mostly in advertising but also in some consulting gives and a lot of marketing gives and cash the bulk of the cash came from a grant from the district arts and humanities council they very smartly recognized the other thing I would encourage you to do is set up two at least two probably no more than three very clear measurable goals for what you want out of the festival we were charged with two things we were charged with making the country aware of the depth and scope of the work being created by women in the United States and making the country aware of the depth and scope of the theater scene within Washington DC school goals great but doable but things that were that we could point to literally on a weekly basis and saying how is this going how is this going we also very late in the game for I think all of us now hired a PR person we made a huge difference but really with two people an intern and another two part time people an intern and another part consultant this happens would you do it again so it's such a great question I would not and I'll tell you why I wouldn't one because those of you know that our role in the world premiere program has really kind of changed the face of how theater gets done across the country and I feel it's so important to do second and third productions secondly because we found that many of the companies within the 70 companies who did not normally do new work didn't really have the capacity or understanding to give the playwright the best possible outing of their play there's so many playwrights from across the country who were thrilled they wanted to be a part of the festival and then got there and realized that maybe this company was not the right company for them ultimately it was all a positive because the work got done and it got out there and it was seen and heard in those titles and now don't know about this thing you all need to this is the new play exchange within NPN it is an online platform for $10 a year any playwright can go in and set up their own profile and upload synopsis scenes or samples or the full play and then it's searchable we have 50% women on here already it's great if you're an organization $25 a year you can go in and put anything in and if you want to just see plays by women that were done in the women's voices festival you can do that if you want to see plays by women about global warming you can do that if you want to see plays by women about global warming they require four actors that have never been produced and two of those actors they can be 70 in african-american you can get there and work down literally that far there's over 7000 plays there's another database issue we were talking earlier in the day with the gender parity studies that the data is being collected in different ways we kind of agree that all the people working on parity studies are going to get together and talk about their computer stuff this is a thing that if you there's no more of that there's not any plays there's not any good plays by women we're calling bullshit and we're showing you how to find them if you don't know where they are all of the scripts from the festival are going to go up on the new play exchange every one that's being released and will be tagged as such so you can go on and get it when I talk to the folks at San Francisco and a couple of the other cities I've said to them think about having a festival that includes second and third productions at least because it's really important to have the opportunity to those theaters that want to participate before whom new work is I think it would be easier to sell second and third productions and also as Kate's organization was talking about that they've been gone through a couple of productions had their revisions and they're ready I would definitely open that door a little more I mean there's a bunch of things we would do differently if we were doing it again and I should say on the if we are doing it again thing we've had our first two initial host mortems, one with the otets and omads one with all of the participating theaters we're also in the midst of a big survey project gathering data about attendance and new buyers and all those kind of things so we'll have all of that we'll be publishing the paper we'll also be putting up on the website of the women's voices theater festival.org website a how to page that explains the structure that I just talked about we're hoping to share that and yeah it's all come important one other thing that one of the women who was involved with you was talking about a couple of weeks ago was that part of the mission and I thought this was so fabulous they really encouraged go to another play at another theater don't just see that one that's one of the things that we didn't do as well as we'd like to have it happened and we're seeing those numbers a little bit but that's something that we've learned that we'll like to share with whoever's going to do it next there is a better way to do it we did it with what was called the festival pass where you could just go in and put in a code and people were told the code but there wasn't a lot of incentive and we would do it differently we had a problem a tourist coming to DC to go to the festival where are these places and I was trying to just figure out which ones are near where I'm staying I think I could buy this up way or not that part we did not do a festival app and I would definitely do that because then you can stand on the street and go wow what's close to me the things we learned can I ask a question come up here and introduce yourself yes the new play exchange which is so exciting I'm on there what is the percentage of those plays that are by women and the numbers of women playwrights that have submitted online it's interesting the number of registered profiles runs right at 50-50 and we look at it five monthly and it'll go to 52 and then there's always a percentage of unidentified and there's a percentage that identifies non-binary but for the most part the men women number of profiles sits about the same men are putting up more plays right and we're looking at it we're one of the things we have very detailed data coming out of the new play exchange and we're going to be able to really give you some great figures about new work and how it's being done but one of the things that we're learning is that men will put a hot mess right men will put a play up before they feel it's finished men will put up plays that say I'm working on this play I really want to have somebody work on it with me hold on to their work and not put it up until and this is my own theory based on the numbers that we're seeing it's something we're going to try to tease out over the course of a couple of years maybe but yeah men are putting up more plays there's nickel numbered men women but men are putting up more plays which plays up there they don't care I would love to talk to you because I have a funny feeling that out of this we might be able to actually I'm not going to do the first of all but I have a feeling between all of us I think it's something that we can do to be a positive today but what I can say and I want to practice it with police drawing works by women for that we do list the productions that are 5050 in writer, director, designer so that means what I'm actually saying is if this festival happens I think we'd be the perfect organization to actually list the place and so there's a structure already in place and also in terms of putting the festival together I think we also have the infrastructure in terms of the designers the writers, the directors we really have hundreds of those names on a database we also have and I'm not saying everybody because I won't say that we're perfect because we're not we're trying to collect the information which is what I think is so important you know how do you know which show to go and see put your money where your mouth is I don't know which shows quality so that's part of why we were organized in the first place but the point is that if people start missing if we can train audiences to make a choice and to be discerning and if we can start looking at ourselves as industry people to go and look at those websites and say who do I hire oh and by the way I've got 10 more designers that aren't on your bloody website why aren't they? let's just put them on there let's just add them we're not trying to resist we just don't have all the information but more importantly which I think is something that people don't know about us enough unfortunately is that we also have a resource which is all the initiatives you know on her shoulders is on there history matters back to the future the league of professional theatre women women arts there's a huge resource of everyone that's out I shouldn't say a lot a lot of us that are out there between all of us I think we can manage it and the piece that I'm offering from works by women is to be a hub in terms of organization and in terms of getting the word out there or maybe organization isn't the right word more about databases more about information so information is out to us to say we're not on there or did you know about so and so or how about this design of fabulous works by women at all so that's kind of what I wanted to say because I know we're all getting and feel the energies like because we're exhausted right it's been a long day are we running out of time? I don't know if we're running out of time I know okay let's reduce ourselves at everything hi I'm Arlene and it's been so exciting hearing all this about all the organizational I want to remind us of what somebody said earlier about the individual reaching out and mentorship there's several women here who have been important in my life in mentoring and don't dismiss the power of what one person can do but I was on the faculty of the college Charles two years ago they put in place a season that was all men and I raised a big fuss and the next season they did all women I reached it when the South Carolina state legislators banned the campus READS program because of the book Fun Home I reached out to Janine Tessori and Lisa Cron and producer Barbara Whitman and they brought down the entire production of Fun Home to the college of Charleston a week after it was now made for the Pulitzer and I want to leave you with a quote from Emma little Emma's ten years old and she was in my playwriting class and we did an exercise where we talked about what we want to write about themes about what's important to us we all went around the room and talked about that and wrote lists and stuff and then that was leading into an exercise where they were going to write a scene and as they started writing little Emma looks up at me and she says when did women get equal rights and I looked at her and it just came out of my mouth and I said they haven't yet and she said really and I said do you mean when did women get the right to vote she goes oh well yes when did that happen and I told her and she said but they don't have equal rights and I can not yet Emma so on behalf of Emma I want to thank all of you for writing your writing here I just want to address the issue of the fact that except for that that we're all white women we may be some variation of white women but still we're all white women there was an enormous number of women of color working in theater in this town and I know that they just don't know this is happening they're not on our lists well they may well be but I know many of them because we work with them at New Prospectus and they usually don't know that it's happening so I think we have to a serious effort when we talk about databases is that we have to and also we have to say this is for you you're not a token you're not asking because we think we need for funding but you are part of the equation and you must must must come and I think we just need to do a better job I agree but I don't want to think that we did not this is how it played out as to them but there were many for every person who came there were three who were invited do you want to come back up and then we're going to finish very quickly in my opinion lead professional theater groups playwrights group meets two little black and they are as good at writing as the white group they are writers so they're there yeah just just if you teach in a college alright I love that commitment because I know I am committed in all of my classes I have 150 students which is overwhelming but I do teach I am a son I teach a lot of different temporary playwrights and I draw them from various sources but they have to know that this is available to them and the perspectives it's happening in New York doesn't have to be in New York but this is what's happening and it's really college professors that's the thing take for the future so if you work in a college make a commitment to that so obviously we could talk for hours especially those of us who are here all day I just want to at this point thank you all for coming thank everyone who participated this entire day which was amazing thank our Canadian friends who started this conversation contact information if I don't because we're going to share, right?