 Welcome everybody back to the Martini Siegel Theatre Center here at the Graduate Center CUNY in Midtown, Manhattan. It's Monday evening 6.30pm and traditionally in the days before the time of Corona, this where we did all our life events and now as lessons we have learned in the time of Corona is we will have life events, but also go back to zoom. And this is our first in a season where we also have audience coming back to our space but for tonight it worked out that we have on the great hull round a TV conversation. Tonight's topic is a very important one. It's a very significant one. It's a celebration of a book publication and not only that we believe in the power and the importance and significance of books. It's also some project we feel very strongly connected. We have three theater artists with us. It's a Mallory Catlett, it's Aaron Lenzman and Aberdeen Newell-Golden, and it's a book that is called The City. We make it together. We're going to talk about it. It is a project I admire very much. And it is a project that is participatory. And it is. Yes, Mallory, hold up there. And it can be bought online. Yes, and it's on a new reinterpretation of the 1000-year-old idea of a democratic participation of citizens and theater. You know, in the way started with the Greek theater and now we come to a contemporary art that really is a new way to reinterpret tradition to reconnect to it. And we're going to talk about it again, the city we make together, city council meetings, primer for participation by Mallory Catlett and Aaron Lenzman. It's a project that's over four, five years. It's now in a book form. It's an important project and we will talk about it. But first of all, hello to everybody, Mallory, Aaron and Aberdeen. How are you guys and where are you? Good. I'm in New York City in my apartment in Hell's Kitchen. Aaron, I'm on the campus of Princeton University where I teach part time. I consider this my fake background of a professor's office because I borrow the space. Fantastic. And Ebony. Hi, everyone. I am also in New York City in Harlem. Glad to be here. Glad to be here and I see that on you. You have your reference to the Lenape land and I think even so we are on the airwaves I think it is important to be reminded the land we stand on and where we live and work and and create. It has been a lot of talk about your project city council meeting. Who has no idea what it is Mallory in three, four, five sentences. It's not belay. It's not a film. You know, it's not a British play. What's the idea that this radical idea you guys came up with or Aaron when he walked in Portland, Oregon, you know, trying to do it get a theater meeting down and he walked into a city council meeting there but maybe describe it in a few words. Mallory what should I. Yeah, go ahead. So I was kind of dragged to a local government meeting in Portland. This is about 2009. And I was kind of obligated to be there because one of the council members in Portland was considering funding another project of mine called open house, which the Foundry Theater had done earlier in New York. And he said you should stick around for the local government meeting that's coming up because it's going to be super fun and I was like that seems impossible. And he said no this one's going to be really hot because it's about zoning. And I was like case in point. And so I felt obligated to I stuck around and what I saw turned out to be some of the most exciting theater I've seen in a long time I saw an older kind of neighborly guy dump a bag of trash in the council and he said, I picked this stuff every day in the kids zone. What are you going to do to help me clean up the city. The council member I had just spoken to said well you just created a public health hazard because it's a public meeting, and he said well you made my point better than I ever could have. And that shut down the meeting as a formal protest. So that was the germination point. And from there I went to Mallory and I don't know if you want to pick it up from here now. Sure. Yeah, so Aaron came to me and was, we just started talking about, you know, a performance that would be transcript based. So yeah, that's how it started I was very interested I do a lot of adaptation of like non theatrical material and so I'd never done a performance based on city council meeting transcripts so I was like, bring it. And yeah, we just started talking from there. I mean I think I Frank I could just sort of read the show section which I think, yeah, please really well from the book right who's published off the book. University of Iowa press is called humanities and public life. I'll just read it. Okay, one of the first big decisions we made was that was that the audience should perform city council meeting. If the piece was first and foremost about civic participation we wanted the forum to lead us to a better understanding of why we do and do not participate. So any part of our inquiry became what else time and language can do beyond telling stories through characters before city council meeting neither of us had worked with bureaucratic language or taken apart social and political structures. But there seemed to be a pathway in these dense and loaded speeches and procedures. We came up with three questions that guided us while making city council meeting. How could the audience run a performance together with no preparation. How could civic procedures which we normally associate with boredom and enemy, draw our attention to a web of dramatic and interdependent relations and power dynamics. How could we make a piece of participatory theater that we would enjoy, avoiding all of our experiences with that form in the past, in which we were often asked to join the make believe acts of a group of well rehearsed actors without any of their preparation. This helped us think about form content and context, and at, at the same time, if our show is about participation and democracy, how can the invitation into the space the kinds of people who shepherd you through it, and the way the script is printed, throw those issues into a complex relief, while still being legible to you, if you just walked off the street. Once we put these questions at the center of our process we were able to build the piece around them. The orientation a four minute video that asked the audience members to make a choice about how to participate in the performance as counselors who act as council members and speak. So we put most of the text as speakers who get a piece of testimony as supporters who don't speak but receive instructions and take actions, or as by Sanders who simply watch as they would a performance. The meeting a 75 minute procedure and acted by the audience with a group of trained staffers both artists and non artists comprised of local government meeting transcripts excerpts edited together with some of Aaron's original writing. And this section looks and feels a little like a poetic riff on a real local government meeting, and follows the structure of most government meetings we saw the local ending, a 15 to 20 minute original performance created with an an active by community members in each city where we presented the work. We often tried to get adversaries around a particular issue to cooperate on making this local ending with us. The meeting and splicing together bits and pieces of meetings in several cities, our theater work created an amalgam of the many places we visited an archetypal, sorry, an archetypal, an archetypal local government meeting. Our city we made each night by performing it. We did this by figuring out what affects situations and structures might be common to most us cities, even as the language and form change from place to place. Fantastic. Thank you. So if I recap it. Additionally, we go into the theater we pay money and we look at brilliant artists who studied all their life to move to dance or speak attacks that we think about what they say and we applaud and we go home this project. Audience members participate they come in a space you have a re enactment of a real city council meeting kind of the cornerstone of foundational meeting of a democracy. You follow the people for the people by the people with the people, and you follow formalities of a council meeting, and you ask audience members of all ages to participate in often a set 17 year old girl could read, you know, someone over 65 year old council member all the other way around someone reads was a very diverse audience. The work of remedy protocol comes to mind that opened up a lot of these work the work of me low row. His Moscow trial his Congo trials, and where he's he stages was real people but in a structured way, a performative presentation and theatrical experience for the audience. Fantastic thing we have also with us abony and I wanted to come to you also early on. You an artist you work at Princeton University as an artist in residence if I understand right from grants you got and you have so highly recognized. This is one of all the projects, and there are thousands, I would say 10 thousands in America, you know, artists who have idea what you do. Why do you say this is interesting of me for me. I would like to work with it I would try to implement it create perhaps even a curriculum around it. Yeah, this. Well thank you for for having me this evening. This process of participating in local government is one that is very near and dear to my heart. I'm often making work creatively and also strategically that looks to the people to the community as resources for social activation and social change. So this project, and really my role at Princeton is as an entrepreneur in residence, and I'm working with Mallory and with Aaron on how this this book and this methodology can scale up and go out into more communities in the arts communities beyond school communities to really reach in deep into our neighborhoods to activate folks that are wanting to work block by block neighborhood by neighborhood for local change. This is interesting to me because from a scholarly perspective as well as from a creative perspective, I am very interested in how government performs so from a performance studies perspective. How do systems perform and how do people as actors within those systems shift them. And so the idea of participation is is an activist imperative it's an intellectual imperative, and I also see it as a subversive imperative. You know, every day people who come into places into city council meetings and dump trash in the middle of a meeting are meant to disrupt some of the norms and the ways that government performs, and that we just kind of, you know, we have rested there. And the idea that each, each city council meeting and each variation of this is a new way of understanding ourselves politically socially culturally is one that's of interest to me. And I'll just say also that the idea of participating in local government being an arts enterprise is one that is quite is quite enlivening. Oftentimes when we think about the place of art in and social change we think about it from a nonprofit perspective. We think about it from under resourced perspective, unless we are you know talking about big commercial theater, but the idea of communities of performers of government performers in that regard of of those who are thinking about moving and shifting how we, how we make policies and practices that impact our everyday lives. For those folks to be able to sustain these practices beyond an artistic, you know, leaning is one that also is exciting to me and one that I want to help support and scale out into nationally all over the country. Yeah, wow, that that is a fantastic project. And I like the idea of this project so very much if I may say the very very first rehearsal for the rest actually happened at the Segal Center at one of our prelude festivals and the co curator Aaron has been with us and also Mallory many times but this was a very special one but I could feel it right away. The museum's galleries theaters are highly symbolic spaces, spaces with imagination of course the area, but they also fought over what do we represent in it. How do we use the time of the audience watching and what do we really present. I think, as we had the talk earlier two weeks ago was Michael clean and Corey Tamler it was the idea of their parliament, and this kind of socially participatory art project in theater and performance, where audiences are emancipated spectators as Franz Gehr said and you quote him often is of significance people perform democracy in a way but here they really perform it. Aaron, if I can come to you. How did you dream this up. I know you said, you saw Worcester group performance when you walked into that space but you said I would like to reenact what they are doing because it is so important. How did you dream that up and what, what forms what rules what methods what do you use to make this happen in different spaces it's hard to think that a Portland Oregon meeting works on taxes and in Florida and in New York. Tell us a little bit. Well, one of the things that has been great about first working with Mallory and then joining forces with Ebony to think about the different forms that this project could take is that I think all of us start with the assumption that there is a lot of knowledge power and creativity already in communities. There are a number of ways, like that I was interested in engaging this material. One was, I found, I was just started visiting local government meetings whenever I was traveling to teach or to perform with someone else. And there was always some moment that was relatively theatrical. It might be like a going away speech by a counselor in Bismarck North Dakota that we used in the piece, or churches complaining about only drainage proposal in Houston, and all the kinds of how the churches and how real estate was influencing public policy there. But it always came back to the communities that we were visiting, we're not places that we felt like we needed to give something to that they didn't already have. So I feel like the interest from all of us but that was a guiding point was like, there was a lot of language in the arts community about things like creative place making. And I felt a little bit of, I felt a little bit of a resistance in myself, because I often thought well there's already places there, and that even under the best of intentions. Sometimes projects that get headed under community engaged work or creative place making specifically by artists who might be white might be coming from New York or from a major urban center to another place might not already come with the idea that we have to recognize that the technology is already in the room. And maybe what our job is, is to put a frame around it so if I think about the Worcester group. Liz Lacombs phrase that always sticks with me is, she feels her job as a director is to put a frame around the actors lives. And in this case the actors we were working with were audience members, sometimes they were strangers to us or new friends and sometimes they were strangers to each other. Sometimes they came from different walks of life so the challenge with the theater piece was, what is the best most respectful most empowering way to put a frame around this particular place, using the tools of these transcripts of some of the texts that we wrote together, the idea of a local ending and adversaries. So one thing I could read real quick if that's okay is two page series of questions in the book. We questions you ask the participants or questions you ask yourself. These are questions we asked ourselves, and that kind of emerged throughout the process and that I think one of the things that led us to want to write the book was that there was still energy left in the process, but there was not necessarily the resources to make it like a fully done version of the piece because it was pretty, you know, we would make two or three visits to a city spends, I think in Houston we spent probably like 15 weeks there over the course of a couple years. The minimum we spent was eight or nine weeks just developing relationships and building material. So the book comes out of a desire to say this process happens. There are some mistakes we made and there's some things we got right. So this list of questions kind of emerged from that. So, just a couple pages. And it goes like this. As we worked on city council meeting, we came up with a list of questions that we think are helpful for theater practitioners and teachers to consider when making their own works. We also hope this can be of use to humanities research. How can you question not only the content or form of the research, but also the context and history within your within which your work resides. This is a beginning. There are more questions that might be specific to one or another discipline or situation. We hope these serve as a starting point. What sort of rooms or spaces should this performance or class or interview be held in what role does this space have in this particular city town or neighborhood. What kinds of performances already take place here meetings, book groups plays conferences sales pitches love affairs. What role as insiders or outsiders in this community impact how the work might be received, and how can we include community members or texts to reflect that. How do we account in our process for differences in geography, ethnicity, race, gender identity or other markers of power and privilege. What role does language play in this work. Is there anything about language that we want to show more clearly. How do we do that. How do we perform this piece. Should they be skilled in performance techniques. How will their level of skill impact audience members who may be asked to join the performance, or may want to whether they're asked or not. How do we make the script most usable by the people we think should perform. Is there theater jargon that where that we could do without. Is there another way to say upstage left. How does communication function performance, can people really listen to each other. How can we rehearse and enact listening, rather than simply representing it. What are we assuming and can we make our assumptions playing so that they can be improved upon by our artists and non artists collaborators. What commonly assumed rules about seeing performances or conducting field research or teaching a course might impact how people experience what we're doing. We need to address those rules break them or honor them or all of the above. How much money do we have, what are our priorities, and can we avoid exploiting professional art workers and non professional participants alike. And how long will this towel take to do right really does it have to fit into the semester or annual constraints of presenting seasons and academic years, and what other work already does or has done what we want to. So I have questions that I feel like we wanted to offer, because they were kind of in our brains as we were working, and then it found it feels interesting to ask those of colleagues and ask those of students. I teach a freshman seminar here at Princeton that recreates our process, but we look at meetings in Princeton town and Trenton and Hamilton, and then engage some of these same questions we figure out what kind of final performance to make. Jump in and just to say that there's the performance and then. So the book is really to explain what the performance was but it also. It also wants to invite a wider group of people who may, who may want to embody their research, right and to give them some questions and this is an example of some questions. We talk about our budget we talk about like Aaron mentioned a lot of the mistakes that we made. And it's really to kind of invite people to to think about how they might embody their research in a way and make what they're trying to do more participatory on one end so people who may not be theater people and on the other side theater people who might like might want to use their toolkit to, you know, go out of the theater right into communities so it's sort of working from those directions in. The book is really trying to kind of share what we learned the mistakes that we made, and that's those questions are really good example of that and I think I think like it was it was a performance piece that it was a book and then we're thinking about the curriculum and that is another iteration that that comes out of this so it's a project that like has has many iterations and that's just that's why we want to talk to you about it. I'll just say, I'll just say also the idea of everyday people who are not in the theater and not in the government being more, you know, in a space of embodying what they really feel what they really believe and leaning into that is something in the book, I think you know helps people to understand what does it mean to be in your own practice, what does it mean to be in your own practice and service of your everyday life your quality of life, your neighborhood your community. And so they're there are a number of entry points into not just the you know the book but also the the methods that come along with doing this type of work that are resources for everyday people. Yeah, it's a really it is actually a really great resource why admire that project also is the democratic process. It uses in producing the work. So many plays we see, you know, how about the idea of collaboration and we all have to, you know, work together and do something. The author the authoritarian voice one director, you know who it poses its will. Actors have to say what's given to them really polish a great Berlin director at the folks who actually runs it always felt bad about it and said I'm going to distribute text and actors can choose what they want to say. And I write sometimes for them they write something and they can also reject it that was his contribution because he said, how can I write a play what he says anti capitalist anti hierarchical. You know, but the way I be I'm paid more he says then he's tried several and I tell people what to do. So how can that be here in this project. And it's not only about the democratic process it actually shows it by the people and people participate I think it's a most like a Robin Hood that you know the arrow is split in the middle that goes into. I think what we need and we need participation or democracy. We need that people act, not only show what is wrong but we have to also then act upon what we do. And also then work truly participate. Just again to bring it a bit down Ebony did you participate as a participator in one of the console meeting and tell me if you did. How does it look like you come in a room everybody sits there or and then Mallory gives a talk and how long does it, how does it work how can we imagine a city council meeting. What happened to many city council meetings, not one with Mallory and Aaron specifically, but I have seen Aaron Aaron's class at Princeton, and you know perform their version of city council meeting, and it's quite entertaining. I would say, I mean, down to this popcorn for people and you get to everyone in the room gets to choose a role, and everyone. You know, of course there are people who are performing. I was an audience member. And, and some folks, you know, got up and gave testimonies about certain things that were happening. The part of the this, the process, the performance that I really lean into is the local, the local issue moment right at the end where, in this case Princeton students were talking about something that seemed to be very important to them. The topics seem to be very important to them and it actually shifted what I was feeling and experiencing in the room because we went from, you know, Professor Jasmine's, you know, syllabus to the things that are really inside of the hearts and minds of these students which I was just like oh this just got very deep I can, I can tell that we've entered another domain. And so, you know the idea from my understanding and from what I of course I'm very in, I'm very deep inside of the archive of this work because of the work that I am doing in service of, in service of thinking about how to build this mechanism and build an enterprise that really supports this work scaling out. I'm inside of the inside of the archive inside of Aaron and Mallory's work, but also inside of the, you know, many folks who have used this process of bringing in a legislative, kind of performance, Augusta Boal's work really speaks to me. And so the idea of using documents, using archive, using research as a way to more understand who we are as people and the systems that we move in. And that's that's where I've been. I will say though, the students freshman this is the this is a freshman course, the students capacity, I think to, you know, get inside of and all of these folks are not theater students are performers. And so, but their ability to get inside of this process and, and to bring this to an audience reminds me of the power of storytelling, and what happens when, you know, people have the space to be creative, regardless of what they do in their everyday lives. And I saw, I witnessed a leaning in among these young people in a different way because they've had the scaffolded syllabus and interaction with all of the aspects of the work and that's the kind of young people I want to be, you know, informing our government and informing our school systems and so on and so forth, those who have an understanding of building story sharing story as well as the legislative process. I also just want to say that I think that city council meeting, like formally, and you're asking about like how the instructions work. I think like one of the things is that the focus is always like how do you keep an audience is focused on the system. Right. I think this is like, this is what's really, and this is a sort of brektium thing right it's like, you know, how do we look at something and think that the acting style was, was created in such a way because he wanted the audience to think well, he did that but he could have done that right, as opposed to another kind of acting style where it just seems inevitable right that I do this, this and and we get pulled in and have a catharsis and everything, as opposed to like being able to sit back with our cigar and watching people make choices and thinking well it could have gone this way or it could have gone that way so I think that the for us. It was really like, all of the, a lot of the choices that we made were to keep the audience thinking about like well why did I make this choice as opposed to this choice and so it, it's, it's a lot about trying to because I think, I think I know when I work with students, what's really difficult is not this idea of a single person doing one thing or another but what's really, what's really difficult is how do we change systems, right. How do we change systems that is like one of the most difficult things questions we can ask ourselves right. And so I think the point of the way that we structured city council meeting was really like, how do we always keep the focus of the audience. How do we change the system, like it's working in this way how do I feel within the system right now, I've made this choice, why did I make this choice, how is this room, making me feel, how am I judging others, how, how is this bureaucracy empowering for certain people and not other people. So I think that that's, that's one of the things I think is really important in in how we kind of dreamed up a lot of these like rules and regs and trying to get people, because we did in a way people did have to say, you know, they did have to say what other people said, right and, but part of that wasn't just to like, because we liked it or we thought it was the best thing, but we wanted them to interact with and push up against rules and structures, right, so that they would have to sit there and say, well, how do I feel about this, what's going on with me internally in this moment because it's a it's a huge reason why people don't go to these meetings right they don't have to negotiate they don't want to negotiate all that stuff, right, in the face of the system and I think that's sort of like the that's why we gave people different options to sit, I made a choice they couldn't change their mind right I made a choice to do this, and now I have to like sit with that, and make sense of this based on how I'm choosing to be within the system and hopefully they're thinking about well, you know, yeah, it's a system that works in this way, it could work a different way and I think a lot of the ways that we, one of the reasons we use the mixture of city council transcripts but also what Aaron Aaron's own writing is an intercession was so that there was a little voice in there of questioning, why is it working this way and could it work some other way. So that's one of the reasons that we chose this kind of collage of different cities, and this kind of interceding voice. That kind of encourage the audience to kind of feel their feelings and think their thoughts and question what was, you know, these rules. I want to also just say that Mallory, you know, you got me thinking right because we're on the precipice of a big political year, a big voting year, and to think about how people come awake, you know, and how people come out of the some people are kind of apathetic about government and apathetic about these the decisions that are being made because they don't feel like they can actually make an impact. And that is why scaling up this work and these methods is so important not because we want folks to vote one way or the other, but we want folks to be active in their own communities in their own decision and so to, you know, to bring in the conversation, you know, from from different cities, and to bring in the capacity for folks to under more understand the system might, you know, move people to want to be more involved. Not just in a big political year but year round. The last thing I'd like to add is having you mentioned the local ending and the students. There was a sense. And I think this was true in the city so that the piece and I think the book reflects the order of the piece. There were a lot of rules to the beginning part to the meaning, and you had to follow those rules basically, or if you broke them it was really interesting, but not necessarily part of the plan. In addition, we reset the space and the ending in the cities where we perform the kind of more, the earliest version of the piece was getting these adversaries to agree to make something with us. Not to solve a problem but just to sort of ask I think Mallory talked about like what could art do that a local government meeting couldn't do in terms of illustrating how a community lives with itself. So, that ending gesture was often like much more theatrical it may have been kind of like, not super technically or design wise not huge but we often like reverse the facing of the audience. One city we have a forest of ficus trees that you walk back in on another city involved an opera at the top of the audience risers with the audience on stage. And then through other cities like in New York we made a fake standardized test for the audience to fill out where all the questions were philosophical and all the answers were correct. So it was a way of complicating what we had just been through by showing something that was kind of its inverse, and in Princeton it was very interesting because everybody could really get behind understanding the bureaucracy in the language of systems. And at the same time the system was the semester last semester was particularly hard here. And the, the, there were safety and protection issues around for different reasons. And the students really kind of had this moment of like, oh, we can talk about what we need to talk about here in a way that we choose. So they made a whole very short local ending. And the night that Ebony saw around how the university was responding to safety issues, and how that made them feel, and it really flipped things like it made that it made us all go oh that that language that seems maybe funny or mundane or boring or procedural actually has consequences, because they were, because they were addressing like the way that one of the systems that we were exploring which is the university was imposing itself on them. And they were doing it in a way that was like very different from what a council meeting does. Yeah, yeah, I think it is pressure Mallory mentioned it in that idea of an educational play a layer strip where your actors demonstrate they don't, you know, go on their childhood emotions you know and have break up. They demonstrate what happened as Brecht famously said, you witness and but bicycle accident on the street the policemen say what happened you show. And you show just what you need to understand and you don't need to know the life of with the driver of the car to understand and make a judgment for witnesses. The idea that it's democratic that it encourages participation in a society where it is endangered at the moment you say we are in one of the book comments you said you're at the end of an empire. We come to an end of the epoch of rights it is endangered. And I think to remember where civilization comes from to participate in the theater is on the part of social progress on justice. And in the participatory is of true importance and I think this is what makes this project so important. And also, so unique Mallory, again, for our audience who haven't seen it. How big is the room how small how long. So you walk in you get a script you tell them you go here and there I know there's a video screen. The pictures, you know, are prepared. How long does that take if someone wants to participate. That's the audience come in the evening others prepare for two weeks. No, it's a little bit night here. So, well, I mean, basically you come and you watch this orientation video, which, which we kind of ripped off of like the do you have that video. Yes, yes. Do we watch it. Yeah. Yeah. Here you go. So everybody who comes in at 7pm to see the show sees that. Yeah, it's modeled a bit after jury duty orientation. And this is from San Francisco so we worked with a local supervisor which is their equivalent of. Okay, so every audience member comes in the room sits on a chair, the setup of a council meeting and watches this video. Yeah, and it's on two monitors that are on either side of the council say good. Hello, I'm supervisor john obelos in the book of laws the Greek philosopher Plato list seven qualifications required for governing and for being ruled. The first four are based on what he calls a natural difference, the difference of birth parents over children, the old over the young nobles over serves and masters over slaves. And the fifth, Plato calls the principle of principles, or the power of those with a superior nature, the strong over the week. But for play though, the only one really worth discussing is the sixth one, the power of those who know over those who do not. So you have four categories based on hard facts. I was born before you. I was born richer than you. I own your land. I own you. I'm not as good as the two more theoretical pairs, natural superiority and the rule of science. I'm better than you, or I know more than you. Boom. You think that was enough. But here's the thing later list a seven category. It's something he refers to as the drawing of loss for the qualification of no qualification. In the form of government only a God could say democracy. So welcome to city council meeting where no one is qualified to be in charge, or everyone is God help us by joining us tonight. You'll be standing in for someone who was actually part of a local government meeting somewhere in the US in the last three years. You be as involved as you'd like. I've never been to a city council meeting before. Is that a problem. No, you do not need special qualifications. There are several ways to participate. One, you can be a counselor counselors sit at the council table and conduct the meeting. We have room for six counselors. To you can be a speaker speakers receive a piece of testimony that was given by someone at an actual city council meeting. Sit at the testimony table and speak directly to the counselors. If you want to be a speaker will need your name so we can call you up to give your testimony. Three, you can be a supporter supporters don't have to speak, but get simple instructions like stand up, applaud, answer your phone, or get up and leave the room for a few minutes, the kinds of activities that take place at any local government meeting. Or you can be a bystander bystanders are people who just want to observe. If you're a bystander will need you to exit the room until the meeting begins. Throughout the meeting there will be staff on hand to guide you or in case you have a problem. If you've got a smartphone, you can have a Twitter conversation with the meeting using the hashtag city council MTG. Once I make my decision. Can I go back and change it. No, sometimes city council meeting can seem like just a bunch of procedures paperwork. Sometimes there's no way to know if you're doing it right. People want so many different things. Sometimes city council meeting can seem like, is anyone driving this boat. The answer most of the time is no. If you look around you, you'll see you're part of a group that has never done this before. Some people get to city council meeting and go, wait a minute. I thought I'd get to speak my mind. I thought I'd be engaging in dialogue. You know what, you do get to engage in dialogue, but it's a dialogue that is already happening among other people somewhere else. You're just filling their shoes for a little while. Why, because we think it's more interesting. What you might feel like. Hey, didn't you just say I was in charge. The fact is, you are in charge. You're deciding at every moment how to participate. That's the kind of power. Isn't it. And maybe it's worth pointing out that our third collaborator Jim Finley, who's not here was our production designer, and basically did something that he likes to call invisible design so when you walk in the room it really looks like two folding tables. It's some name cards and two regular old TV monitors that play this video and then show live clips of the action as it's happening after people make their choice. Yeah, Jim, Jim actually said I have to create obstacles right as a, as a, as a, yeah, Mallory. I mean, I just wanted to say that we decided early on that we wanted to make sure that when you looked at the room, you, you would have basically we traveled with a like a rolling suitcase that had all the props. But we wanted people to look at the room and go like, Oh, that's in the church basement that's in the library, all of those stuff that the school has that. You know, I mean, we did, it does have a like a five camera live shoot so there is a technical thing but like, it's not, it's not a particularly it's not like you're looking at a set it's like you're looking at the room, and what you did really to like the materials are things that exist in many kind of shared community spaces basically. And that, again, is just making sure we just wanted it every turn, because we're asking the audience to do something that they may or may not feel comfortable is that they would feel like, Oh, okay, I have this, I could do that right so we didn't want to put up a lot of like barriers, even visually or aesthetically to make people feel like, Oh, maybe I'm like, I don't understand what's happening here. And there is a script right so they is like in a play there is a script. Yes, but the one of the things that Jim did early on, we we first started prototyping it. We had a script but we found that the people in city council mean they would just sit there and look at it and just like flip through it. And so they didn't listen to each other they didn't. So Jim was like, no script. How do we have no script. And so we were like, at first it was like, Oh, but then it was like, Oh, this is going to be fun because we gave each council meeting each council member a staffer, and they we found all these ways in which they deliver whatever needs to be said at the moment it needs to be said so that the audience can really like sit in the experience and really has to listen and wait, and that created this great dynamic with the staffers who really like so the city council members, each have their own staffer so that person is working with them to, you know, shepherd them through and the staffer gives them a script what they're going to say in that moment. It's on cards the script is on all sorts of things it's on cards it's on an award someone gets it's on. Like it became really fun to figure out like how to deliver what needed to be said in the moment that it needed to be said it was like a very and that's kind of the stuff that we go through in the book is just. Once you have that limitation, you know, you can be like well this is impossible or you can be like wow, this is going to be fun right that like it really invites invited a lot of for me a lot of creativity and a lot of innovation right because you realize that was going to be really important because everyone wants to sit and look at people really you know flipping through and then they just didn't that they would just spend the whole time trying to prepare what they thought how to act it as opposed to like they have to say the thing in the moment right. So the performance of it was also more interesting if they were really listening and really engaging in the moment with whatever needed to happen with the instructions. A question I had for for Ebony. I mean Mallory talked and both are about the system that you show a system, you're like in galley breaks Galileo and he says, what's breaks idea that we show systems of society away from individual breaks you know they says, there's the chandelier moving in the Galileo because it's a particular movement from the earth, and the American idea you know get therapy, you know, or do work out, you know, and create an app and your life is better. There's a climate change industry that says oh your carbon footprint, you know if you only do that you know that it will be better, instead of really saying there is a system we are in and the system is not working. And people do focus on the individual approach or individual happen is instead of you know, participating in that thing so my question to Ebony is. Do you believe this works. Do you believe participants will come to settle council meeting and get these pieces of paper they read and they are council member or they are whatever give a speech, and, and are in the government sense you're performing of self in the everyday life, perform what they are performing in everyday life someone else did. Does that work. Does it does something happen with. Well, if I you asked if I believe if it works. Yes, absolutely do. If I didn't I wouldn't be sitting here right now speaking with you all. So how does it work. How do you see it. Well, here's the thing. I am a firm believer of you rehearse the world that you want to live in. And you rehearsed it by understanding these, these, these types of dynamics that are complicated that are convoluted that really get at the nuances of what it means to live in this country, you know, and, and whether we choose to be bystanders whether we choose to be counselors whether we whether we feel like we haven't had a choice. The idea of being in a situation or scenario that comes through with city council meeting as a performance and as a methodology is one that allows us to, you know, allows audiences, students, participants of many sorts to re engage. And this is the thing that I think is most exciting for me about getting this opportunity in front of more people is the opportunity to really consider what does it mean to be less of a spectator and more of an actor in your own life. And I have seen what it means for folks to be able to for young people for communities to be able to collectively, you know, take apart and understand what and research, what is happening that is governing their everyday lives. And that has been, you know, a way in which people have become more active. I've seen this as an activist, I've seen this as a teacher, you know, to ask people to be involved in something that they really don't understand. It's very challenging. But once you understand it and understand that this system is supposed to be for us, it's supposed to work for us and with us, then something changes, I've seen it happen. So, and so yeah, I do believe that this works. I do believe that this idea of the forum as a democratic process is one that is super important to, you know, re engaging and reactivating people as neighbors people as as students as as actor as performers as artists. Yeah, I want to ask it to Aaron Aaron was about to say something. Did you want to. Yeah, the only, the only thing maybe I'd add is that makes me Frank your question of any or answer makes me think that, or something that's been on my mind with this work is, there's often a kind of perceived like tension between, do we try to change the system from without or do we try to change the system from within, that's one of them, and also is the system for up or oppressive enough that we shouldn't bother with it, versus. We should work within the system and try to change things from from that. And I see this project at its best as functioning as a kind of both ends, meaning we can put a frame around the system and show its oppressiveness, and we can also work within it. And for me, long term, because I think of all the projects that I take on Mallory and I were talking about this and I would imagine that you might think of yourself this way to as a practitioner is that all of it is long term. Right. City Council meeting is a 1015 year project if you look at all the forms that it takes. We have another project called Perfect City, which is a 20 year art and engagement project at Abrams. Right now, right. Isn't that, isn't that happening right now. It is happening. But yeah, we have a big thing coming out in June, kind of series of events. But the goal I think is to say like from within the system, if we recognize the problems that the structure holds, we can actually start to change the structure both from within and from the consciousness that we have of it from seeing it from without. And I feel like that's maybe part of the goal is to honor the fact that it doesn't work for people, and that not working as part of the design. And there's a potential in it that I think Ebony you're speaking to, which is that it's, it says it's supposed to, you know, and if we kind of take it to task from working both with inside and outside I think that's the goal. I also think like that's also the there's also a thing about each iteration, right. So I think we're so fortunate to be working with Ebony because of that belief that just strong belief, because the, the curriculum is really trying to enact. A kind of impact that the performance or the book may not have had. So, so for me that that each each iteration. So the, the piece of art is, you know, it's like what it what was our intention with City Council meeting is different than the curriculum where the curriculum will be the most instrumentalized right aspect of the project where we have to go in and absolutely with this belief that that it's working towards this change and towards this awareness, where with the book and with the performance, it's, it's it's slightly different, right. So, so that's I think also what's interesting about the process and the iterations is the kind of instrumentalization of the ideas is also different in each, in each, in each iteration. And I think there's a goal, or there's a thing to point out in what Mallory said which is that like this piece started as a, as an experiment in a form, right, I saw something and then I brought that to Mallory and it was like this is an interesting form. It reveals something about our interest, but it wasn't necessarily to make the kind of impact we're talking about now, but it just sort of has led through an evolution and through thinking and talking and writing to something that could have that impact. I think I'm just putting that in there as a plug for both this kind of socially engaged participatory work that we all are invested in as well as like the formal experiment that's kind of like a bunch of people going what if, because that's also the background that I think all of us come from as well. Yeah. And I'll say, I'll say that, you know, in the realm of culture strategy that I dabbling from time to time that there's an idea that art can help to bring awareness. Art can help to create conversations, can help to shift the hearts and minds of people. And along that continuum of impact we get to shifting the individual, but then we get to shifting the systems, the behaviors of people and the behaviors of systems. And there's a piece of this that I think, you know, really lends itself to a deeper to more conversation about, you know, as we're talking about what does it mean to shift systems and systems are, you know, these kind of animated bodies doing their thing on its on their own. We are a part of what makes a system be that thing. And so the idea that we can change, you know how we behave how we feel, how we move how we talk means that we can also get inside of what is working and what isn't working with these systems and change them as well. If that means dismantling them and getting to the other side of that, then there is, you know, a thought about that, but the ideas that we understand that change is elemental that changes. And you know, personal, and, and it requires that before we can get to the outer so yeah. I can't even remember so you must have just took in me taking me in the right direction. It'll come back, it'll come back what I would like to just throw in. There's a lot about theater and politics political theater. And this is politics and theater as close as it gets, you know, in a way it's a reinterpretation of of the work of a Piscata or the living theater, you know, of a of a Brecht of a ball and an updated version of contemporary version that really also takes spectators as collaborators as emancipated as spectators as the French philosopher who also was now a single program. And what is it but a question to all three of you what are the theoretical frameworks, who do you look at what did you read in that research to come to this project. I think it's one of the interesting things I learned is that is that theater artists learn Aristotle and visual artists learn Plato, and so I never really knew about Plato skepticism of these Aristotelian ideas which are at the heart of Western theater practice. And I don't think I understood that there was always this debate with the deep distrust of Plato towards the arts and also performing arts, especially as not natural as fake right. Yeah, and Aaron's father. I mean, Aaron grew up with Plato. So that was something I learned a lot about. And I think it learned that through Ron Sierra's use of like. So I mean for me the the Plato aspect which I was not, I just was not educated in that and, and then the way Ron Sierra frames it was really key of just, and it's a thing I use often with with in teaching with students is about that really to really what your relationship with an audience is and to unpack all the assumptions that you may have learned or why you what motivates you to do what you do is this is this. And so that was really important for me to to to work with Ron Sierra and to really like try to question all the assumptions I carried with me and how to unravel all that so that we could actually try to like have a conversation across what he causes these irreparable distances, right that that is actually and and to make a multifaceted performance where everybody could have. There was a boundary there was a sense of autonomy, you know that we were we were working with autonomous people doing something together and that was very you know that was really key for me. And I would say just to add to that, you know, I Mallory I like the way you phrase it because it sounds like Plato and I were childhood friends we grew up. That was partly a philosophy professor, among other things, and the other readings that I think we did that were helpful were Irving Gossman, the 50 sociologists who's Canadian, who wrote the presentation of self and everyday life and basically applied dramaturgical terms to a lot of kinds of behaviors, and he specifically was really interested in power, and how we perform power. And then the there was another Robert Foutrel was a scholar who built on gothman who wrote about one city's local government meetings over the course of a year using gothman's framework so that was really helpful to see those power structures play out locally and he's kind of seemingly informal behaviors. And I want to shout out to his own Greg Snyder who's a Baruch professor now wrote a book and does participatory ethnography. He works with subcultures and basically try to change the way in his work, the kind of top down approach to sociology that was often done where there are subjects there's a researcher, and there's a lot of status and power that are problematic within that role. So when we made our local ending we often interview people, and I used Greg's approach, just as I knew him through his writing and through working together honestly at a restaurant. Where I would interview someone and not take notes and not put a recording device on, then I would go back and write what I remembered the next day, and then I would show it to that person and say does this sound like you. I don't have ideas about how we might build on what we talked about, but they could say that's total BS or I like this part but not that part, or I want to rethink this or yeah that sounds like me. And what was pretty magical for me about that was that I could remember more than I would think, but also we were then co authoring because often the people that I interviewed were performing their own texts, their own lives, their stories. And I would do a lot of really creative choices that I probably wouldn't have made. If I had had the recording device. And if I had not been beholden to that subject to say, do you trust me with this, you know so that was another part of it, finding research that allowed us to build common language and also trust, and kind of a new listening a deep listening. You have to listen in new ways and in different ways. One of the last questions Mallory, you also call run the marble mines. A project a very significant, you know that we lost Libre or not too long ago as a significant group of work you are in the old PS 122 now it's the performance space. How does this work fit in. How does it influence what you do is it something different or is it just you play in a jazz band and you're in a classical piece how how does that work, how do you combine all this. I mean I always think that, like for me the legacy of mavo is very artist centered and also innovate like where artists were given the space and the time to like, prepare to to do the work to do the work and to explore it in whatever avenue they wanted to go and I think like, for me, I feel like what I learned about city council meeting was this, once you embrace these limitations, it is actually the key to innovation is what I is what what I really learned if okay so the audience has to perform and there's no script. Suddenly, I had all these, these newer ideas that I'd never had before. And so I do think that. And I think about the, you know, my mind they, they, a lot of their early work was like, okay, we're gonna. There were these strict limitations or these like strict ways of studying form and content right and then they just had the space and push it and push it until the thing emerged. So, I mean, I guess, I guess that's how I feel like there's a there's something in the practice which is about really in allowing yourself to indulge in the limitation or whatever that curiosity that you have is, and to see it as the key to like formally because I think one of the interesting things about Maddox history is that they were formally innovative right, I mean, they did just some plays but they ended up using media they ended up, people were seeing theater in a different form than they had experienced it before. So continuation in a way of experience. Yeah, I feel very comfortable there because I feel like the history of the places people were like well I just have this. I want to explore this kind of thing and I want to push it push it push it until a new form emerges. And so that makes me feel very like you could just feel it in the place, you know, like, and they know how to like we know we want to give us those resources and that, that space in a way and that philosophy we would kind of want to bring that to the table for other artists for younger artists so I guess that's the way I would say. Yeah, yeah, and I think Lee Brewer would agree I mean I think we did his last public interview here on this e-talk. And last question for you. Let's say New York cultural funding theatrical funding would work differently and instead of billionaires putting 600 million into a structure like the shadow. Okay, listen I give important significant ideas resources I'm gonna say he's a million or two. What would you do. How would you implement this idea of the city council me that participatory democratic engagement. Oh well that's a million dollar question for real. I am right now in my fellowship at Princeton is thinking about the ways in which we can use resources working with sponsors working with customers working with partners to again to scale this these ideas to a larger audience I will I'll say that we have a number of things that we are thinking about in. What would you do what would you do you would train people have a workshop center or you would. So, so the idea is to actually create a university. You know, right now we're calling the enterprise school for participation, but that's a placeholder. You know, but the idea is that there is an online, a virtual and a, and a real space where people can come to study this intersection of performance arts and politics, and, and community engagement. And so that work requires a team it requires space it requires facilitators performers, it requires materials and a marketing team it requires a lot in order to, you know to move this idea from from where it is now to be to seeing the these hubs pop up around the country that are resource to do the work in their own neighborhoods and communities. That's a fantastic place and it could be real. And it's actually it's so often it is just a question of funding. Aaron, tell us a bit about the project you you're presenting right now at able to our center and when is the next city council meeting where can people participate or see it. The next city council meeting is happening in your town wherever you are every week. And the one you kind of restate. So you go to city council meetings and watch it. I mean remedy protocol famously a German company theater company declared the stakeholder meeting of Mercedes Benz a performance. And they wrote a performance script say who are the main actors, and people could go and then. And also they looked at the formal way of power, you know shareholders really have nothing to say or very little, but they have to, you know, present what they're doing so it's a performative way. So they put it in but I think you updated that a little bit but is there the one where you and Mallory work is there another one coming up and what's happening at the Abrams Art Center. So there like several things going on. I think that Evan E and I and Mallory are getting to talk about like, is part of this institution or series of programmings that we're thinking of in terms of pedagogy. Also does it include versions of the performance that are restaged similar to the way that we restage our original work. I'm going to say exactly when I feel like you know the school version of Princeton will happen in the fall. There will be other versions that we're working with a couple of test sites that are high schools in different cities one in Pennsylvania. And so those are beginning to brew and bubble, and I think those will be coming online in the next few months to a year. My project actually I have a performance running at the chocolate factory right now that is running for this weekend it's called nightkeeper and it's actually very different from this work it's a collaboration with an actor named Jahan young choreographer named Hillary Clark, a musician named Norman Westberg who used to play with the band swans, and it's a piece in very low light about insomnia. So that's just like kind of like a little chamber theater piece. And then at Abrams my project perfect city that I started is now co run it's a multi generational multi racial collective, funded by creators rebuild New York and through residency at Abrams. And we're doing a project called invisible guides and that happens in June it's a series of convenings, a walking tour photoville exhibition created in collaboration with, excuse me a photographer and survivors of domestic violence. I'm from a particular shelter on the Lower East side. And the ultimate goal with that work is to say that the people who are perhaps most disempowered by our systems of protection were isolated by the systems that are meant to protect them would be the ideal people to plan a better city. So that project is under the auspices of perfect city. Co run it with Tiffany's area and Jamoy snipes, and it kind of takes some of the departure points of city council meeting, and this work into a realm that is less defined in terms of its form. We do rock tables, we do walks, we do do performances, and there's visual art and photography that goes with it too. Fantastic. And what's happening at Mallory minds, Mallory at my minds. Oh, um, Wow. A lot of things in development. We. So, I'm working on a new opera. Brooks is working on a new piece called verses. There should be a workshop of that in the fall. Yeah, we're, we're just, and then there's going to be a reconstruction by David Newman of St and the football player, which we did the 50th so there's a lot of things brewing new things brewing and hopefully doing some touring hopefully we'll tour join in this mud and yeah so full plate Ebony what's a lot of you what doing next to your university yeah. Yeah, I'm working on a piece right now that goes up May 13 that weeksville heritage center. It's called the keeping. It is a processional multi site performance that happens on the whole campus of the weeksville heritage center for those who don't know. Weeksville is a community that was founded in 1838 in Brooklyn and what is now crown Heights, and I've been the artist and residents there for the last couple of years. So this will be my culminating project, which is also funded by creative capital so we're wrapping that up on May 13 and all of the things related to pre production are happening now. Fantastic amazing I think this is such a complex interesting beautiful and I think really contemporary project that anticipates a future. A lot of people theater performance can do so many much more we could have talked about Gavin creepers involvement, the great Jimmy punbremmer the Councilman who participated, and, and, and so much more but you know I'll get the book and Mallory show the book again from the Iowa press. Oh here the city we make together so it is a brilliant concept and I think it is what is really needed we have to book help to put also in New York City together you know the post covert impressions, the disengagement the disillusionments, the rising violence you know that comes because people do not see a future I think there's a very important essential role theater can and should play nothing your way to deal with it your interpretation is the most urgent necessary theater at the moment and where you put your life's work in. I think it's brilliant. All my respect over the time of something that does not sound from the outside as exciting, you know as a new check off interpretation or another check Shakespeare or something so this is really brilliant work also close to the visual arts clear bishops work you know of the artificial health. You know what she says, and we have to actually see the history of also through the performing arts and how do we get beyond the white cubes and black boxes and participate Tanya buggera's work and so so much more so just fantastic thank you both we're going to have a signing of the book at the single center April 13 5pm. If anyone can come and come over invite all your friends and maybe you bring also people participated to really celebrate the publication. Theater artists are not as great often in documenting their work visual artists are very good, very trained theater people with hesitant we just still don't have books on the great history of the public theater or I don't know the city company I guess in somewhere. So this is an important project. And so thank you all for participating Mallory Aaron also Ebony and all the best and I will try to participate as much as I can into our audience thank you for taking the time to listen now so much more is online so many works when we started out they were much less in the corner time but this isn't really a significant conversation and again it also means the work of artists what does it mean for your life, I mean everybody talked about it how do you change. What would it mean for you to participate in a different way how why don't you go to a council meeting or in the place the house, the street you live how can we change the city we live in it can be part of the change. We actually want so thank you very much thanks to Talia and thanks to Vijay and see you from how around for hosting us and I hope to see you all soon. Thank you.