 Hi, everyone. How are we doing today? Great start, huh? On behalf of the APAP Board of Directors and Staff, I want to thank you for joining us this morning. Welcome to also to all of those who are joining us from elsewhere throughout the live streaming process, live streaming process provided by us by our generous colleagues at HowlRound. Thank you so much. And we're pleased to have ICM partners as a sponsor of this morning's plenary session. Please join me in thanking ICM for making this morning's event possible. Now, as many of you know, our Saturday morning session is unique because each year we bring together highly creative individuals who have demonstrated the passion, persistence, and courage necessary to realize their dreams. The artists we are about to meet, in fact, embody the strength and spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose legacy we celebrate throughout this weekend. Dr. King said, You don't have to see the top of the staircase to see the first step. Our world of the arts requires taking steps forward and upward, without always knowing what is at the top of the stairs or at the end of the road. That is the nature of the creative spirit. We are especially blessed this morning to have a well-known and loved creative risk taker with us, who will introduce us to five fabulous speakers. And I expect she also plans to keep us energized otherwise over the next 90 minutes. I'm referring to, of course, Liz Lerman, choreographer, performer, writer, educator, speaker, and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, whose approach to research on the arts, the participatory process, and its application to science, physics, and other areas is gaining increased attention. In fact, she was just appointed professor at ASU's Herberger Institute for Design of the Arts. If you haven't done so, I encourage you to read her book, Hiking the Horizontal, Field Notes from a Choreographer. In it, she says, and this is kind of similar to what Dr. King said about the quote about the staircase, find a way to respect something that lives at the end of the spectrum, farthest from where you are comfortable. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming today's moderator, Liz Lerman. Hi everybody, I'm gonna put on my professor glasses. So it's so nice to be with everybody and see you and such a great, wait, wait, you can't, I was at rehearsal today with the artist you're gonna see. It's an amazing hour and a half we'll have together. We're gonna start with Robert Fareed Karimi. He is many things. He has done so much already, and I think one of the things listening to him that happened to me was observing what catches his attention, and then once it has his attention, what does he do about that? Who does he talk to? How does he research? How does he make what he makes, and then remarkably, how does he share it? Sometimes he thinks of himself as an experienced designer, and I think you'll see why in just a minute. Please welcome Robert Fareed. Good, my name is Robert Karimi, and I am an experienced designer, participatory artist, but I want to give you a taste of what I do. So what I need you all to do is take your hands like this, and I'd like you to do this. Ready? You can use your feet if you don't want to use your hands. Here we go. I want you to do this. Yeah! Yeah! Ready? We're gonna remix for David Boy. Here we go. Now that your hands and your lips are energized, I'd like you to take your elbow, take your elbow, find a neighbor, and give them an elbow. And ask them what their name is, and their favorite vegetable. If they hate vegetables, give them a vegetable you hate. Okay? Here you go. My name is Robert. I love artichokes. What do you like? Excellent! Holy shit. Okay, I don't have them much. All right. All right. Let's bring it back. Let's bring it back. The clock is ticking. All right. Hello. I'm back again here. Hello. So let's do this. Ready? Cool. So now you've seen my name is Robert Carini. I'm a comedic, spark, participatory artist, and I'm drawn to themes and stories about transcendence that emerges from cultural collision and trauma. I made a show about Freddie Mercury to deal with Iranian xenophobia. I have interactive installations. I even do a comedy cooking show that I created this idealist Iranian Guatemalan chef that takes on any idea based on PBS cooking shows because I realized that people will talk about anything as long as there's food. But my Iranian father got type 2 diabetes and rather than take insulin, he decided to go back to my grandmother's recipes and it reduced the disease for him. I realized I gotta do something as an artist because at-risk communities are bombarded with all this stuff about diabetes and health. What can I do? Aha. I'll go back to my mother's recipes. That's a picture of her. I'll go back to my aunt because I'm from the Bay Area, take the Food Activism of the Black Panther Breakfast Party that they used to run, and print it together, and I'll get a champion called Creative Capital to give me an investment, which they did, and I created Wham! Because I'm from the 80s. The People's Cook Project. Yes! So what I had to do was take that plate, you see, 50% vegetable, 25% starch, and 25% protein on a 9-inch plate and get people to reconnect to their cultural rituals and their cultural recipes and stories through interactive experiences. I went through, I created pop-up restaurants that got people to share their food wisdom together with crazy waiters that are actors and absurd foils. I created, I occupied breakfast, lunch, and dinner in Baltimore because of my champion, the Warhol Foundation. We were able to occupy, while Occupy New York was happening, we occupied Baltimore more than occupied Baltimore did. More people came. And then I went to Arizona State University. My champions, these professors from various departments, they had me share my technology with nurses and health professionals. And after all that, I served 50,000 people through six years doing all this work. Yes. And the professor's work, their study showed that art can affect the attitudes and behavior towards health. People are open to change and the documentary about the work got an Emmy. Yes, thank you. So I came up with a methodology called deliciousness that came out of this, which means to honor the wisdom of everyone in the room, honor the culture, be culture-centered of everyone in the room, allow for others to shine, to make space for joy, so that we nourish everybody. And so I said, I'm gonna take this deliciousness, not to spaces, not to theater or art spaces, to cities. So I went to St. Paul and worked with Mung Elders and did a food storytelling project because their recipes aren't written down, so that they can share their recipes and stories to the next generation. In Sheboygan, Wisconsin, working with a visual artist, we made a double-decker taco truck and talked about what nourishes the community through their own cultural past. And then I designed and built a low-rider bicycle kitchen cart to honor my community in San Jose, California. And we took that and we got people to cook and eat together. Here they are in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I made food games. We made a chopped style game that got hundreds of people cooking and eating together using their food wisdom. And now I'm taking deliciousness to take on swimming because the same communities that are at risk for type 2 diabetes are most likely to drown in America. And so I'm looking for champions right now because look, all it took was one initial champion, creative capital, giving me the handshake and look at all I did. So that's why people, I'm coming to you today. That person you gave an elbow to? Look, look, look to that person and promise them that you are going to be their champion. Go, come on. Make a pledge to be someone's champion today. And you know what? Yes, and you know what? I need the lights. You know what? Now that we have the time, I think we need to end it this way. Are you ready? Because this is what we do with the people's cook together. Ready? Arms up. Ready? Ready? Come on. Come on. Come on. I know it's the morning. Ready? Here we go. We are the champions, my friends. Come on. Come on. And we'll keep on fighting till the end. Sing it. Sing it. We are the champions. We are the champions. Thank you, everybody. I'm Robert Karimi. Have a good day. Whoo! Have you had an experience already? Just love what people are doing. It's so amazing. Food wisdom, huh? I think one thing you'll see today from a lot of the artists is how they bring things together. Sometimes through their language, obviously through their actions and how many different ways they're crossing borders. I know that's a big question for all of us and you're going to just see so many examples of it. Okay, if you thought that was fast, get ready for the next train. Jessica Caremore, unbelievable person. Unbelievable story. In a way, I was thinking the other way to think about today are just these amazing journeys that everybody has been on. Don't take a moment to say she's talking too fast for me. Don't do that. You'll miss something. Just get on the train and listen to this incredible story. You'll see here the relationship between the personal and the professional and what she does between that. And I honestly think that's one of the great things we have to offer. So many professions think you pollute them if you get personal. We actually engage the personal in such an important way and this artist is going to take you on an amazing ride. Hello. Thank you, Liz. I'm ready. I was born a poet October 28, 1971 to my mother Irene, born in Wolverhampton, England. Raised in Canada. My daddy Tom Moore from Madison, Alabama. Who migrated north to Detroit for more opportunity and well, Cadillac cars. I will always be my father's daughter. My father was a maker. He built the popular speak easy to do drop in that still stands because of his historical landmark, an urban mythology status in pension row. How do I exist? How have I fed my son on poems without grant money despite threats on truth telling and cuts in arts budgets nationwide? It's so much easier to be a liar. Liars make large amounts of money. I've been writing poetry since I was quite young and my entire world was rocked in 11th grade when my drama teacher introduced me to fur color girls like Intazaki Shange. I felt like an entire history of women writers is being kept for me. I wanted to unearth them all. I began to eat their books. Sanchez, Laura, Clifton Brooks, the way I watched my mother speed read through novels my entire life. I think the mystery of why I wasn't taught about them or myself. Maybe you want to rush to know everything and write all about it. That was my paternal grandmother I never met. In 1922 I lost my man in my dreams. The cool miles had finally taken over my daddy's 69 year old lungs. He ran out of breath and my poems began to travel at full speed. I wrote the poem Breeze the morning of his funeral January 3rd, 1994. Me and my daddy's first plane ride together was me escorting his casket back to his paid for plot in Madison, Alabama. It took me a decade to return and gave birth to the poem Finding Daddy's Grave in my third book. In 1995 I did something irrational. I decided not to pursue my TV journalism career, even though I was up for a major position in a top 10 news market and still working an undergraduate degree. I picked up my four pickup truck and moved to a place called Brooklyn. My daddy's death propelled me fearlessly into my path. Who in the heck would be crazy enough to read their poems in front of a notoriously, it's showtime at the Apollo audience known for booing acts off the stage. I was living on New York for all of five months when this happened. People from all over the country suddenly knew my poems, waitstaff, train conductor, Shirley McClain. This is still surreal 20 years later. I was a poet on the Apollo, the one with the braids. I cried everywhere because I knew my daddy would have been so proud. But I also knew it would have never happened had he not passed away because he simply would not have allowed me to move to Brooklyn by myself. At 23 I had a great literary agent, record deals on the table, but decided to become independent to fill a publishing void that was obvious among black poets in the driving New York City art scene. We neither are poems on bookshelves. Saul Williams was my neighbor and friend and walked his manuscript over to me. And so began my life work as an institution builder among poets. I made the cover of the New York Times in 1996 and secured a distribution deal after self-publishing my first book, The Words on Fit in My Mouth. I put my daddy's picture on the cover and sold over 20,000 copies. Poems resurrect the dead. I was asked to recite an original poem at an AIDS Walk New York City with an expectation of 50,000 people in Central Park. I lost my childhood friend Joseph to AIDS in the 80s and I knew I would have to write a poem to honor his life. I wrote the poem until we danced. Joseph's name resonated with those thousands of walkers and activists and I was asked to read his poem for AIDS walks all over the country. And years later I would read his poem during the benefit concert for gay men's health crisis and one of the stages of my dreams, Carnegie Hall. They don't kill youth is speaking this way. I would be asked by a South African radio DJ. One of the most transformative moments of my life was touring South Africa with Dub Poe and Linton Quayzie Johnson. The reaction from South African audiences was the reality of apartheid and the youth I taught poetry workshop to in Soweto impacted me so deeply they called me Mama Champ. I left my heart in Soweto and dreamt of returning to build a library there someday. One little girl shook my soul crying after my performance of a poem of our racial categories called Box This. She said you don't understand and I said to her I am you and wrote the poem even the light skin girls are a stick of the light skin girls. When poems are enough I was given permission by artists and friend Radcliffe Bailey to paint. During the artist residency in 2010 I found myself in a world I'd never imagined possible. Three weeks later I was a conceptual artist and have continued to make, exhibit and sell my visual work. My first exhibition was Na Na, Canon Backwards. Was my artistic reaction to the aggressive way white poets were male poets are exalted in the literary canon. So yes I got naked in the name of poems in honor of women writers and of course that was sold and won't ever be printed again. Poetry has no limits in my world so I wrote my first ballet in 2014 Salt City based on the Salt Mines of Detroit a blue-collar Afro-futuristic ballet with Detroit Techno at Soundtrack was directed by Akku Kedougal the woman in yellow from Intazaki Shange's original cast at Spelman College. I wanted to put my poems inside the bodies of the people existing in a future attempt to gentrify them out of history. I really just wrote it so that I could capture the confused expression on people's faces when I told them I'd written a ballet. That's everything. Poems even rock and roll. In 2004 the National Black Arts Festival I produced my first Black or Maroc concert weekend and tribute to legendary funk artist Betty Davis. I am a poet in the middle of a guitar, goddess and women artists like me who have found a way to travel the world, feed their children and find brilliant audiences. I found them extraordinary and I wanted a space for them to celebrate their music. Twelve years later I received a handwritten letter from my muse, Betty Davis, thanking me for keeping her music alive. Still, the biggest stage in poem of my life has been motherhood. My first son was my Earth son, Omari, and I loved him unconditionally. I learned that children do not grow in your womb but in your heart. Still waiting for the world to catch up with this truth. I was close to 200 pounds here earning my stripes, I guess. If you asked my birth son, King Thomas, who mommy works for, he answered, mommy works for mommy. When he was 10 months old, I left my second marriage. I'm a poet which means I fall in love on occasion. I became a single mom with no real job returning home after 12 years. I wrote my way into an overpriced loft that close friends and family consider outside my means. But I refused to live below my potential. I wrote my way out of the dehumanizing welfare office and found myself writing and reading a poem at the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina by invitation from Susan Taylor. I couldn't afford not to go. I wrote the poem in New Orleans after being caught in the rain near the Mississippi River with my son and rushing his stroller back to the hotel passing all the luminary scheduled to speak. There was never a space for can or no. My poem was resisted and everyone here today must resist fear. Whether you're an artist or curator or corporate entity established or emerging, fear divides, silences and moves the world backward in time. This is the fearless gift my daddy gave to me and now I leave it with you. Thank you. I refused to live below my potential. Imagine if we could make that possible for every single person. I want to take a second to thank Alicia Anstead and Scott Stoner who made all this happen and all the folks at APAP. Really incredible. They put a lot of thought into this program and there's a lot of cross discussion going on for months beforehand and I for one am feeling the results of it this morning. The next artist is Somi. I was lucky enough to hear Somi sing at a really special event. The Clarice Smith Center at the University of Maryland opened one of those season announcements in a quiet little brunch. A bunch of people in the room saw me and Susie Farr. This was the beginning of our saying thank you and goodbye to Susie. I can't think of a better artist than Somi. What she did in that room, what she brought with her from her own traditions and her own stories and what she conveyed given that we were all also there trying to take in the long journey of Susie Farr. I think with this amazing jazz vocalist you're going to hear where she starts and then how she takes on a really complicated world in the most beautiful way. This is Somi. Thank you Liz. Good afternoon everyone. I'm ready. Shine Your Eye is an Nigerian expression which means to look at something in such a way that the thing you are looking at sees you too. In late 2011, I moved from New York City to Lagos, Nigeria. I'd been there the year before to perform at a jazz festival with my band and fell in love with the parallels between New York and Lagos, both of which are boldly cosmopolitan, hard-won cities with deep rewards for those who persevere. As a half Ugandan, half Rwandan artist based in the West, I had often wondered how living in an African city might shift my artistic voice and creative impulses. How would the opportunity to immerse myself in nuance and the intimate knowing of a modern African city inspire new sound and story in my work? So, when I received an invitation to do a seven-week teaching artist residency in Nigeria, I jumped at the soft landing opportunity after which I embarked on an 18-month creative sabbatical in Lagos. Nigeria currently boasts the largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa and the city of Lagos teams with over 20 million people that has a bustling creative economy like no other city on the continent. But despite the country's size, potential, and well of creative and inspired voices, its cultural economy is still relatively nascent when compared to the resource and infrastructure we get to enjoy here in the West. Upon moving to Lagos, I quickly realized there were so many modern African stories that were not being seen or heard merely because of geography, visas, or costly educational opportunities that might otherwise transport local narratives onto the global cultural stage. A privilege a relative few have enjoyed over the years. Similar to most African metropoles, I also quickly realized there were no real venues that lent themselves to artistic development or deep engagement between artists and audience. The once stately national theater built in the 1970s, for example, has fallen into grave disrepair, relegating most performances to hyperproduced and otherwise planned hotel conference centers. A site I found somewhat ironic given the immense disposable wealth that accompanies the oil-rich nation and its long-standing position in and passion for the arts. As I began to consider sharing some of my then work in progress inspired by my new life in Lagos, the lack of performance venues became an issue of deep concern for me. So in response, I decided to host a salon in a small art gallery owned by a friend of mine during which I could receive the important critical feedback from the very people and city I was writing about. I called the first salon in Atelier, a workshop. 66 chairs crowded around a makeshift bandstand for 75 minutes of music and wine. That Atelier eventually grew into what I call the Lagos Music Salon, a bi-monthly series featuring my own music and various guest performers from the Nigerian community for regular audiences of about 250 to 300 people, all committed to or curious about this intimate new space of art in exchange that we shared with each other. A year passed and the song cycle developed while producing that series had birthed my latest album, eponymously named the Lagos Music Salon. Upon my return to the United States for the album release in 2014, I tried to think about ways that I might impart the very layered and rich experiences I had had in Lagos, the lessons I'd learned about looking closer, about privileging nuance. An album seemed too one-dimensional and how would I carry my western audience back to those 66 chairs in that first salon? So in the three months leading up to my release, I decided to create something called the Salon Tour. I made a list of potential community partners, locally-based artists, and non-traditional performance spaces who would ultimately become a nationwide host committee in major North American cities. That host committee eventually included a range of inspired individuals like fellow singer McLeet Hadero at Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco to Kristi Edmonds at UCLA Center for the Art of Performance, like visual artists Theaster Gates of Chicago's Rebuild Foundation, or Bowery Arts and Science and the Brooklyn Public Library here in New York. All of home had been long committed to deep community engagement and the re-imagination of cultural space. So with the generous support of my host committee, my band and I were able to perform to 21 salons in seven cities across the United States, ultimately reaching just as many people as I might have in a national jazz club run. By serving as a disruptor of traditional touring models, the salon tour also metaphorically challenged American audiences to more closely consider African narratives, bodies, identities, and our delineation of cultural space. Consider the nuance that lies explicitly and implicitly in otherness while journeying to a deeper understanding of ourselves. Legals taught me so much about freedom of taking and privilege and community, but mostly it taught me to shine my eye. I hope you too will find that if you look deeply enough into your own audience, that it looks back at you so that you might learn from and make space for each other. Thank you. You know, it's a lot to ask these artists to conceive of this particular structure. I was going to try to do this without saying the name, this cha ka cha. Actually, I made a piece once called The Good Jew in which I was on trial for whether I was Jewish enough, and I had learned that if I was in front of a Jewish audience, if I ever said a Yiddish word, that everyone would just line up and correct me. So I had a thing in this particular piece where one of the dancers said the word schmada, and then another dancer said, no, no, it's pronounced schmada, which is kind of how I feel about Pajakta. But it is actually a really interesting dilemma, and I thought it would be fun for you guys to give it a whirl. So what I would ask you to do is either think for a minute as if you've been writing your memoir, and maybe you are, or if there's a big project you've been working on for quite a while, you know, maybe over a few years, or maybe there's a community where you live that you've been building a whole long relationship with something that's got a little time attached to it. And I'm going to ask you in a minute to speak to somebody near you. It might be your elbow partner. It might be somebody else on the other side, maybe. But just see what would be your first sins and what would be your first picture? How would you do that? How would you sort? So in one second you're going to turn one way or the other, and I just want to say that if the person on this side goes this way and the person on this side goes that way, and you're alone, you have some choices. You could decide you hate interactive audience participation. Or you could actively belong. Just join one of the duets on either side of you and get going. Okay, give it a whirl, you guys. Take a second. We'll start to come back, because of course it was just one sentence, one picture. Good. Okay, we're back. As they say in the stage management world, we're back. Okay, that's interesting, and it's actually a perfect lead-in to our next artist. John Michael Schert is really, really interested these days in process. And what it means for people to engage in artistic practice in whatever way as we just did. He is an incredible dancer and also helped found Trey McIntyre project and was the executive director of that company. So let me just say that again. Executive director and incredible performer. We're going to talk more and reflect more about that later. It's just another example of the magnificent ways that people are crossing boundaries. Please welcome John Michael. So for me this presentation is really about ideas around identity and having to put together the slides and we can begin. I didn't know what my identity was. What is my visual narrative? So I asked 10 friends, family and colleagues to go through my Instagram account and they curate what my narrative is. Because this is how I see myself. For 25 years I've been this dancer. I have performed on stages around the world. And this is how many of you in this room have known me as the dancer and executive director of Trey McIntyre project. Two and a half years ago and leaving the company that I helped co-found and create I had to ask myself, who am I now? Am I still a dancer? I had the luxury of time and with this time I said, I don't know my family. I want to go back and reconnect to the people that I haven't spent time with because as a dancer your life is not your own. You're touring around the world. You miss a lot of weddings, holidays, even funerals. And my dad has always said know who you are, know where you're going and know who's going with you. Know who you are, know what you want, know where you're going, know who's going with you. I didn't know who I was and I came back to my family to spend time rejuvenating the sense of self. What did I want? That was a big question for me and when I get, I have the luxury of asking every day because I was approached by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business that may be the most conservative, quantitative capitalist center of academia in the world and they said, we want you to come be in our midst in this pretty beautiful box and we don't know what that means. I said, I don't know what that means. What am I going to do? And it's a question I ask myself every day. What is the role of an artist in other sectors? What do I do when I'm a dancer but I don't dance? How do I exist in a quantitative business world when the skills I have are mainly non-verbal? Body language. How do I go about translating what I know to be true in my body in a world that only values things that can be numerically formed? So I live in Chicago half the year and I live in Idaho the other half of the year where we had based Tremac entire project. This is my home. This is my environment. The sense of community. I have to keep one foot in my artistic realm and the sense of self. So I can go into this other foreign realm that doesn't fully understand me and I don't understand it. I live in a qualitative, subjective, intrinsically motivated place. I choose Idaho as my home because how many of you in this room have been there? Exactly. Most people have no idea. I'm involved in a music festival, Tree Fort Music Fest. Some of you might have known TMP was Boise's first economic development cultural ambassador at Boise, something we were very proud about. And my music festival has now inherited the title and we are the cultural ambassador at Boise, this idea of community in place. I toy over this a lot. I think a lot about what rule do we have as creative institutions, as individual artists? This company, Tremac entire project that I put a decade of my life into ended last summer as a dance company. It still continues. Trey is still making incredible work. People like LFF took a gamble on us and helped me become the person I am. What am I? Who am I? If I don't have the artistic practice of dance, if I'm a son, a brother, if I'm an artistic producer, am I still a dancer? These images now are people in my life that have reinforced who I am. That's my guy Brett. And we get to and help me reaffirm daily what it means to be an artist because it's so easy for us to feel silenced. It's so easy for us to feel like what we do is not valued. It doesn't have great worth and these realms of quantitative financial power. So I call what I do now the utility of the creative process. Because though I don't have a creative practice, I'm not taking ballet class daily, I'm not performing. The process, and I learned this from many mentors, Alonzo King, Trey McIntyre, different people through my life. The process is this balance of the form and the feeling, the doing and the being, the listening and the telling. It's the extrinsic and the intrinsic. It's a mixture of these two worlds. What I'm learning in more quantitative realms is they only look at the extrinsic and they make decisions based off of what the data says. I call that the known. Here's the known. Here's the data. We in the arts world know the intrinsic and the subjective and what we're feeling and how it's welling up inside of us and then we filter it through the extrinsic. We don't let go of the form. Ballet is highly codified. Every fine art has incredible rigor. But we create art and I joke that art is two thirds reality and one third possibility. Artists know what is next. They can see what is possible. It's a skill that we have that we can maybe bring to these other sectors. What I do now in all my travels and these images of me being all over the place, I have a lot of breath these days. I'm in a lot of places doing a lot of different things. But I have to keep reminding myself of my artistic practice and what is that? How do I bring that artistic process into these other realms? How can a dancer also be a non-verbal communication and work for a tech firm? We didn't have directors of innovation ten years ago. What would it look like if we better value body language and non-verbals and public sectors? In all these realms where people are very interested and concerned about innovation and what is innovation? I joke that it's creativity monetized. They want to be innovative. They want to be creative. They want to be creative choices. How do you make creative choices? You have to have a creative process. It has to come from a place inside of you in which you're balancing this form and this feeling. Something I learned as a dancer. How do we help others unlock their creative process? More importantly than that, if so many other sectors and other realms of the world want to be more innovative, why are they not hiring and it's interesting when I delve further and further into this world the block is not from the other side. It's actually sometimes more from the artists themselves who I don't think see themselves as a plurality. They only see themselves through their creative practice. I don't have a lot of answers yet in my pursuit but what I know is that this process that we have developed in our artistic fields has great value, has great utility and I think that's the gift that we can give and bring to the world. Thank you so much. John Michael and I were joking once a dancer, always a dancer. Who was here first this morning? The two dancers. There's something in the training like you're always preparing for the next step and we're always like whatever is posted is the time. We're going to be earlier. It's pretty fun. Our last artist today is the amazing Michelle Ellsworth and I just have to say we don't know each other real well whatever we get to be in each other's space we just start laughing and just enjoying being in the presence of which I hope you will feel the same. Here's one little story about Michelle. We were at some place we had to rehearse or something we were backstage waiting for something and she said to me, you know when my son was about eight I said to him, okay you can clean up your room or you can help me edit my video. What would you do? Well, he did edit her videos and he has had a profound profound impact on her development and vice versa as you can imagine and that's only one incredible story of Michelle Ellsworth. Here she comes. I will do anything if I can be in her neighborhood. So how shall I say just over a decade ago I became profoundly aware of how many things were not wow, really not working on the planet. Shortly after that realization I noticed that the available and standard tools for making things better were shockingly inadequate. So I said to myself Michelle Ellsworth, focus up and that's what I did. I started first by building a 150 pound pentagonal dress that solves problems. It starts kind of as a simple Elizabethan number with everything totally intact and good looking and then it transforms into a giant uterus into a confessional booth into a flotation device, a platform for discussing mass incarceration and also strategies for carbon sequestering. And I focused to religious problems. So I started the institute for potential religious artifacts, beliefs and procedures. My research told me early on that the biggest problem with religion isn't actually religion. It's members of religion. And so this is in fact a cult of one. So you can see over there a pew, a pew for one that was the gyno pew. I have quite a collection and then there's some religious hats, precepts, there's many hymns, on this website. After the religious effort I thought boom I should start looking at hamburgers and start to question and re-evaluate humans' relationship to them because that thing that they always do buy them in or make them and then eat them it seems so rootinized and predictable. I said what would happen if we started to bury them, to dance with them, to transform them, to torture them. And I just thought there might be a lot of potential like physical, emotional, environmental benefits from something different. And it started with beef burgers and then moved to veggie burgers then plastic burger burgers that were recyclable and then gestures that represent burgers. Then I read an article in the New York Times about how the Y chromosome was in deep peril and that had lost 98% of its content unlike the X which ladies in the house still totally intact is totally rock and solid. But so I asked the question darn what will be missed if men go how can we replace them with apparatus, choreography and web technology and that's what I did. That's the male gaze simulator on the left and a toilet seat on the right and it works on a micro and a macro level you know boyfriend dumps you or species extinction. Okay so before I show you anything else I just want to say that all of those are freestanding websites but they also form or serve as improvisational scores for live performance and I have issues with closure and the problems just keep coming so I constantly add content to them. So these were some of the stones and the making of the most recent piece called clitigation. Clitigation is combo-platter clitamnestra and litigation for a number of years and for a number of reasons I have really identified with clitamnestra and I'm not going to talk about all those reasons but one which is that we've both witnessed the impact that wars have on legal protocols. In the case of clitamnestra she had to deal with Athena's decision at the end of Escalus's Orsdia to introduce the first ever 12 man jury trial thereby ending the period of vendetta based justice which was really popular back in the day and introducing the period which we're working on litigation based justice. In my case I have witnessed how the post 9-11 wars have altered and bent language and laws associated with military commissions torture surveillance and the use of drones. So I bought the domain name clitamnestra.org and in the name of clitamnestra and other citizens who failed to conform to the category of a good citizen I developed what I call over-the-counter-terrorism protocols for avoiding surveillance. That was my main motivation but I also found that a lot of the side benefits have to do with the reduction in interpersonal drama which is great. So my first protocol was to address the internet so I made myself a completely free-standing or rather my son made me a completely free-standing internet and I made replicas of my most frequented websites Pandora, Ted and I put myself in all the ads. I just went ahead and did the Ted talk because I realized I actually know what I wanted to hear and I already had that answer but then I also started making content that wasn't online but I always wished had and again you can see the impact of my previous pieces. The next thing I did in terms of avoiding surveillance was start to build furniture in which I could hide. On the right there you see me climbing into my chair you probably saw my hydration system. Hydration is key for my ability to stay in there it's not about the legs numbing it's hydration and on the left my table I feel like it was foolish to think that technology could solve all of our problems and so I went with a wood-based a wood-based solution. I was inspired by the micro biome they're so good those wood mites that hide in furniture so I just went with that. This one I thought again people are a weakness what if I could just dress up like my friends script our conversations be totally offline my relationships have never been better which is amazing and again keeping other people out of the loop key for maximum safety. This next protocol has to do with living in a blue box you may think oh this has a downside but I have to say the upside is profound you can do anything in the blue box and with the use of technology you can change the context a context it complicate your location and identity and this thing that I want to do in the tube with the water not cool but you put it in a religious context and you like boom everybody's doing it baptism totally cool it's not a problem it's not threatening this thing with a sterno log again that looks like a bad choice why would you do that in an enclosed space this here the fish doesn't make sense why would you do that but then again in a boardroom put it on a boardroom table and you can get away with a lot of stuff again it's all about context for protocol number five this is kind of a continuation of the blue box but this is hiding specifically in art this is hiding in art and it also it also is demonstrating the fact that this is another protocol my body double so this isn't actually me I started to employ a body double here he's changing into his french bread costume for hiding at whole foods and again here he is again and the thing about this is I was inspired by the drone pilots in Nevada flying over Afghanistan and Yemen I thought that would be great here you see my surveillance free leg able to achieve a lot of choreographic goals that I wasn't able to achieve any other way which is great so then the last thing I was going to show you but I will just tell you is about this thing called the choreography generator I thought it would be great to perpetually make dance for a number of reasons give the surveillance camera and so I made six phrases and ten versions of each phrase and they all end in a unique place but I end each phrase exactly the same so that they can be linked in any combination and if you do the math on that that's a million dances which is really great if you're trying to get tenure at a university and you need to fill up your CV so so I would just say those are some of the things I made dance was absolutely central to this surveillance free living because dances really one of the most effective places to hide things the choreographic code the NSA is not even close to cracking it so it's a really great place so those were just some things that I made and thanks thanks yeah Michelle is trying to hide we're hot alright we had some rules we're going to spend a little time talking together and then you guys get to ask some questions and as you're thinking about what those are I mean feel free to get you know to stand by I think there's a microphone there's one and there's one so you know in a five minutes or so I'll say start lining up and we'll get into that okay so there are lots of things you can see that these people have in common and so many distinctions that's just beautiful but each of you has at least more than once in your life pushed out of the professional defined however our professions our artist's lives our silos however defined you've all completely pushed against that I'm curious either to take us to one of those moments where you did precisely that how you did it what strategy did you have to fight fear as you were talking about what changed for you and if you feel like addressing also the people in this room how have they helped you do that or possibly how have our ecosystems helped so it's a kind of big topic and let's sort of play around in there anybody want to go first? Jessica, you want to? I can, sure I mean I've been pushing boundaries of poetry since I moved to New York City and went on a very non-traditional poetry stage and for me this being coming from Detroit spaces are not always traditional we didn't have a bunch of cafes and so Deaf poetry jam hadn't happened so I was looking for a bigger audience because I never wanted to be in this secular little space as a poet reading in a bookstore and just that wouldn't reach the people that I was trying to get to and for me it's always been trying to get to just everyday folks which is what I did with the Apollo which I was very grateful for that moment because people who rode the trains in New York City all the way staff, that's the people who knew who I was our presenters and producers may not have known who I was but I knew as an artist that I had an audience and so independently I figured out a way to go find my audience and so yeah I'm always I mean I curate executive produced black from rock which is rock concert so I'm a poet in the middle of a rock concert I don't know what I'm doing there I just know that the women that I bring have similar lives that they are famous internationally have done very large stages and sometimes go into a regular place and no one knows who they are so you can hear already some clues for those of us in the room thinking about how we might be supporting and moving this kind of art forward one as she said I don't know what I'm doing there and actually living with that question of I don't know is so powerful I know that we expect artists to put themselves there but I want to ask you guys to do that too so it happens of course back to Martin Luther King I have never heard that quote before I'm on the first step but I don't know where the rest is going I think that's fantastic how about others of you other ways you might think about that initial question I think for that question of I don't know I think that's actually a source of great power as humans the majority of the time we don't know the majority of the time we live in ambiguity and uncertainty that's the human condition and we strive I think to create these systems and ways of like figuring out the data and like making sense of but I think the best approach we can always take is to embrace that ambiguity because out of that comes invention and out of that becomes new ways of understanding and seeing so I think that I think as artists and those who work with great uncertainty in the non-profit art sector we're not that different than our peers and other sectors and in fact I think we have a greater skill set dealing with the question of the unknown and I think we could almost better market ourselves as having that ability and it's a source of great power question about breaking down is how you did it where you needed help where you didn't oh sorry where you needed help and where you didn't yeah oh no please so me go ahead I was just going to say that I think throughout my career I've always sort of struggled with the label of are you an African artist or are you a western artist and so again that whole idea of living in the liminal you know really embracing the liminal I think one of the ways that I've tried to resolve it is not really focusing on whether or not my music is specifically you know an African sound or it's a specifically a jazz sound I mean really just try to commit to storytelling and understand that as artists that we have the power to imagine our own kind of you know cultural boundaries space and our own place of cultural belonging and so I'm thankful for that and I think one of the ways that I've tried to also respond to it in a more you know beyond myself and more in a more extensive way or expansive way for my community is thinking about how other African artists also struggle with that no matter what genre they might be doing and so I actually produced I started an organization called New Africa Live back in 2008 and began to produce you know performance performance series was mostly performing arts so literary arts, visual arts but thinking about how do all of these artists whether they're hip hop artists from Somalia or rock artists out of Soweto and how do they you know understanding that the common thread is that we all have something new to say and a way to challenge homogenized notions of ourselves as African artists in this global community so really trying to you know again just make space you know I think that's what I was trying to get across earlier is making space for those voices in between and embracing others as well and of course we can hear here also there's a desire to say to the African artists we have something very particularly that we need to do among ourselves and understand but we don't want to do this all by ourselves in fact we live in this global world and I know for everybody in this room this is a challenge because we are living in a time where maybe people do niche I'm going to only listen to this station I'm only going to do this thing I'm only going to go to this theater and yet we're talking around how to transverse that and how essential that is for us anybody else I just wanted to say that it hit me doing the People's Cook project because I was doing poetry and I was touring doing that and performing and solo performance and when I did my Freddie Mercury show what does Freddie Mercury have to do with being racist towards Iranians all of a sudden I realized just that beginning conversation created a meme and I didn't even do the show and I started realizing that its own message started happening and that's what happens with the People's Cook project that it's never just about the performance itself it's about the message so I realize that as a performer a thinker a mover all these things I have water and the glass is dependent on my partner and so it's about finding the right partner because I have been in the battle no one knew this because no one is hearing this but I'm in the battle between artist and social worker people say I'm not an artist anymore I'm a social worker and I kind of get pissed off when I hear that shit sorry I'm cussing but it's just that idea that what it's the same water it's my water what glass are we going to make together let's talk because right now when we're talking for me when I was listening to you I was like I'm being asked to go to General Mills I'm being asked to go to other corporations to bring my water because they're trying to figure out how this water can help nourish them and that's where we are at I feel and that's what the work is getting me to think about how can I nourish with what I do rather than thinking about discipline I think we have so many specialists in the world and we try to label ourselves by our specialty and there's nothing wrong with going deep in your rigor and with your craft and your reach level of mastery you have to be almost more of a generalist and you have to be able to take that specialty and those skills and apply them in multiple places and you never stop being the artist I think we get really caught up on the trappings and the environment and the context and I think the difficult thing the thing that you're doing brilliantly is you're maintaining the integrity of what you're bringing regardless of the environment and I think we often let the environment tell us what we are because I call myself a translator right now more than anything else I'm just constantly translating I'm saying the same thing that's common knowledge over here but I'm saying it over here in a way that they've never heard it and I can show you behavioral science that's where innovation happens because it triggers a new chain effect and this new network that they never even thought of it in that way and that's our role I think that's all of our role to live in that space in between is to live in that in-between space and in your brain it's the corpus callosum it's the webbing which for a long time scientists thought it didn't have purpose and they would actually sever it often times and select the patients and now we're realizing there's actually a lot of magic happening in that space in between Yeah and if you listen to Radio Lab I have only listened to three minutes at a time when I'm in a car is when I get Radio Lab but there was one recently on anesthesia did anybody hear this one and this is the part I heard that's really living in a wake our brains have many different parts and they're busy talking to each other as you're describing but when they put that anesthetic drip basically you go down to one single place so that in some ways in a singular place is somewhat anesthetic I don't think that's totally true but I think it's an interesting metaphor for what we're discussing Anyone else on this? Hopefully, dance is definitely my first language as an artist it always feels like my home but I was never sufficiently fluent as a dancer or as a choreographer to communicate nor was I efficient or had the grace to make language function sufficiently and so it was in the combo platter that helped me and I have so much great admiration for people that have a dominant form but to cover my weakness I have embraced the idea that this compartmentalization that happened in so many categories between the different disciplines and the arts but also between business and all sorts of neighborhoods were rather arbitrary some people at universities literally went around, well I think they went around and peed on the different buildings to mark them as discreet to discourage communication between departments and so for me being able to embrace the combo platter across even the sciences and the environment has been profound I think I can hear some of you the internal clicking going on about well what about our marketing departments they have to call you something and I think actually the question we could get into quite a big discussion about labeling and the dilemma of singular labeling as opposed to multiple which is why the tagging system is so interesting in that pack that people understand now that things may live in more than one place and how thrilling that is to find these people in more than one place I think what's funny Liz is that even though I've been a poet my entire life when I started doing university campuses I had to explain to white English departments that I was a poet over and over again fighting against the new spoken word label that came out after that poetry jam got very popular I was suddenly a spoken word artist and that wasn't on my bio I was a jazz poet I didn't have a jazz record yet I was a hip hop poet and had never recorded a hip hop album and so trying to figure out for me what does that mean that you don't you look at a woman that looks like me at white poetry but you can't say the word poet you can't find it in your mouth why is it challenging for you in the English department at whatever university so I think we can hear the pain and the horror in that it's not unlike the social worker problem and I'll just say personally for me historically maybe every generation has to define itself because I can remember in the early in the 70s when we were all beginning some of this work there was a big discussion whether we should call ourselves cultural workers or artists and I said wait wait wait I'm not giving up the word artist I'm not doing that art is too big and too powerful and too magnificent to limit by some particular person's perspective about it and I've seen with the social work problem which we can have a discussion about that yeah I'm interested in how at least how ancestry is playing out in what we saw earlier today for several of you it was trips to Africa that mobilize something for some of you it's a trip home and I'm just curious if we could talk a little bit about the impact of both what those trips meant how you define that ancestral part of yourselves and then secondly in a time of in our country where there's a tremendous amount of nativism and some nationalism going on in such a way that might challenge some of that thinking how do we want to address that how is it so important and then what are we going to do about it I'll forget the second part but the first part is strong it's a nice transnational Iranian Guatemalan artist son of immigrants who read Shel Silverstein and is lurking for his freaking missing piece and the thing is that the reason I realize when I make all my work is I'm searching for home I mean my father wasn't allowed to go back after the Iranian hostage crisis because he worked for the government so and here my parent civil war is going on in the 80s so how do I create myself I had to translate for them I was the little one that had to translate at school so who am I where do I fit and how do I you know that missing piece how do I get it my weapon has been humor that's how I get into crowds where I'm not I remember the first time I performed in New Eureka and everybody looked at me like who the hell is this man and I just I did a poem called get down with your Muslim Catholic self and and that was it because that's how I got in the power is humor and I think that comes from an understanding and then that becomes the art you know and that becomes the art I think the idea of home one of the things I learned as a dancer is how to be present and to me that's home like how are you just here right now that's so different than a lot of the mindfulness traditions or I mean like anybody every human again is sort of like looking for that I think how we do it you know for me it's going back to South Georgia which is a place I actually don't love but where I'm from it's my family and it's embracing this environment that I left when I was 14 to go to boarding school for ballet or my chosen home now of Idaho that's like wild nature those helped me get back though to the deeper place since at home and I think that again is that what I didn't try to carry forward with me this sense of presence and being really like balanced person but the second part of your question is how can we help others I think that's what we're getting at that's what I'm trying to get at is help others realize this sense of like how are you present when I coach entrepreneurial teams who are like making some new start-up and they just want to make a lot of money I'm like that's really not the goal you know that like you're trying to create something so how do you do that with this sense of purpose a sense of authenticity a sense of integrity how are you actually saying that you believe in because also when the judges are judging you that's actually what they're judging that's what they're paying attention to so I think giving society more tools to keep coming back to themselves I think is really necessary so you guys you can start getting ready to get to the microphones I hope you're working on some questions we'd love to hear from you you can be really specific if you have a question for a particular person or you could be general I'll ask one more while you're getting yourselves specifically close to those mics given who you are now looking back on your training is there something in the way we're training artists that we need to address think about and the way we're training actually the world to think about us that we need to think about given the kinds of work you guys are now doing which is so fantastic Michael you actually said at the end of your talk you know some of the resistance isn't in the world out there it's actually in the art world is where the resistance is so I'm curious about that and Michelle there you are and that amazing institution what are you seeing what are the young people wanting or what do you think they need to have would be another way to think about this I didn't hear you actually I'm asking about training and given how you have become who you are reflecting back is there something in the training that needs to change either in our own artistic circles or in the support systems around us thinking about this notion of fluidity and how you know everybody can sort of their trajectory can come from so many different points it's not an A to B thing and I think it's about being open to all of that both as artists and as art professionals it's important to be open to understanding that one's personal and professional trajectory can be defined in so many different ways and can look like so many different things especially right now I came from a completely different background I was planning on becoming a medical anthropologist that's my background my training and I think that's why my creative process is deeply anthropological deeply ethnographic and I don't I was just giving a master class on storytelling the role of the vocalist as a storyteller sometime last week and you know it's really about honoring your story you know your personal history getting back into the last question before about heritage and this notion of home and so I think really when we're thinking about how to figure out training or how to frame training or what sort of training people should do I always tell people is to know themselves you know and to be open to discovering the unique kind of path of somebody else you know if you're not if you're the presenter and you're trying to understand where that artist is coming from and I also just again to tap on fluidity and sort of to answer your earlier question I think it's okay for that the notion of home or your notion of self to change as well for myself it's really been shifting over the last few years and I think it is as I finally left and went and spent that time on the continent and really was able to confront who am I as an African woman and am I really bogged down with the romantic notions of home am I really bogged down with the romantic notions of like what my sound is supposed to be if I was there if I had been raised there and all of those things and now I'm realizing there are stories that I didn't really think were my stories to tell that I need to tell you know right now I'm really committed to I'm working on a project about hey Harlem and I I'm committed there's a huge West African immigrant community that lives in Harlem and for a very long time I felt like their stories haven't been told and for a long time I felt like I wasn't the one to tell their stories because they had a very different immigrant narrative socioeconomic background most of them were Muslims I'm not Muslim most of them are West African I'm East African they're Francophone I'm Anglophone there were all these kind of differences that I decided oh well it's not my story but it needs to be told and now I've realized actually it is my story to tell because I'm I'm just making room for that and I've realized that my notion of home can be Harlem not just away from myself which obviously has fueled so much of the work up to now sometimes I really listen for metaphors that help me understand strategies and we just heard one at least to me about oh I need to make room for and within that is a whole set of ideas about that that involves doing and acting space and personally and you know communally as well let's start here do you mind telling us your name and then go for the question okay I'm Robin Hickman and this was to be here to present soon but so me hello I can't wait for you to be back in Minnesota and so my question to you is if you would share what you're going to come to Minnesota to do we've talked about the ancestors we've talked about the present but this sister is so committed to our future our young people would you share what you're going to work in Minnesota sure thank you so much nice to see you I'm partnering I'm doing a project called Salon Africana and I've begun to work with an organization out of Minneapolis St. Paul called Youth Prize and they're really committed to out beyond the classroom learning opportunities for young people and so one of the projects that we're doing a project that I pitched them is an extension of what I shared earlier on the Lagos Music Salon and that work in the intimate spaces and trying to challenge people and their notions of African narratives and all of that so I'll be working with young people throughout Minneapolis St. Paul over the course of the year doing a program basically a salon every quarter where I'm bringing in various African artists from various disciplines and we're also engaging the local arts community there there's a huge immigrant community in Minneapolis St. Paul hugely Somali and Liberian and a few other people as well and so we'll just be working with them and trying to help these young people kind of think outside of the box and tell their own story and empower them to tell their stories empower them to you know figure out what it is to have that kind of bicultural transnational identity and have a space of expression and have a space of not just necessarily to become an artist but to become anything that they want and in truth of who they are let's go over here thank you I'm Heather Good and I'm with the Wisconsin Union Theater in Madison, Wisconsin and all of you do very genre-defying work you've been groundbreakers in many ways you've broken out of silos you do this very unique thing and I think you can feel like a community of one when you're in that situation and so I want to ask the question that came up in last night's plenary session are we a community and from your vantage point of doing very unique work that's hard to categorize what does the sense of community in the arts world look like for you thank you but anybody like to take that? I feel I live in Colorado and I make solo work and my disposition is introverted and so in many ways I list towards the community of one as demonstrated repeatedly perhaps in my presentation but I have found a profound community of other artists and funders and administrators and presenters when I think of my life as an artist I visualize the people at Creative Capital standing at the door of my art land providing me the safe context in which to work Sarah Nash at the door of art land for me most profoundly repeatedly and all the presenters that I've worked with it's an essential ecosystem to use Marta Curran's word of art land that I'm so grateful to be a part of and then those artists that I reach out to that have brains that are more exquisite than I could imagine to tap conversation with so I am very optimistic and so profoundly a beneficiary of the large arts ecosystem. Yeah, the community for me is one of just people, my friends and artists that I've gained along the years and Blackom Iraq has become definitely a sisterhood I've never been a sorority girl that wasn't my thing so I needed something to feel safe around women so I think I created the space because around women wasn't always the space where I got a lot of support, men usually supported me, even who brought me, oftentimes were men I wanted to create a space where I could be around amazing genius women and feel very safe and that's what Blackom Iraq has become over the last 12, 13 years but also spiritual I have ancestors walking with me and I understand that and so I think in some of my training I've never even considered myself training in any kind of way, I'm just really living and hoping that I can touch people with my work and be inspired by other people's work as well while I'm in it but the community is who's in the room and who's not in the room too, my father is a part of my community and so you just take those people with you because sometimes you've got to talk to your damn self to make sure you're not crazy or crazy or whatever and I think and I was yesterday with Bill T. John was there during that talk and I think that my sense of community, I don't know if this is my community this is maybe the people that are scared of me I don't know I like to think that the people who come to APEP are my community but often times it is a very solo job and you are in your head often and so you do have to find those like-minded people like I could definitely call you to make sure that everybody's okay you got to have your people that kind of walk in that light and it's not it's an extraordinary life and it's magical and it's not for everyday people I remember being asked by a mother how could you choose to be a poet you're a mother almost like I was doing something offensive until I have the nerve to want to make a living off the thing that I actually can do and find a way to make art work for me in a real tangible way to have a house in a car and clothes and shoes and hats and all that shit's important and so I need that and poets are so underpaid and so I don't believe in being a starving artist because I'm from Detroit it's not in my so my community is working artists and finding other people and like tell me what are you doing in March 5th can you come to Detroit I like to book other artists I like to wear that hat where I'm actually finding work for artists I think we need more money in our community sometimes for me an underlying question when I hear all the conversations is there anything in our mythological world that's helping or hindering us and I think one of the questions in the arts is you know we aren't so good at acknowledging our forebears and one reason we don't is because we're supposed to like be original and figure this thing out by ourselves and we get honored for that kind of that particular form of genius and yet you can see if we I'm sure if we talk each person here but speaks so eloquently about the artists who have helped them trained them the teachers they've had that have moved them the way people are answering it is fantastic because we bring a whole history with us that makes us who we are and that is part of our community and we as a whole could ask ourselves how do we maybe make more of that can you ask your question because being a dancer was such a communal community we were together and you know their behavior you know what they smell like you know what they go through you can really read people like understanding your environment and your tribe and I am very alone now and that's the one thing I miss about being a full-time dancer is that ready-made community that you just sit right into but my answer to the question is then you have to go build a new community and it's on you it's on you now to develop new environments in which you are becoming your fullest self and the best part is your personality and you're a different person in every environment but because I'm alone in some respects now I'm actually becoming more versions of myself and have this community in Chicago and I operate in this way and I have this community in Idaho and this community in New York and this community and I think that allows me to be much more than I was when I was only thinking of myself in one way so can we go from over here oh I didn't see this microphone I'm sorry please I had a degree to which you've all broken out of a specific discipline and used other disciplines in New York I do the same I find it very frustrating in the sense that I know that my audiences always respond to what I do directly they have no question about what I'm calling it but to present it to get it presented to accept it I'm like in the midst of genres and I'm looking I guess for more encouragement I was particularly interested in what you said about tagging and how that's kind of changing the perception I do a show called Story Faces in which I tell stories by painting them onto people's faces on stage and therefore I get dismissed as something for children because it's face painting at birthday parties which it isn't you know it's mask based and storytelling the first time I ever presented at a storytelling conference just a couple years ago I discovered there were all these rules about storytelling that I didn't know I wasn't allowed to bring anything on stage and if I did I wasn't a storyteller the spoken word thing I've gotten that too and to me no I'm telling stories it's not spoken word and I know the difference I guess I'm just looking for more encouragement is this opening up more? Yes keep going Yes keep going Yes keep going So you guys we have to begin to look to the end of this and I thought I would just tell a quick little story and that's biggie of storytelling and then have you guys sort of dwell on this so we just finished a tour of a piece called Healing Wars and I got to end at the La Jolla Playhouse for a month which was fantastic and I really got to know some of their audiences and after one show a woman came up to me beautiful woman small ancient and she spoke with an accent that I might have placed in Prague or something like that and you know she did this very personal gesture which you know of course endeared me to her immediately and then she said you know I've seen this art in the world but this was really art or something like that so of course I loved her from the moment she said that and then she said to me I danced for Mengele so Mengele you know is this doctor in Auschwitz who's busy experimenting on bodies and apparently one of the things he did do was to stand at the train track and as people came through he actually did make different decisions and he pulled her out of the line that she was in following her mother which would have been to her death in 2016 and then she went into the camps and she had survival skills I went to see her a couple of times while I was there and she's just an amazing woman and then she said to me I never said why me I always said what's next I was like profoundly affected because those of you who know me know I can have self-pity at a drop of a hat so I thought wow I'm in correspondence with her now every email ends with I never asked why me I always said what's next and so I wondered if we could just do a quick little what's next whether it's personal what's next or what's next as she took in the context of the world she was in just a little sense of where you're at and what's next could be in the next hour I think sometimes what's next is not the bright future it's all possibility and what's next for me personally is a dark hibernation period and I want to embrace that because again a lot of information comes out of that so even though I'm doing a lot I'm being a lot of things I'm growing a lot of places I'm not trying to rush the process of saying what am I going to go accomplish in the world next and who you know I'm kind of this is a moment for me of letting it happen being I practice you know beginner's mind like not knowing and I find that again really you know how Jordan you sort of say let the game come to you and it's like I'm just letting that happen where as a dancer and executive director you're out there being the warrior like making it happen so I'm interested in your question sometimes it's to be still and to slow down and find your resonance at this moment Great, Lisha Having just finished litigation I'm starting new pieces and to think about their evolution or their premier paralyzes me completely so what's next is just Did you all get that? It's in the body, beautiful Yes, Sumi? I think I'm just I think it's about being more expansive in my storytelling and I think that's where that notion of fluidity is just really staying with me and being open to moving into new ways new types of expression you know just sort of trying to share more layers of who I am as an artist and as a human being so I can, yeah For me what my focus right now for sure is music and I've been conjuring Billie Holiday and Phyllis Hyman and Edda James and Nina Simone inside of my work and trying to allow survival to be my mantra as a woman artist and do those women in their stories they were my mantra for my first recording project and continue to find ways to twist audiences heads back and get them very confused when they see me on stage with a lot of music and background vocalists and tap dancers and horn players and trying to figure out what to call it and hopefully never to fit into a Grammy nomination category you know to them just to get the confusion category I don't know but to continue to challenge myself and it's because it's for me to be a rapid-fire poet that I am has been an exercise for me to learn how to slow down and to turn my poems into pieces of jazz and soul music and it's been really just transformative for me to watch the audiences react to me especially being in front of my friend Talib Kwalee's audience who's been taking me on the road and watching them be introduced to poetry with a lot of music around it and it looks like me and dresses like me on stage and so just all the confusion of that the distraction of high heels and political poetry and stuff about women and jazz and what is she doing I want to push more of that to make people really uncomfortable and excited about music and poetry I'm really looking for three words right now continuity, rootedness and amplification the big thing is that for me this world of being an artist is and so I really want to find long-term relationships more not just with presenters but just with my champions with the people, not the investment with foundations with people just for a long term and then the big thing is amplification one of the things a very good friend Michelle Cerro's a poet passed away last year before he was 50 and it hit me that I never thought about it writing, being permanent being on TV, being on videos records, all that is something you need to think about you can't just be improvising for the rest of your life even though we do so Rachel's going to come up and tell us what's next and I'll just say for the moment thank you, thank you thank you Liz thank you Liz thank you Liz I sound a little Californian but that was totally awesome you guys are so great please join us once again in thanking Liz and our speakers for quite a thoughtful, energizing, inspiring session and thanks to all of you for your participation and thanks to ICM partners for your sponsorship without you this would not have happened you won't want to miss tomorrow's plenary session with John Collins, Lisa Cron and Bart Cher be here again at 11am in the meantime grab a bite make sure to hydrate head downstairs to the second floor for the opening of the Expo Hall at 2pm have a great conference and thank you all so much