 Just give folks a minute or two here to join us. This is Derek from NEPA speaking. I just want to give a quick reminder before we get started that we do have live captioning available today. And I am going to post the link if you want to follow on the external website that is on the chat in the chat and you can also put them directly in zoom by clicking live transcript at the bottom of the page. I started in another minute here. I want to give folks time to enter but I also want to make sure that artists have time for the Q&A and contextualization at the end. All right, so hello, you have all heard from me several times today and I am so appreciative of your time and attention. Our next performance is the ensemble of color from Maine. As I mentioned earlier today, I am a lifelong inhabitant of Maple Nation specifically here in New England. I grew up in the region we now know is Maine and appreciate the opportunity to acknowledge the lands and peoples of my home place on behalf of both NEPA and the ensemble of color. All of the territory that is now known as Maine is the traditional ancestral present and future lands of the Wabanaki Confederacy, or in English, the people of the dawn land. This is the union of five indigenous people spanning not only Maine, but Nova Scotia and surrounding islands, as well as the lands occupied by both the United States and Canada. While all colonial borders by their nature disrupt the relationship of people to each other and to the land. This is especially evident in the so called border states like Maine, and the communities they draw lines through. In the centuries of attempted erasure and colonial border in positions in 1993, the Penobscot calls to the relighting of the council fire of the Wabanaki Confederacy. It has burned uninterrupted since I asked you to join me in offering respects to the firekeepers and elders past presence and future of the people of the dawn land. The acknowledgement of the lands and people of Maine would be incomplete without acknowledging the black ancestors both in bondage and freedom, who have lived, loved and labored in these lands. Since at least 1780 black Americans have been at the forefront of main famous maritime industry, and have contributed significantly to the arts, economics, religion and culture of the region. I asked you to join me in offering respects to the ancestors past presence and future of the black and African peoples who do have and will call Maine home. I asked you to join me in offering respects to the immigrants past presence and future, especially those of the global south currently being displaced by us imperialism, and those who arrived here in dawn land territory via house island. I asked you to join me in a moment of reflection, respect and contemplation of the history and people of the lands now known as Maine. Before we press play I do want to share two resources in the chat for folks. The first is a website where you can find the traditional and present keepers of the lands you currently reside on. The second is a land trust founded by Wabanaki Confederacy members that works on land back actions in Wabanaki territory in Maine, including cultural preservation current art production and food sovereignty. Thank you for joining me for a moment of respect and acknowledgement of elders, firekeepers and sectors and protectors past, present and future. With respect, I'm going to turn over the camera and the microphone to the ensemble of color. I wish I could wear fragility like the white women that surround me. I want to take it and put it over my entire body and let it caress me to sleep at night. I want to slip it on under my feet and make sure that every step I take is rooted in something unreal, something unjust, something only seen by those that I choose to step all over. I desire to wear fragility like the white women around me, not around my neck as some sort of a noose that keeps me restrained, keeps me hidden behind myself inside myself and beside myself known. I crave to wear it like white women, like shawls, like capes, like all of the sparkling stones and gems they wear around their fingers, around their necks, around their ears, or around their heads. I want to wear fragility like white women at their weddings, when everyone is looking at them like they are the best thing that has ever existed. I daydream about wearing white fragility like the white women that encircle me, so that I can escape from the bullshit and the terror they can't seem to stop putting at my doorstep. I want to wear fragility some days so bad I could die. I wonder what it could feel like to wear fragility like the white women that margin me. I would put my fragility over my entire body and let it caress me to sleep at night. Even for just one night, one night of peace like a lily, I beg to wear fragility like the white women that bind me. I want to wear it like the violent tears streaming down their white faces when the reality about who they really are hits them hard, knocks the wind out along with courage. In comes the guilt or the shame and then out goes the accountability. Then back in with a heavy dose of entitlement. Some blinks of tension wrapped in white girl privilege, possibly internal collapse and self-destruction for a moment, not remotely as close a devastation as the ongoing desecration of so many First Nations tribes by white tears and white terrorism. A place of deep violence and confusion and pain. I attempt to wear fragility like the white women that invest in me. I attempt to wear it as comfortably and as easily as they do when they move from room to room, from meeting to meeting, from sidewalk to sidewalk, from highway to country road, from the shower to their bedroom, from the barn to the farmhouse, from the classroom to graduation, at the airport, inside a restaurant, at the swimming pool, the grocery store, under the care of an OBGYN or masseuse. When they get pulled over, creating at an artist residency in their beds at home, asleep in the middle of the night. I want to wear fragility like the white women that confine me. The ones I see laughing at misogyny because they don't believe it exists for them. Her money tells her so, her degrees tell them so, her successful children tell them so, her touring calendar and booking fees tell them so, and her board positions and affiliations to whiteness tells everyone so. I want to wear fragility like the white women that limit me. The ones who teach their boys how to be lazy, psychologically, financially, and physically violent, insecure, anxiety-ridden, emotionally immature, sex-obsessed, spiritually damaged fuckboys who are incapable of bonding through their heart chakra. The ones who become intellectual property stealing, ego-driven, stunted, possible future, CEOs, chefs, nurses, mama's boys, dangerous assholes. I want to wear fragility like the white women who skirt around the major humanitarian issues. Instead, I would act like the stories of grandeur that get passed down from one unsuspecting, mediocre, ignorant, entitled, unskilled white generation after the next. I want to wear fragility like the white women that surround me, protected at all costs by their men, white men, black men, Asian men, Arab men, queer men, and non-binary folk. I want to wear fragility like the white women who always seem to fence me in, like the ones who use land ownership and human bodies as collateral to secure their personal financial stability for their future and their possible offspring's future. I want to wear fragility like the white women who haven't done enough decolonizing work, who haven't done enough anti-racist work in their adult lives, in their bodies. The ones who have pieces of paper validating them daily, but no lived experiences of protecting black bodies in danger daily. The white women who believe themselves to be liberal, progressive, feminist, to not see color, to know the difference between right and wrong. The ones who can point out the good and the bad, the ones who never think to properly compensate black women, indigenous women, Asian women, Arab women, queer women, women of color for our emotional labor. By making us a line item in the companies and households that you budget for every year, I want to live in the shallowness of their understanding of relationship and care. There are so many times when I want to wear fragility like the white women around me so that I can escape from all of their bullshit lack of self avoidance. Lack of self love, avoidance of white racial emotional labor work, distrust of self, insecurities, self pity, self harm, lack of skills, lack of personal accountability, and the overall terror you can't seem to stop putting at my fucking doorstep. I would remind everyone that my mixed race or adopted children, oh they count. My allyship counts. My black partner counts. My foreign exchange students counts. My domestic worker counts. My au pair counts. My gardeners count. My Caribbean vacations count. My ambiguous hue counts. My now successful white son with a learning disability that he had to struggle through counts. My poor, rural white childhood counts. My abusive father who drank himself to death counts. My appropriated career counts. That one time when my child dated a black person counts. That one time I sat next to a black family on a boat and we all got along counts. Those books I read by black people count. I wish I could wear fragility like the light skinned passing entrepreneur whose understanding of her own blackness stops when I point out that the success of her organization is due to the fact that white folks think that white folks run the organization. I wish I could wear fragility as drunk and shamelessly as the Italian American woman who informed me that she has paid her reparations because she married a black man who can't take care of himself or his black children. I have fantasized about wearing fragility like the American born first generation white European mother currently colonizing stolen Wabanaki land. Her fragility allows her to reap the financial benefits of the legalization of marijuana. As her child bears the white privilege with ease the white violence from her spouse with innocence and the white guilt and shame that is not apparent as a line item in her yearly budget on stolen Wabanaki land. I wish I could wear fragility as softly as queer non-binary folks who were raised as girls and women. I would also be in denial about my perpetuation of harm, my perpetuation of dehumanizing, belittling and policing black bodies. I would too cower at taking responsibility and deflect always to my queerness as my rightness. I wish I could wear fragility like the white women that surround me, like the ones who pay me more money to take care of their animals per hour than they pay me to take care of their children per hour. I would wear my fragility as the brilliant glory and acceptance of white culture parenting that it is. I would flash it at people constantly like a shiny badge, a metal, a trophy, a plaque, a stone statue, a painted family portrait, or a library named after, theater named after, building named after, Street named after, named after, named after, named, named, named, named, named, named, named, named, named, named, named, named! I wish I could wear fragility like the white women that surround me, like the ones who have been spouting project goals and mission statements for so long they actually believe they have lived them. I would not put in years, decades, epigenetic lifetimes worth of actual work of not lying to myself, not lying to anyone else in my life or letting others continuously lie to me because they are regularly lying to themselves, oh no, why bother? Instead I would take all resources and paint the prettiest pictures that I can possibly imagine about how happy I am, how fulfilled I feel and how good of a person I have become. I would carve the most adventurous fucking story I can make work fit for my intended future privileged white woman purposes, some days I wake up and I want to wear white woman fragility so bad that all I can do is cry! Giving a follow-moment to come into the space and be present in the moments following that performance and the moments that were the performance itself. As we transition into a place of contextualization, conversation and question, I want to uplist something really quickly which is at the time of planning the regional convening, the ensemble of color was listed as the theater ensemble of color and as part of their continued organizing and reworking and establishing, they have transitions named to the ensemble of color which is represented in the naming convention of the panelists we're going to have. Join us in a moment here. Renee, whenever you're ready, I'm going to go ahead and pause and give you the space. I'm going to go through my phone and look at your faces first because I'm on a smaller screen and see some faces, I see some faces, I see more faces, I see more faces and they keep coming. Okay, I won't cry, I won't cry, I'll see more faces. Tears are welcome in the face, be the first tears of the day. Once I start, I can't stop so I'm going to try and hold it together. Thank you for the faces, much appreciated y'all and for the folks who aren't sharing their faces, also much appreciated y'all. Thank you for being here. Oh, hey, so I'll start and say let's take some water for anybody who needs it. I'm one of them, one of them. And then the second thing I will say is I want to clearly state the tribes that surround me, the Passamaquoddy, the Malasit, the Mi'kmaq, the Abenaki and I know there's one more. No, that was five. Was that five? That was five. Okay, this is why I can't cry on work and be very grateful for the fact that as a South African Indigenous human, I landed in a place where I understood in my body that I was home, even though in real time, it didn't feel that way. And now almost 40, I've been here for 32 years. I understand why here in a way that I just couldn't as a child. This piece originally originally began in 2020 when I was in specifically Abenaki territory, which is about an hour from Portland. And I was surrounded by an all female group of workshoppers at the Celebration Barn Theater. I had been an employee there for eight years. I gave my resignation last year. And in my eight years of being there, I had never had an all FEM workshop. It was like, yo, okay, I'd heard them talk about it. Things like this had happened in the seventies and the eighties, all the partying, but by the nineties, an all FEM workshop just wasn't a thing that could really sell at the barn, especially for clowning. So they had never done that. And then here I am. I've been here for almost seven years at now. I'm like, all women, I'm so excited. And a few of them I knew, super dope. My position at the barn at the time was residential manager. I was in charge of the 11 acre property. So I was in charge of the kitchen where I was preparing meals for students by the end of my career, not the beginning of my career. Originally, I was also the nanny for a one month old baby. I also ran the tech lights and sounds for shows and the performing artists that came in on Saturdays. I was also very much easy. That list is just cute. Yeah, I could keep doing that. That was me at the barn. They'd never seen anyone like me. I had never used that place in quite the way that it had been used. I had never used it quite the way anyone wanted to. I just used all my skills and I was like, ooh, you people don't know what things are. Let me try this. Let me try this, a place that had been around for a really long time. Had all of these skills, all of these accolades. And year after year, I was recognizing there wasn't a skill here that I had. So after my second year, I started Theater Ensemble of Color with Christina Wyvonne Richardson and Nicole Chiyomomo Kame. And the next six years of being in that space got me to this place where I was at a residency with all of these friends. And a thing that I thought I would rejoice in after all of this time because I hadn't really been allowed to do anti-racist work in that environment. I hadn't really been allowed to do decolonizing work in that place. No one would say, Renee, we told you you couldn't, but that was the environment. No one there was trained. So the things I was bringing to the table didn't work and therefore never came back up in conversation. So I understood my place. So here I thought I was going to be able to really shine. And what ended up happening instead of a shining moment was being introduced to a bunch of racist women in the arts. A bunch of women who were getting incredibly prestigious places, who first thing they said to me when they introduced to me was, I work with such and such a community. I've heard I should speak to you. Almost every single person I was told I should meet at this thing. We have a prestigious person coming from Canada to teach. Whoa. One racist white woman after another introduced themselves to me. And there was just one difference in this year of being in that establishment than the previous, and it was time. One, a year away because of the pandemic. And two, the year before the pandemic, I had started to set some boundary. I had started to say you overuse me. In fact, you way overuse me. You make decisions for my job without me at the table. So now you have to figure out for a whole summer what to do without me. I'm only going to show up for nine weeks when I normally show up for about 31. See what you can do without me. I had done that a year and a half before. So now I hadn't been here for almost two years. And now I was going back into this environment that normally was delicious. But for the first time, void of me, I got to see it for itself and this piece started and it brought up 30 years of living on Wabanaki territory. And specifically my relationship to white women. My pedagogy, my training is white culture parenting. It is something I have been working on for a long time and didn't even have the words for it. Until that moment, until I was sitting in a room full of people who thought they were liberal, loving humans. And when I read the beginning stages of this play out to them out loud, the reactions were incredible. And I had originally just asked the instructor if she would please hear me because I couldn't do it. I couldn't talk to them. But I needed someone to understand what they had all created before we all walked away. I needed someone to know what they had done and made themselves feel like. But I was the outside. So I needed to tell the instructor and I read the beginning stages to her and she said, Holy shit, don't know what to do with that. And then we talked for about an hour and a half. And then she said, would you consider reading this to the class? And I said, you know, I thought about that originally. I wasn't sure what to do, but I think I can do that. I think I can do that. And I did. And it was one of the most difficult. I love device work. It's my thing. I'm a high school graduate. I have no formal training whatsoever. This is my third business. I live life like a white man. I do what the fuck I want. So for me to sit in that room with all of these people who are unbelievably skilled and trained and yada, yada, yada to really bear my soul in a way that I had never done since wanting to as a child since moving to this place at six years old, wanting to help white mothers in particular understand the kind of harm they create by being bystanders in their own lives. That is my work. White terrorism doesn't continue because of patriarchy. It continues because white mothers are bystanders in their own lives. And as a person who raised 33 children in 22 years from 25 families, 24 of them were white, extremely affluent because I assimilate really well. So my first nanny and gig I was 11. I took care of an infant from a woman who didn't want her, who left me alone for days on end. I was making four thousand dollars a week as an 11 year old. Four thousand dollars a week as an 11 year old because my birth mother had already been had given me up. I was trafficked as a child. So I was already in a system of being trafficked in a different kind of way than we all are trafficked as just being in this place. So for me, I understand white women very specifically and affluent white mothers in particular because I was a commodity to them and the way that they could use me. So now as an adult, as I'm doing all of the work, as I'm having honest conversations about being kidnapped from another country to be trafficked for my money because my black mother understood what her body and my body could get her in this country. If she spoke to the right people, if she gave me to the right people. So I started being worked at 11 to the right of people so that all of the systems work for all the people around me. So this piece comes from a lot of space that is mine. But as a unit, our organization, we have some very clear, clear, clear understanding in our bodies as femme identifying humans, what this place has done to us. So when we work on this piece, when we talk about this piece, when we look at this piece, it's really rooted in all of our stories and it just keeps elaborating. This is a shorter version. There's a longer version. And I'm realizing there's an even longer version. I was like, oh, wait, I thought the 20 minute version was the longest. No, it is not. No, it is not. And this is just my voice. So the longer versions have other folks involved in it. So you really get a chance to to move through the piece and feel different spaces. I'm going to stop talking there for a moment and just give you a little bit of context of who we are so that you can take the piece you just listened to and really understand we are a Black, femme, indigenous survivor founded, founded, small and mighty organization, compromise of a multiracial group of a diverse class and educational background. We are actively building power and relationship with other Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, Arab people of color, queer of queer people of color and global majority humans and survivor led organizations across Wabanaki territory. We were born out of a deep need for play and joy. For Black, femme bodies. We will say it again without hesitation. We were born out of a deep need for play and joy for Black, femme bodies. We came together to create a space to be intimate and loving, to play with abandonment, to create collective, intergenerational joy for Black bodies, to uplift Black joy to challenge the dominant narratives that Black experience is defined by trauma and violence. We seek to build new narratives that challenge the way that Whiteness pits us against each other as Black femmes. We make art as an intergenerational community with youth of all ages to teach girls, especially the abundance of ways to show intimacy and affection outside of the systems that hypersexualize us. I'm going to stop talking there on my own. I'm about to. Thank you. So I want to just uplift for you responses from the comments because I know you're operating from a phone. And Jasmine from Sage Seeker said, yes, yes, yes. Thank you for this love. I wanted to make sure that was brought to you in the space. I know that you can't see everyone on camera at the same time. There have been lots of parts. There have been lots of applause emojis. There's been a lot of playing. There's been some snapping and clapping. And I know that you're in a limited screen to see. So as we sit with all of the things that you just shared, I wanted to make sure that is reflected back to you. I also want to note as we are in the last 10 minutes of this session, Renee is going to be present with us for our defining community session, which is a panel to close the day. And we are making space. So if there are questions, if there are things that you all want to sit with that we don't have time for in the next five minutes, we do have 45 minutes of self-selected, self-guided time, including a room for debriefing on panels and performances. So I want to be mindful of the five minutes. And I don't want, especially for other Black, Indigenous and queer folks in the space to feel that your processing has to take six minutes and then end. Thank you again, Renee, for everything that you've brought into this space for the performance itself, encouraging folks to use Huba to your advantage and go ahead and look up the Ensemble of Color and that page. We have another comment in the chat. I am lost for words. I was unable to see the video, but I am deeply moved by your presentation, Renee. Thank you so much. So just naming those as they come up. Are there any questions that folks want to raise? You can raise your hand and I will call again. I know Renee's screen is limited. You can use the raise hand on Zoom or you can pop it in the chat. I know that I can speak for myself as a mixed ethnicity person who moves through the world with every kind of passing privilege of whiteness, the core concept of fragility is something that is born and put on and put off, like a ball gown or a suit of armor was incredibly resonant in ways that are both painful and affirming. So just naming that in the space and having an intimate understanding of what that continual tightrope feels like and understanding that it feels like a tightrope from distance, but it's really not. It's really holding other people at sword point, right? It's a different circus trick and it's a much more harmful one and having that in the space is just super valuable. From Jasmine, I'm curious about space and funding, probably much larger question, but how are y'all able to produce work and how does that feel with developing audience as Black families? Great question. Thank you, thank you. Funding has been shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty, shit. I worked for free for the last eight years. That is the honest answer. This is a labor of love. I'm working toward being paid every day. It is going to happen, damn it. So that's the simple version. I write a lot of grants myself and I'm skilled in teaching myself anything. Like I said, anything I wanna do, I do it. So I've learned how to become a grant writer. We pay our actors $15 an hour for rehearsal. It took me three and a half years to make that a real living system. If we make more than our funding, then they make more for rehearsal. We pay our actors an average of $25 to $50 an hour for shows, period. It has taken me eight years to build that in practice. I love myself that much. So I work really hard to make sure I get the things I need. I need not a lot. I always move my budgets into the work that I do. I've been a philanthropist for two decades out of my own pocket. So that's another way that funding happens. I am unbelievably skilled to take care of my community before I'm able to take care of myself. That is my best quality. So everybody gets paid, buildings don't need them. I work really slow. The play we're working on right now, we started working on in 2016. It's an original play about trafficking. The playwright died last year, October 31st, a year ago. And we just put up the full production play read in a 1,000 seat theater in Westbrook performing arts. I didn't pay for it. My partners took a lot of that, yeah. I take my time, so I work with the right people so I get the thing I want when it's supposed to happen. She wanted to see the full production before she died. That didn't happen. I refused to push the timeline knowing she was dying, refused, did the thing the activist art actually needed because we take care of our community first. And I couldn't push things. I couldn't push money. I couldn't push timelines. I wasn't born in the United States. So I come from a different timeline epigenetically. And so I'll hold that as an answer also. I come from a place that taught me advocacy as a child. So the need for urgency doesn't live in my body, the way that it does for people who were born with this epigenetic code. I love taking my time. I love taking my time and doing the thing. What do we say? We move at the speed of trust in our organization. We don't know what urgency is. So that's how we are dealing with that. And also in the beginning stages, it was really hard when my actors wanted to be on stage all the time and I had to figure things out when they wanted to be seen and I had to do it. I just fucking did it and now I know better. So now that's not my practice anymore. It's not my practice anymore. And we will keep evolving until the practice feels feasible for everyone, including me, including me. Thank you so much for that answer. And for the question, we are just at time and there's a couple of things I wanna remind folks of, speaking of that urgency, but also making sure that we all get what we need. And that includes, there are three options for this next session. They share a password. The password is theater with a capital T. You can choose to come into space and ask members of the National Theater Project Team questions about our programming, our funding, things that arose in the info session. You can choose to come into a space to process the panel and performances of the convening so far. That does include the things we saw in Hartford, Connecticut a week ago. All of that is welcome to be in the space. And there is unstructured networking time, which is me holding a Zoom room and trying not to get in anyone's way. After that, we have a final panelist where you can hear more from Renee on the concept of community. It is going to call back to our earlier panel. Again, the password to the next session is theater. And I hope to see all of you again soon. Thank you. Thank you.