 Hello and welcome. I'm Teresa Eyring, the executive director and CEO of TCG, and I use she, her, hers pronouns. On behalf of the board and staff of TCG, I want to say thank you for joining us at Convergence, the first half of our 2020 TCG virtual conference, Re-Emergence. Before we get started, we'll take a moment to offer our respects to the many lands on which we gather, and to honor the traditional stores of these lands. If you have a land acknowledgement as part of your personal or organizational practice, we invite you to share them in the comments now. You'll see now a map of native lands on your screen. Like many of you, we've made a practice of land acknowledgement at all our gatherings. We do this to offer recognition and respect, to broaden awareness of the history of this land, and to begin to repair relationships with native communities. And it's important that this responsibility not always fall on native people. As we move to a virtual gathering, we do so knowing that many native peoples do not have access to these technologies, and that these online tools contribute to the climate crisis that disproportionately impacts indigenous communities. In your own time, I invite you to review the land acknowledgments in the comments, and consider how we might act in solidarity with our native colleagues who are experiencing the worst of this pandemic. To help get us started, I'm joined by my friend and colleague, Adrian Budu. Thanks, Teresa. I'm Adrian Budu. I'm the Deputy Director and COO of TCG, and I use he, him, his pronouns for pronouns. Our coming together today is bittersweet, because our big production, the National Conference, was supposed to be in rehearsals right now, soon to open in beautiful Phoenix in June. But like so many of you, the pandemic has made us pivot online, which for many theater people will never be the same as a live event. But just because they're not at the same doesn't mean they can't be deeply meaningful, as we trust our time together will be. But first, we need to take a moment to honor Phoenix. We were just so excited to bring the theater field to Phoenix. We couldn't wait to share the thriving art scene, wonder at the natural splendor, and honor the native communities upon whose land we were together. Above all, we couldn't wait for you to meet their amazing theater community. They are a generous, kind, committed, and visionary group of people. And we hope that when the pandemic fades, you'll find time to visit them. We'll have a chance to hear from our host committee chairs later in this session. Before we get started, we also want to wish Ramadan Mubarak to all of our Muslim friends and colleagues who are observing Ramadan now. We know our Muslim friends are not only feeling the loss of connection into theater, but also missing the deep connection that comes from prayer shared in person. And we're sending all our love to you. One small way that we can support our Muslim colleagues who are fasting is to refrain from drinking or eating meals and camera during our Zoom meetings. We'll be in touch on that later too. Thank you, Adrienne. Now, the name of this two-part conference is Reemergence, and that title holds multiple meanings. One of the things it means is that our conversations are intended to be emergent, to live in an open, generative space. For while this pandemic is many things, a crisis, a tragedy, and an existential challenge for our field, it is also surely a transition, a portal through which our field must pass and be changed. If we move through this transition with care and intention, we hope that we can come through these losses stronger than before, so convergence is intended to be a space of collective envisioning. That said, we know that many of you join these conversations needing immediate tools and resources to keep your theaters and theater careers alive. TCG is committed to providing these tools and resources as well. Moving between a visionary space while also navigating complex federal legislation and budgeting scenarios isn't easy, but for theater makers, it's also not unfamiliar. And for us at TCG, we believe that a holistic approach, one that responds to our immediate needs while strategizing about our future, is essential. That's why TCG has assembled a five-part responsiveness framework. TCG's response efforts will, one, stabilize the field by advocating for and disseminating information about relief funds. Two, organize theaters through virtual gatherings and online resource sharing. Three, communicate the existential need of theaters now and the intrinsic role theaters will play in stage in our country's recovery. Four, innovate new ways of connecting with audiences and creating our art form. And five, transform the systemic challenges our field faces to emerge stronger from the crisis. A core part of our stabilized efforts is our advocacy at the federal level. TCG works in coalition with other arts advocates to ensure that not-for-profit theaters and theater artists are included in critical relief legislation. You've also supported that work through the 7,000 messages you've sent since the pandemic to your congressional representatives. This work is led by Lori Baskin at TCG and she tells us we can't let up. Keep those messages coming to Congress. We organize through affinity-based online communities in the TCG Circle where theater people have sent over 3,000 messages to each other since the pandemic. We've also been working with journalists to ensure that the needs of the field are clearly communicated with articles posted in the New York Times, NPR, New York Magazine, Forbes and many others. And we've begun to lift up the innovative ways theaters are connecting with audiences. Most recently in our webinar, virtual toasts, online galas and donor engagement. That brings us to our work today, the work of transformation. Convergence will support the urgent need of connection and collective action as we grapple with the changing needs and challenges facing the nonprofit theater field. We will do what the TCG conference has always done best, bring different types of theater people together for emergent conversations and ideation. The wonderful Priya Parker in her book, The Art of Gathering talks about how to articulate the outcome you hope for from a gathering of people. She says, think of what you want to be different because you gathered and worked backward. On the other side of convergence, after you've logged off your last Zoom call of the week and move into your weekend mulling over what you've talked about and experienced, we hope that you feel different about the work ahead than you did coming in. We hope you're both challenged and comforted by these conversations. We hope that some offer you with tools and ideas, but we also hope that some bring you into the community with theater people you might not have met otherwise. We hope that in those communities we begin to reckon with what this time is teaching us as a field and how we might acknowledge our losses together and imagine and forge a new path forward. And we theater people know we have a long history of adapting and thriving in the face of plagues, pandemics, terrorism, global conflict and economic disaster. We have the opportunity to work through this crisis with an eye toward transformation, toward leaving behind the practices that weren't working and maybe never worked to rebuild our theaters and our communities with a focus on justice, equity and inclusion. Let's do that in the coming days. I want to express huge admiration and love for TCG's conferences and field-wide learning team and hand it over to its fearless leader, Devin Berkshire. Thanks, Adrienne and Teresa, for setting us up so nicely. Hi everyone, I'm Devin Berkshire, my pronouns are she or hers, and I'm the director of conferences and field-wide learning here at TCG. I'm also the mother of Nina and Diego, and I want to echo the gratitude to all of you for joining us here at our first virtual conference. This has been quite the journey for TCG and one we didn't think that we would be taking this quickly. So we really appreciate the patience Teresa was referring to as we know it's been a lot to keep up with on your end. So thank you for bearing with us as we all learn together. The staff on this end is pulling off some really miraculous work, so my gratitude also extends to them. Our hope at the moment is to take a little time now to do what we would do in a live conference and our How We Show Up session, which we've been doing at the top of every TCG conference since 2015. How We Show Up is in many ways about getting us all on the same page for the work ahead for the three days we'll be together. The first How We Show Up, which was conceived by my wonderful colleague, Karina Shulenberg, and led by my amazing predecessor, Dayfina McMillan, I offered up the invitation to attendees to join us in all the fullness of their humanity. Not just as colleagues in the field, but as people who are sharing space while embodying all their areas of identity. So we've continued to offer that invitation at every How We Show Up since then, and it's a lot to ask of you at this time to join us in all of your humanity and vulnerability. And it's an even taller order when we're trying to do it all from our own homes through computer tablets, computer screens and tablets, without being near each other and without being in the same room together. For a field that's meant to gather people in person, this is a difficult task, and we acknowledge that and will continue to express our gratitude to you for your time and energy. To make it a bit easier, we'd like to introduce overall meeting agreements for our time together. Your facilitators in your different sessions may reintroduce these in those spaces. They may build off them, they may invoke them just as we're offering them now, or they may create new ones with you. But these are all some of our favorite guidelines for sharing space, some of which may be familiar to you. These agreements come from TCG, from organizations like AWARDA, and from different facilitator networks that we interact with. So let's take a second to talk through these. Make space, take space. This refers to being conscious if you're someone who tends to speak a lot, make sure you're allowing space for others to participate. And if you're someone who tends to pull back, try to step out of your comfort zone and lean into participating more. No one knows everything, everyone knows something, together we know a lot. This refers to a kind of collective intelligence we should be allowing to emerge from these gatherings and acknowledges that the knowledge we share is greater than the knowledge held by any one of us. Allow everyone to speak for themselves, not on behalf of a group. Let's commit to speaking in eye statements in these conversations. Agree to disagree, but please do not disengage. This refers to the welcoming of healthy conflict, as we know these conversations may get challenging, but please don't let heated moments of exchange cause you to disengage from them. What's learned here leaves here, what's said here stays here. This is TCG's version of confidentiality. Didn't come from us, but while the conversations in many of these spaces will be recorded, except for the personal identity groups, TCG will not distribute these recordings, they'll only be used internally for archival purposes. Respect the agenda, but hold it lightly. We want to encourage trusting your facilitators to have crafted the agenda for your time together well, but they are also prepared to be agile if necessary and if the energy of the group is pointing in a different direction. Be a person, look for moments of joy. We'll say this a lot, and I want to credit the wonderful Stephanie Ibarra for first putting it this way to us, the be a person part, but in this kind of space, that's particularly important. We're all home, we have pets and kids and noise and it's all okay, but please do stick with us enough to discover joy together, whether you experience the joy with your kids sitting on your lap or in a rare moment of privacy. Now to talk more about our suggested rules of engagement on our digital platforms, two members of the phenomenal TCG conference team, and Charlone and Sam Morialli. I'm going to pass it to Sam and Anne to tell us now a little bit more about how we're asking you to interact and zoom with us during convergence. Hi everybody, I'm Sam Morialli, I use they and he pronouns and I am the TCG conference coordinator for the 2020 virtual conference. And I'm Anne Charlone my pronouns are she or they and I'm the TCG conference manager. Sam and I would love to spend a minute offering a kind of virtual vocabulary for our time together. Almost all our sessions will be happening via zoom platform that I'm sure you've all gotten to know very well over the last several weeks. For how to show up in your zoom rooms and a lot of this information can be found in our welcome posts on mighty networks easily accessed in the discovery section, along with screenshots of how to find some of this functionality. So, first, set your name and TCG we are encouraging you to set your pronouns as well. So as you can see even in this recording here they're Samuel Morialli with my pronouns and parentheses and stay on mute except for when it's your turn to speak. Please use your camera to the extent that you're comfortable just so people can see you at least physically reacting your attention there. Please use the raise hand function on zoom to signal when you would like to speak. Feel free to use the chat box to participate if you don't want to speak but minimize crosstalk in the chat. And the chat can be used in a couple different ways. You can use it to ask questions of your facilitators and you can do that by noting that with question marks or you can support a speaker or thoughts notated like so. Be a person, little ones and pets are welcome on camera and we recognize the extraordinary caregiving responsibility being placed on some folks during this time. Please respect our colleagues who are celebrating Ramadan by turning off your camera to eat or drink. And use the clock away function to signal your absence from your computer especially during breakout periods. A lot of these zoom tips with screenshots can be found in the welcome post on the Convergence Mighty Network that we'll talk more about in a minute. And please let us know if you have questions during Convergence about zoom or anything else by emailing us at redashemergence2020atTCG.org or by direct messaging the mighty network member named TCG support line and someone at TCG will get back to you right away. We just want to ask you to offer grace and generosity to your facilitators and staff hosts on Zoom calls who will also try to help you work through any technology issues that you may have. And we will have them and it will be okay. Now I'll pass it over to our intern Amelia, the most vital member of our team. Amelia, can you tell us a little bit more about Mighty Networks? Thank you, Sam. Yes, I can. Hi, everyone. My name is Amelia Smart-Denson. My pronouns are she, her, hers, and I'm the conferences and field-wide learning intern at TCG this season and what a season it has been. I have also set up a lot of the Mighty Network platform that houses most of the Convergence programming info. And rather than spend a lot of time now telling you about it, I would encourage you to go to this post in the featured posts section of your home page, as well as the discovery section of the network and read a quick how-to of how to make the most of your use of the new platform. It's really user-friendly, but email us at the email that Ann mentioned if you have any trouble. Back to you, Devin. Thanks, team. And what an amazing team you are, for real. Okay, everyone, we are looking forward to seeing a lot of you over the next couple of days and we're here for any support that you may need. So with that, I'd love to pass this to my wonderful colleague, Elena Chang. Thank you, conferences team. My name is Elena, and my pronouns are she, her, hers, and I'm the director of ED&I initiatives at TCG. One of the things I've noticed is how my sense of time has changed during this pandemic. It's harder to feel which day it is and sometimes it feels like we're moving both really slowly and way too quickly at the same time. One of the things that helps me is taking this time to say thank you. And so I want to say thanks to our amazing conferences team who have rallied this convergence together. I also want to take a moment to really lift the wonderful work behind the scenes of our new marketing director and goddess of all online things, Erica Lauren Ortiz, for her tremendous support this week. Finally, I also want to lift up how draining these video meetings can be. And so if you want to stretch, move your body in any way that feels good, please do so. We look forward to connecting with you more directly throughout the week, but team ED&I here thought we'd provide a bit of context on this year's identity affinity spaces. Amidst COVID-19, it's time, more than ever, to lean into specifically anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist, anti-Abelist practice. And what many individuals from the POC, LGBTQ disability networks have been sharing with us has been more than sobering. At TCG, we continue to interrogate this. The fact is, things have not been inclusive for decades before this pandemic. It's not a question of what can be done. It's more of an urgent question of what needs to be done. And it's with that thinking that we've engaged with many networks of color, LGBTQ initiatives, and leaders from the disability theater networks to center by foreign about conversations as part of TCG's convergence. Hi, I'm Sierra and I use she, her pronouns. I'm the equity diversity and inclusion intern at TCG. As part of our convergence programming, we will have a specific identity affinity session for people of color. This session will gather all who identify as people of color into one session before breaking out into specific racial identities for discussion. They'll then reconvene at the end of the session to share out what each group talked about. There will also be a session for white people around anti-racism and how to do the work. This space is specifically for and facilitated by white people because we should not expect that kind of labor and teaching about anti-racism to come from people of color. It's important to have a space where white people can take the responsibility of doing and learning about the work themselves. In terms of breakout sessions for people of color, there are five race specific sessions. The native session will foster a discussion of native community needs, how the native community can support one another at this time, and ways for that community to move forward and heal. The MENA, or Middle Eastern North African Session, will introduce the newly formed MENA Theater Makers Alliance, its purpose and mission. The session will then invite feedback and discussion around ways to build a stronger MENA network and the best way to advocate for MENA artists. The Latinx Session will focus on uplifting bright spots on the horizon and noting the most beneficial actions across the field that have happened in response to the pandemic. This session seeks to imagine how the Latinx community and Latinx Theater as a whole can continue to move forward from this moment. The API, or Asian Pacific Islander Session, will be a collective reflection during these troubled times and a chance to discuss messaging as a community, specifically as it regards to the anti-Asian racism and xenophobic attacks currently occurring. The Black slash African American Session will center on community care, specifically by looking at the current needs of the community, how to care for one another and what that means and looks like during times of crisis. Thank you, Sarah. Hello, my name is Sarah Machiko Haber and I am she or her pronouns. I am the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives Associate at TCG. We have three more Personal Identity Affinity Sessions this year that I'd like to share a little about. First, those who identify as having a mixed identity are welcome to attend in the mix, the mixed identity and multi-identity affinity space. This session, facilitated by Kayla Kim-Vodipeck and Kanisha Foster, is for anyone who identifies as mixed race, mixed identity, multi-identity individuals who are part of a multi-identity family, for example, adoption, interracial marriage, second generation, and allies. I'd like to live that mixedness is not limited to racial identity. The second space is the changes that remain in affinity space for theater and disability, facilitated by Reagan-Linton and Claudia Alec. This affinity group is for theater artists with disabilities, allies, and the theaters that support them. We've heard frustration from many people that the conversation around disability in theater frequently focuses on audience accessibility and often excludes artists with disabilities and their art. Claudia and Reagan have crafted a session that will discuss unique challenges and big picture questions, like how will we center the leadership, resilience, and expertise of disabled artists during this moment and beyond. The final affinity space that we'd like to let you know about is imagining an intersectional and intergenerational LGBTQ theater community, facilitated by the new coordinator of the National Queer Theater Festival, Brie Inge Schwartz. This is a buy for and about session, so if you identify as a member of the LGBTQ plus community, please join the conversation. Brie has created a really dynamic session that has time for both group conversation and one-on-one connection. There's going to be space to discuss who is usually featured and who is often left out of the LGBTQ theater narrative, space to identify needs, space to support each other, space to hear folks who have been doing the work for many years, and space to share about current projects. We hope that you will join us for the personal identity sessions that you identify with, and we're excited for the conversations that will happen. Last but not least, many of you know that ED&I has been utilized almost as a catch-all to increase awareness around depression, like the ongoing critique of how systems can focus on the optics of inclusion versus activating values in conjunction with community. We look forward to the new emergent conversations that arise out of not only this week's identity affinity sessions, but especially to continued exploration of the ways that power, access to resources, cultural oppressions show up in every single session. Sessions that we too are privileged to participate in. Now let's hear from our wonderful Phoenix committee co-chairs, Cristina and Steve. Chísimas gracias Elena. My name is Cristina Marine, and I'm the program director for theater and film at Phoenix College here in Phoenix, Arizona. My pronouns are she, her and hers, and I want to pass it to my wonderful co-chair for the local host committee, Steve. Hi, I'm Steve Martin. My pronouns are he, him, his. I'm the managing director at Child's Play, and it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to convergence. We are so sad that we're not all together here in Phoenix right now, although you might be less sad since it's 105 degrees. But we were really looking forward to sharing the conference with you next month. But we are very happy that TCG is prioritizing the health and safety of all of its constituents. We wanted to experience, to help, to let you experience all of the great and wonderful arts and cultural amenities that we have. Artists, organizations, installations that we have here in Phoenix and in Arizona were disappointed that you can't be here. It would have been a great time to experience what a real dry heat is all about. The conference was also going to coincide with First Friday, which was something that we were very excited to share the arts community with you here in Phoenix. We also have a great Indigenous community from the Navajo Nation down to the Pima and Gila Indian Nations. We are also, I understand, going to have Native Nations here, which I'm hoping that all of you will get to experience sometime in the future. We also have a lot of theater in Spanish and Latinx culture and heritage is here and vibrant and alive. And so we wanted to share that with you as well. TCG has played a very, very important role in my life. I was a very young theater manager. I didn't know a lot. And then I started coming to the TCG conferences and I started meeting my peers and I started hearing new ideas and sharing experiences. And it changed me and it helped me to become a better manager, a lifelong learner. And it helped me to create what I believe is a more inclusive and equitable organization. So thank you TCG for that. I think that we were really looking forward to is having a lot of our students from the many community colleges and state schools here in Arizona participate in volunteering and really experiencing the essence of TCG. We want to thank everybody at TCG for thinking of Phoenix and our unique cultural experiences. And for wanting to share what we all know about with the rest of the theater community. We also really want to thank every single person who was part of our local host committee. We had a team that would have put on such an incredible conference with all of you here in Phoenix. So a shout out to all of our amazing, amazing comrades here in Phoenix. On behalf of the entire host committee, we want to say thank you. And now we'd like to pass it on to everybody's longtime TCG friend, Emilia Cachapero. Hi, I'm Emilia Cachapero. I'm the director of artistic and international programs at TCG. And here at TCG, we have a history of professional development programs like our rising leaders of color and our Fox Foundation resident actor fellowship program. And we often like to start our working sessions with some grounding work. And we thought that it might be a good idea to do that with you all. Now, first off, it would be great if you have a piece of paper handy a loose sheet would be perfect. And then a pen or pencil nearby, we're going to be using it later. So just taking a breath here. We're all dealing with a lot right now. And it isn't the load that weighs us down, but it's how we carry it. You might have read the article in last month's Harvard Business Review that was titled that discomfort you're feeling is grief. And it talked about grief in a variety of ways, the loss of a loved one, the changing world and anticipatory grief. It's that feeling that we have in an uncertain world. But if we can name it, we can manage it. There are many ways to do that. And I invite you to work with me on some conscious breathwork. We all breathe, at least I hope you are, but we don't always think about how we breathe. So sit in your chair. Or if you have mobility issues, you could do the standing, you could do this lying down and just rest your palms on your thighs or close to your knees and close your eyes. And if it's difficult for you to keep your eyes closed, you might want to just lower your gaze to the tip of your nose. That works just as fine. And I'd like you to do an internal scan of your energy, your energy level. So on a scale of one to five with one being the lowest and five being the highest, where are you on that continuum? Then I'd like you to continue doing an internal scan of your calm and tension level. So one being very, very calm, five being extremely stressed out. Where are you? And I'd like you to then scan your happiness level, one being very, very unhappy and one joyous. So continue there after you've taken that scan and observe a slow, steady breath with your lips lightly together. Make sure that your tongue is away from the rough of your mouth, so lower your tongue. A lot of studies have shown the value of silence. And there was a Duke study, a 2013 Duke study that showed that two hours of silence a day really improves the development of the hippocampus, which is that region that governs your memory, the front of your brain. And breathing is meditation for people who say they can't meditate. So we're going to focus on a three part breath. I'd like you to place your hands on your belly. And with your inhale, think about pushing your hands away with your belly on the exhale, your hands come closer in. And again, inhaling, pressing your hands away, exhaling your hands come closer in and moving your hands to the sides of your ribs. Similarly, when you inhale, you're pressing your hands away. And on the exhale, your hands come closer to the center and moving your hands to your thoracic area. It's that heart and chest area and lightly rest your hands on the thoracic area. And as you inhale, think of your hands rising and on the exhale, your hands lower and take that a couple of times at your own rate. You may be breathing slower, you may be breathing faster than me. And in a moment, we're going to do control breath work. It's going to be a four, seven, eight breath. So you will be inhaling on a four count, holding for a seven count and exhaling on an eight count. A lot of people may find some discomfort when you're holding your breath for a long time or longer than you're used to. And sometimes it can feel claustrophobic. So not necessary that you hold it for the entire seven, but maybe six or five, as long as it's longer than your inhale. So we'll try that. So an inhale on four count and your four count. And when you're ready holding it for seven, exhaling eight and repeat that a couple of times, four, seven, eight. Inhale four, hold seven or six or five and exhale eight. Now, as you're doing the four, seven, eight breath, the more oxygen that comes into your lungs, it makes your lungs even stronger. And that's incredibly important now, particularly with our health concerns. So continue on. There was a British study with asthmatic children. And with these kids, they had them enroll in wind instrument classes. And so after a few weeks of those classes, it was found that the nighttime symptoms were reduced by 78% for these kids. And the daytime symptoms were reduced by 53%. And it was just by work on breath and strengthening the lungs. Continue on the four, seven, eight breath. And just put your attention to the frontal lobe of your brain. It's a bit like the recipe box that my mom had when I was a kid that many of you might have had the same thing where she had an index box that was crammed to the gills with recipes that she had written down and things she had cut out from packages. Well, our frontal lobe is like that area. It's got an overuse and an over storage of information. So I'd like you to just place your thumbs in that Frida Kahlo point. It's that point between your two eyebrows and gently make a few circles in one direction, make a few circles in the other direction. And again, at your own time, do that a couple of times. And when you're ready, you can flutter your eyes open and look for your piece of paper and your pen or pencil. Give you a second to get that right in front of you. And what I'd like you to do is think about three promises that you're going to keep between now and the weekend. So one promise is to yourself. One promise is to your theater circle. And one promise is to your community. And to yourself that could be anything from you're going to do some conscious breath work in the morning or you're going to have a cup of tea instead of coffee, or you're going to take a long walk at the end of your day. A promise to your theater circle could be you're going to check in on somebody who you haven't talked to in a while. Or it could be you're going to share a photo of you and some of your theater circle folks from before this pre-COVID time. And with your community, that's self-defined. So however you define your community, what you might do to help your community. It may be raising your windows at seven o'clock every day and feeling the community of folks on your block as you're cheering frontliners. It could be anything else. So write those down on your paper, give you a moment here. So I'd like you to keep the paper near you someplace where you can reference it, where you can be reminded of the promises that you're going to keep or work on keeping over the course of this week. Thanks a lot for spending time. And I hope to see you over the course of the week. Thank you, Amelia, for leading us with such gentleness and grace through the grief that so many of us are feeling. I'd ask us all to take that gentleness and grace with us as we move through the next three days together. This is TCG's first fully virtual convening, and we may make mistakes along the way. Each of us may find our stress response or grief show up in these meetings in ways that surprise us. When these mistakes and moments of vulnerability happen, let's practice that grace and gentleness with each other. If we do, we'll surely find moments of deep connection at a time we need it most. With that, thank you again from all of us at TCG, and we look forward to this precious time together with you all. So as we begin convergence, I would like to take a moment to give acknowledgement to those who empowered us to bring this week's programming to the field. My name is Kevin Biderman, and I'm the Director of Institutional Advancement of Partnerships with TCG. And over the last few weeks, TCG has been in frequent conversation with the following funders and sponsors, all of whom are committed to the stabilization and recovery of our field. This week's programming in the digital space would not have been made possible without their support. Now, normally in the theater, I'd ask for you to hold your applause, but now that we're in the virtual space, I'm welcoming your cheers and applause as you are able. So please join me in thanking the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, Hearst Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ruth Easton Fund of the Edelstein Family Foundation, TRG Arts, the Sherri and Les Biller Family Foundation, Fisher Decks Theater Planning and Design, Audience View, Walt Disney Imagineering, Capacity Interactive, Management Consult for the Arts, Agile Lens Immersive Design, the Richenthal Foundation, Blue Print Advancement, the New York Council on the Arts, the Arts and Culture Department from the City of Phoenix, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Institute Financial Wellness for the Arts, and Next Stage Design. Thank you for supporting the first TCG virtual conference. And now, I'd like to welcome my colleague, Erica Lauren Ortiz, to the screen. Thank you, Kevin. I'm TCG's Director of Marketing, and this is not only my first conference as a member of the TCG team, but this is also the first time that TCG is bringing the National Conference to the field with no registration fees. And as you know very well, even no cost programming requires quite a few costs to pull off. In lieu of registration fees, I hope that you'll consider making a donation to TCG. Your gift not only helps us to serve the field with programming just like this, but it ensures that access to these resources remains open, particularly now when we need it the most. So, if you're able, please join me in supporting TCG and visit this link to learn more. Last, the curtain will rise again because theater is vital. If you're able, please consider supporting this work and enjoy Convergence.