 Thank you for standing by. Good morning, folks. Welcome to Seesaw Theater's eighth annual inclusive theater festival in collaboration with Calling Up Justice. My name is Matthew McGrory, and I am this year's executive director of Seesaw Theater. I am six foot two, a white male presenting person with brown hair and glasses. I'm wearing a gray sweater and blue pants and I'm standing behind a wide wooden podium that comes up to my waist. Hi, my name is Zoe Morrocco, and I'm Seesaw Theater's artistic director. I'm a five foot seven white female presenting person also with brown hair and glasses standing next to Matthew behind the podium. I am thrilled to welcome you all to this event and want to thank you for your support of all of our educational efforts to give you a bit of the history of Seesaw Theater. We originated as theater stands with autism, which was a special event hosted by another Northwestern student organization, the purple crayon players. It became an independent organization in 2014 and have expanded with our own mission and season of sensory friendly theater. We now reach students across the Evanston and Chicagoland areas through school workshops and our devised winter and spring performances. This year's inclusive theater festival would not be possible without the hard work, the dedication and brilliance of our conference and engagement director, Ashna Rai. She's been working tirelessly on creating an accessible and reaching an innovative event. Starting with Claudia Alec of Calling Up Justice, Ashna has brought this festival to a new level by elevating voices that need to be centered in these conversations about accessibility. We are beyond fortunate to have Ashna as a part of our Seesaw community. And I feel so fortunate to be the person to do this please join me in welcoming this year's conference and engagement director Ashna Rai. Oh yeah. The high tech portion. Good morning everyone. Good morning and welcome to the eighth annual inclusive theater festival. My name is Ashna Rai, I use her pronouns. I'm a sophomore here at Northwestern and I am this year's conference and engagement director for Seesaw Theater. I am so grateful to have you all in this room with me today. I'm glad that we've learned about diversity inclusion and celebrating people for who they are are acknowledge to the Northwestern campus is a predominantly white institution built on stolen land. fires, the Ojibwe part of Watering and Odawa, as well as the Menomere, Miami and Ho-Chunk nations. It is also a site of trade, travel, gathering and healing from more than a dozen other native tribes and will stay home to over 100,000 tribal members in the state of Illinois. While the Land of Closure is a good beginning, we want to be really aware of the fact that that is exactly what it is, a first step. It must be paired with action. Your welcome packets for this event include a couple rings that I have found useful in my journey of understanding the significance of Native American and Indigenous communities in the modern United States, and I encourage you to keep looking and educating yourself. It's the least we can all do. For students at Northwestern, please reach out to the wonderful members of the Native American and Indigenous student alliance, Nesa, if you'd like to be more connected with their work. I wasn't actually able to attend last year's Inclusive Theatre Festival myself, so if this is your first ever ITF, I'm in the same boat. I'll probably attend many more together. Monica, who is here with us and has been the most wonderful, patient and supportive mentor to me in this process, was the director of ITF last year, and she gave me some pretty big shoes to fill. When I received the opportunity to be the director of this year's conference, I began thinking about what I wanted to bring to this role. How could I use my experiences, my personal relationship with the arts, and my passion for education and research to show what ITF looked like this year? The first thing that came to mind was diversity. As an international BIPOC student in the Northwestern Theatre Department, I don't happen to see stories or characters that reflect the identity crips that I am a part of. I wanted my mission to get a lineup of presenters that showed the intersections of disability and racial justice. And in the process, I have the ability to form connections with nine wonderful and brilliant artists who come from all over the United States and work in very different areas of theatre. Believe me, I'm the most excited to have the opportunity to learn from them over the next two days. This year, I was lucky enough to reach out to Claudia Alec of Calling of Justice as a potential presenter sometime around June. Claudia was kind enough to take me on as a mentee. Help her produce a conference that should explore the boundaries of what accessibility and justice could look like. Claudia is not from Chicago and is thus presenting tomorrow over Zoom. But I'm sure she's watching over the hard-run live stream right now. And I just want to express my genuine gratitude to her, particularly so much about what activism, advocacy, and kindness looks like in this field. I have learned so much about the world through our simple weekly one-hour planning meetings. I feel most connected to our art when I share it with others. Whether that's through teaching magic in a public school classroom in my hometown in Indra, or through an art film or chatting with other C-cell world members as the bold sets for our shows. Currently, such an important part of art and C-cell's work truly helps people feel like they have a place to belong, whether they're loved, respected, and desired just as they are. So this year, with ITF, we are celebrating. We are celebrating the innovation. All of our presenters are doing incredible things in this field. And we're celebrating how much patience and intelligence it takes to create something new. We're celebrating community. The fact that we're all in this room together and we're all united on the fact that we're really the arts more accessible to everyone, not just the people that traditionally suit the age-old American theater canon. And most importantly, we are celebrating education that we are gathered here to learn from those who know more and that we all hope to make our practice of the arts better. I hope that this year and always, we will continue to promote accessing the arts in a way that leaves no one behind. When is the time for a C-cell to refer to anyone with whom we have worked with or connected in the past? I know we have many, many and over friends of C-cell in our mischief today. And there's no server joy to know that you will all have the opportunity to connect with this community, which really would not be here without the support of you all and the people who come together each year to make this possible. Thank you truly for being here. All the presentations we did today will take place in this room, where one of the four presenters is zooming into this base this afternoon. I want to stress that participation in these presentations looks different for everyone. I encourage you to be as active as you would like to be, but remember that you are always welcome to take a break outside of the room or work down the hall and take a left to reach our quiet room, which is the Evans room. We also have some fan favorite C-cell props available at the back of the room during the conference for your enjoyment. Located both in this room and in the quiet space. Some presentations were called for some more interactive activities and discussions, while others are more of a traditional lecture format. If you have not heard anything at all throughout the conference this weekend, I encourage you to find me, Matthew, or Monica, or any other C-cell board member. We are all wearing super cool ITF ID cards. This year, everyone first enough to collaborate with two amazing organizations. Clarem of Justice, a collective that produces performances of justice online, on stage, and in real life, has acted as our co-producing and mentor organization and helped us make this entire conference more authentically accessible. The Hiram Theater Commons, a full and open platform for theater makers worldwide, is live streaming our entire conference to their website this weekend. We can now be more grateful for their support and guidance in giving us this kind of exposure and helping us connect to the larger theater community outside of Northwestern and Chicago. I encourage you to learn more about both of these organizations and the amazing work they are doing by scanning the QR codes and the posters around the room. On the lot of Hiram, you can see that the wonderful category machine is literally recording our conference. And it is also being live streamed through Zoom on my laptop. If you have any concerns or questions about this, please feel free to speak with any C-cell team member in this room. Now, the camera will be recording the presenters in amounts to you if you ask a question. Please let us know either before or after if you would prefer to not be on camera. I want to emphasize that this is not an issue at all and we are happy to either cut your section from the video or make sure that you aren't seen. And we are more than happy to accommodate any kind of request. The 2023 Inclusive Theater Festival would not be possible without so many brilliant and supportive people who have been the best cheerleaders, mentors and partners I could have ever asked for. Monica, who has been a friend, mentor and teacher all in one for almost six months now and has given us the best of my judgment and instincts. Matthew, who never stops telling me how proud he is of me and takes pictures of me with the idea of banner by the arch, is one of her constant support, encouragement and seesaw shoutouts. Claudia Alec, who has taught me so much about activism and justice and mentorship in the past three months. Laura and Elise, for toileting my endless requests and tiny text edits on our marketing web chat. Claudia, for lugging on all of the content that we're currently filming. And everybody on the seesaw bird, for inspiring them with their passion and helping them build an ITF that I am truly proud of. Thanks for creating art and showing it with others. Thank you for joining us and welcome again to the eighth annual Inclusive Theater Festival.