 Good? All right, Liz? All right. Okay, I feel like this is like a live mic at an improv club. Okay, so group B, it's not completely clear to me that we always stayed focused on the theme of right spot. I know that I forgot instantly, that's what we were supposed to be talking about. But some people did keep bringing it back up. But we were all pretty bright, I think. I mean, in a cheerful way, not a smart way. Okay, so we kind of could break it down to four things. One, for sort of overall topics. And one, we talked quite a bit about re-creating the talk with, talk back model, the way in which the very common models take all the energy out of the audience. It's so excited to talk. And then they're like, oh, we're gonna be told exactly how to talk about this. And to breaking up that structure and making it more casual and listening to the audience and embracing how the audience wants to talk and what they wanna talk about instead of it being kind of a top-down model. And I think a lot of playwrights are really excited by that. And that, you know, anyway, so that was one. And then two, we talked a lot about the playwrights, new ideas for how playwrights can be involved in the process in a lot of different ways. And somebody brought up Luis Alfaro spending like large months of time in the community, rewriting work for that community, staying all the way through the run of the show and going out into the community. And that not every playwright would be able to do that or want to do that, but a lot of playwrights would be a lot more excited about being involved in a lot more ways than they are being used and could be, could also be, could be sources of ideas and could also, not only would be like, yes, I'd be happy to do an interview if you asked me to, but could actually be part of the process of what can you do and how can you be involved in such a way that two years later, somebody would say we'll playwright in the lobby, I've been waiting for your next play here because they were that involved. Other ideas having to do with like meetups that were like meetup groups that maybe are focused around the playwright and like going out to dinner with the playwright and that's about it on that or, okay. So then on, no, she's my helper. Yeah, no, no, it's good. Okay, and then the third thing had to do with, oh, ah, yeah, the physical space of the theater and the mission of the theater and having a new different relationship to the community. So it's like, you know, we built this theater and we, you know, community-based stuff and you know, that's, we're not interested in that, oh, no, nobody's coming to our theater and here it is and we don't know anybody in the community and the idea that, for example, if you have, if the space isn't always, if the space is sometimes dark, what can you bring in so that if people get used to coming to the space for other reasons, they'll come to see the shows. They're used to coming there for, you know, PTA meetings or community meetings or, you know, sky's the limit. That's about it on that too, right? Okay, and then the fourth thing had to do with the idea of reimagining the infrastructure of the theaters themselves. So instead of being very top-down and very hierarchical, that there is a sense of people listening to each other, people collaborating in a lateral sense within the organization and I think that also with in terms of visiting artists, not just playwrights, directors and designers, being a part of that in a way that is reimagined. So, did I leave anything out? That was exactly three minutes and 56 seconds. Quite impressive, Kenan, you coming up? Okay, so I'm part of Group A and so our conversation actually had three parts. The first part, we actually focused on some of the bright spots from today's conversations as inspiration. Second was some bright spots that are happening with us in the field currently and the third was focusing on some bright ideas for the future itself. So the three takeaways from today's conversation that we had that resonated with us, the notion of the ringleader as a curator of experiences for people. So that was a big one for us to swallow and think about. The other is the fact that there are different examples of participation, bringing the artists into this process of engagement gave us all something to think about. And the third is repositioning institutions not so much as selling tickets but as envisioning them as curators of an experience, a human communal experience. So in terms of some of the bright spots in the field, what we noticed that came up consistently is the idea of bringing aboard community partners at different levels of engagement either in terms of bringing new people that might connect to a particular work or reverse as opposed to an organization to organization collaboration is that the artists themselves, such as a director seek out the various people who might have experiences that are resonating in the particular work and bring them into some sort of conversational model. There is one other, I believe, in terms of our bright spots. Anybody from group one wanna jump in? Okay, we'll come back to it at the end. We jump then forth to the bright ideas that we had since we were all sort of inspired. So one is the idea of all of us embracing the notion of generosity at the field is that we need to learn to be generous with each other from individual human beings to the institutions that we run. And so one example of this generosity might be what was called a follow the play. So as opposed to one theater company being invested just in that company's audience development for the work is to actually carry a play through to be a shepherd or a steward of the process and be generous. So that would involve organizational collaborations that might allow people to connect to a particular work and it's development over the full trajectory but it does require us to be generous with one another. The other is also bringing into this conversation of audience engagement the notion of audiences as co-creators meaning actually physically doing the work of creating. This doesn't necessarily mean just listening to the work and feeding back and playwrights but actually getting on stage and being a part of the process. That would be an expansion of the continuum from those who just sort of provide some sort of feedback to the other end of the spectrum where they're actually doing the work. So that's also in terms of being generous with the artistic and creative experience itself. And the third big idea that we had came out of this conversation is definitively or not definitively but engaging in the research question of why do women go to the theater? And if we can just as a field finally embrace that particular research question perhaps there's a lot that we can learn that might inform other aspects of our profession. Terrific, next up. All right, being short in speech has never been my strong suit, so here we go. All right, so from group C we had, I'm gonna break this down into three major themes. Building an audience, talk backs and pre-show engagement and making the sausage. Okay, so in building an audience there were a couple of things that we saw as bright spots here. First, using entry points with other art forms or other pre-built in audiences. So for example, a company using movement with Pilabalus, Tom Waits music, Penn and Teller Magic was brought in as all of those different groups each made for a very diverse audience at the theater. New York Theater Workshop does a great job of selecting a community member to lead talk backs who has something sort of specific thematically related to the play, so they really serve as a bridge between the artists and the audience. We also talked about, you know, we recognize that students have different learning styles. How about the fact that our audiences have different learning styles also? So we can ask our box office managers to tell us who's gonna be in the audience tonight and how should we react to, you know, change what we're talking about in our talk backs or how the work is presented based on who's there. We also talked about strategies for engagement when you have no money. So using note cards or butcher paper or just giving audiences an opportunity to write about their responses. Okay, I'm moving on to making the sausage. We realize this is really about letting the audience in on the story, not about the story of the play, but the story of why we're doing the play. So this includes things like tours of costume workshops, which everybody loves, including us, letting people in on tech rehearsals. It turns out the only people who like tech rehearsals are people who don't have to be there. Long form interviews that you get to read on the subway ride home. Another alternative to that is giving just a teaser of an interview and then linking to the website using either a QR code or writing out the website link so people can find more for their own. We also talked a lot about the program being a branding souvenir. So something you get to hold onto and be about engaging with that institution. We really thought that theaters who looked at their programs as opportunities to engage with the institution as a whole were more successful. And then we also were just really impressed with the National Theater of Scotland's packets that they give out to every single school in the entire country that involve a video DVD of the play itself, as well as a book on the making of the play, as well as a copy of the play. So they really put together these incredibly full packages. Don't we all wish we had that money? Okay, that's it from Group B. Two minutes and 53 seconds. Two minutes and 53 seconds. All right, Group G. So our theme was collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. We didn't divide into three sections. We had a kind of chaotic conversation that was really rich. Bright spots came out. We talked about a lot of different bright spots in the research, but something that came out very strongly was one of the members of the group from Company One talked about their studio sessions. And everybody in our group really resonated with that. And that had to do, they do this on every show. And they invite audience to participate in a very complicated tour of the show. So they have a curated conversation ahead of time with food and drink. Forgive me if I get this wrong a little bit. And then they go in and they see 20 minutes of a rehearsal at any point of that rehearsal. They may be running scenes. They may be talking. There might be a table read. And then they come back out and talk even more about that. And what they found is that they've discovered their ambassadors. They've discovered their cheerleaders, if you will, and who will then bring groups of people and their communities into the theater. The other thing they're doing is they have company members attending the shows as a kind of ambassadors at every single show. So there's some company member involved with the front of house, not necessarily working the front of house, but being there to both get to know the people who are there and also to greet them, to interact with them, to speak with them. And they do a thing called the Pedestal Post Show where they have various pedestals around the theater. And audience members can go to any given pedestal to talk about different topics which they have unsigned. And so the other conversation that was really rich was that of collaborating across departments and that there was kind of a flatlining of, quote, unquote, they use the term, somebody use the term ownership of the audience or the audience experience so that artistic development, marketing, all these departments that traditionally were quite separately are collaborating more and more and more and more within a particular theater. We did not talk very much about collaboration outside of a particular theater. And finally, the Act Three Model. The Act Three Model is a model where the audience is told that this play has three acts. And the third act is the audience interaction conversation moment. And that is curated in a whole variety of ways in this particular theater. And I would be remiss without saying that we talked about skimmers, swimmers and divers and that there are these three different kinds of audience members and that you can think, when you think about this kind of interactive model with your audience that you're thinking about all three of those different wishes or desires. We're on a roll. All right. Okay, I would say that we probably landed mostly on the topic of space. I'm in group E. Group E, I think focused on space a lot. But we basically sort of, we talked about the dynamic of audience to audience, sort of communion, audience to artist communion and audience to institution communion. And some of the stuff was outside of the issue of space. And I'll say that first, because mostly we talked about space. In terms of audience to institution communion, we talked about how we really, we sort of liked the recent development of getting sort of pre and maybe also post but especially pre emails reminding you of where you're going and a little conversation going. That was always an opportunity for the institution whatever voice it chose to adopt to talk to individuals that committed to seeing the show and then afterwards in whatever way they wanted to. We talked about a variation of the talk back in which before the artist is introduced, the audience is asked to talk to themselves for a while to sort of kind of change the dynamic of what the conversation became when the artist was introduced to that. But the space conversations were sort of what we mostly landed on. And one of our members talked about having a party, a post show party on stage with the actors in costume every single night with like free hooch and the whole shebang. And that was a commitment that they made to like 130 performances that they always had like sort of a celebratory event that mixed the artists and their audience. And another theater did something similar. They're like, we don't have the budget to do that with a free thing already, but they often had parties on their space and this person also had another creative role of having kind of immersive events in which in the end everybody, the cost of a drink was worked into their ticket price. So instead of being told, oh, we can go for drinks there afterwards, they were kind of led into something because they'd already paid for it. And that kind of led the audience into talking amongst themselves. We talked a lot about what the environment in a theater should and could be before, during and after so that the audience feels comfortable staying there that they feel like the second they show up, whether it's five minutes before or 20 minutes before it's an inviting and charismatic environment for them to be in with their fellow audience members with the staff of the theater so that conversations can happen. And afterwards, we talked about maybe programming things. In one space, we talked about how Steppenwolf many years ago flipped around using their big space for their sort of check-off shows and their little space for their new plays and flipping it around so that audiences were sort of taught to sort of that the space hierarchy was changed around and how that then also translated to companies that then used the smaller space for new plays afterwards that somehow the value of what space you were on got shaken up by that and that was an interesting variation on our theme. We talked a little bit about the Boston Art Center which many of us hadn't been to so that was a slightly confused conversation. But we actually hypothesized a great deal about Company One's practices which nobody really knew about so now we know more about that. And where am I in the time thing? And then we also talked about programming in a way with elements that were not necessarily theater elements but sort of created a larger cultural conversation I think within the same theater space wherever you bring it because a lot of us didn't have fixed spaces and that also being a way of sort of like widening the offerings that one could give to an audience without having that sort of direct experience. Oh, there we go. In general, we tried to think about how to make the conversation about one's experience and not about evaluation of the artistic product. Thank you. And group? Group D. My name is Kelsey. I work at Pillsbury House and Theater in Minneapolis. Our theme sort of centralized around access and issues of accessibility as sort of an extension like the initial engagement I guess. We first started off talking about child care and how theaters can be more inclusive of parents and how we can tie that into our offering at Pillsbury House we're lucky because we are located in a community center with the child care. So we don't have to worry about the licensing or insurance or any of those issues that come up. But is there a way like nationally can we partner with a national daycare to include this across theaters all over? Or is there someone else mentioned like daycares have parent nights out? So can we partner with those daycares that already are doing those things? Let's see, another big bright spot was mentioned by Akita at Emerson Arts and she told us about her play reading book club in which she organizes groups of people, I think up to 30 people to meet at a library five times. They read the play out loud to each other. Then they get a free ticket to go and see that show and then after the show they have a community meal with the artists. And these people also in addition to a free ticket they get a discount code to share with their friends so that they sort of become the ring leaders themselves. And this was also brought up that the architecture of the theater and the like third floor versus the lobby and how like the sort of the behind the scenes and the in front of house if you will. How can we break that down? And this library thing did just that by removing the architecture and taking it to the library. Someone mentioned email blasts and the intimacy of creating a relationship with your audience as yourself and not some nebulous thing. We also talked about the timeframe of engagement which ranged anywhere from two months to two years. When do you start engaging people? How would you engage them? Word of mouth was the biggest marketing reason people came. And then lastly I mentioned at Pillsbury House all of our shows are Pick Your Price which we implemented a couple of years ago. It means that we've been able to maintain the same like we still have a similar amount of revenue but we have far more sold out shows. So it was sort of an exciting way to expand your audience. Well, making it accessible at the same time. He's not, oh yeah, right? Oh, excellent, all right. Two minutes of peace. We are group F. We're ensemble artists so we thought we couldn't just do this one person. Okay. Okay, so we're gonna share some bits with enough information that you should be able to follow up using the power of Google. Okay, so some of the themes that we ended up going over is this idea of artists and audience face to face. Artists creating in collaboration with community and or informed, involved in community conversation. Artists who listen and respond to their audiences and then use that to move their work forward. And space given to audiences to voice their own thoughts. First little bit, intersection for the arts. These are arcs for the development of the play and an arc of community conversation around the themes of the play. These are separate arcs with their own integrity but they influence each other profoundly. And we saw an example with the Wilma. Particularly, they did a new play by Paula Vogel that involved development with veterans. And this was something that became not only helpful to the veterans who were involved in this process but it also became a workshopping tool for the play. Then by unintentional collaboration and cool probability poetic theater in New York also did a play based on veterans and but particularly based with veteran poets. And so they produced a play who written by a veteran who had taken a workshop with Paula Vogel. Maybe because of that other production, we don't know. We heard from new dramatists and the questions of how to cast an audience with the right people and the right time to help a playwright develop their play. The Goodman has a couple of projects. One is sort of a traditional, have a playwright at your table as an engagement tool for audiences but also where a playwright sits at a table with invited audience, it's a ticketed event where they read the play, one of the plays of this playwright and it also helps the playwright hear their work in a different light. Another thing that the Goodman does is that they have a community, they have an education and community engagement department that is combined that is working to bring theater outside of the building, outside of the institution and not just theater but conversation to communities that are not traditionally audiences for their theater, whether or not these folks become theater audiences in the future. We also talked a little bit about the power of an audience hearing a playwright in their own voice and how that enables you to hear their work in a profoundly different way and how can we create more opportunities for that? And we also talked about the playwright's voice in conversation with cultural artists from other media, perhaps pairing Sheila Callahan with a badass feminist painter, I don't remember what the medium was but really any badass feminist would do and what that would do to the conversation. In Singapore, there are citizen reviewers that are invited to become thought leaders and to review work, however, we had a question of whether or not in the United States with our snark culture whether this would be valuable. We heard about Sojourn doing the most amazingly titled play How to End Poverty in 90 Minutes with 99 People. You may or may not know where the audience decides how to allocate $1,000 to a poverty organization in that community. We heard about Flux, Ensemble and how they had this sort of lucky intersection with geek culture which then led them to just to create and look at how their entire structure and their entire, not just doing a play but creating a world around a play to further engage and then using this information that they received with their audiences to further see how they create all of their work going forward. We took a moment to remember Wendy Wasserstein and her beautiful example of taking students personally to the theater. Thank you. Only 17 seconds over with two people, that's not bad. Who do we have left? Have we gotten all the groups? Did we us? That seemed so fast. All right, so that is actually, we put a lot of things out into the room. We're gonna have a lot of time tomorrow to hash some of these things out so there will be some fair amount of conversation and particularly tomorrow afternoon we've set up a lot of time to talk with each other about some of these ideas. This was an incredibly generous day. Level of engagement and enthusiasm is deeply appreciated. Tori, Brad, you guys wanna say anything before we wrap up and then Jamie's gonna do logistics, so. We sent out a message earlier today to those of you who are working with either service organizations or new play development organizations or you're a funding organization but many, many of you were in trouble. So if you haven't opened up your email since you left wherever it was that you were earlier today, please do so when you get back to the hotel. Thanks. Wasn't that cryptic? Anyway, do that. Okay, so we're gonna wrap it up here and we will meet each other again for dinner at Petit Robert Central which is just a few blocks from here. Polly and Emma will lead a group over there in about five, 10 minutes. You also have time to go back to the hotel if you want to first. The restaurant is kind of in between here and the hotel. The address is on your agenda. Dinner will start around six and it's on us, so please come.