 It certainly is copyright because it's written down if any of you were at the previous discussion. Our core values are courage and risk-taking, innovation, theatricality, strong narratives, dialogue around social and political change, and egalitarianism. These are just a few of our works that you may recognize. The Big Hits, Gross and Decency, The Laramie Project, as well as our ten-year follow-up, The Laramie Project ten years later, which I helped write. I am my own wife, 33 Variations, tallest tree in the forest. It's worth noting, even before I introduce her, that Barb is involved in the original Laramie Project, both as dramaturg and actress, as well as when we staged them both at BAM in 2015. Somewhere around there. 2013. But we do not have a space. We do not have a season. We are a play development laboratory, really dedicated to investigating form and content, but within the timeframe of project-based work. So we may spend upwards of one, two, sometimes even three years developing these plays. So we always say we hope our track record speaks for itself, but these come across along every two years. We are constantly in workshop for them in different stages of development, but we do not operate like a traditional theater producing organization. Since today's talk is primarily around our book and Ergo, our method, I'll just give you a few of the, this is my slide, right? Yeah, you do this one. You sure? Yeah. We agreed on this ahead of time, but then I get on a roll. Moment work is, we found it helpful to define it, and it has a few different definitions. One is a method whereby one might write performance. Another one is a process of sketching, usually performance in the rehearsal room, but also a playwright may use it to sketch toward a text document. It's a means to explore a hunch, which we'll get to a little further down the road without needing to know how or where any particular moment we make might fit into an emerging narrative. I should backtrack and just say we define moment as a unit of theatrical time, so we may make something as small as a few minutes or we may make a moment that lasts much longer, but each unit, we actually think of them as the equivalent of a word if you're thinking about the metaphor of writing a novel. So these theatrical units of time are like words which we then make sentences, which we then string together eventually to make a play. And lastly, I'd like to think of it also just as a means to analyze performance from a structuralist perspective, which we will also get to in a bit. But if I am the keeper of the keys in terms of our history, Barb, it certainly is the writer of the tabla rasa, or the new, as of April of 2018, the masterwork here that we will call it is truly her collaboration with Moises, and then the company members myself included at the bottom who helped chime in every once in a while, but was a gargantuan task to assimilate 25 years of knowledge and even to the different places all of us company members have taken the work and really coalesced and assimilated into one work. So she's going to speak a little bit about what's in the book. And without further ado, I would like to introduce Barbara Pitz McAdams. So around 2002 when Moises was being asked to teach this, he said, why don't you start coming with me and see if there's a method here, because he was doing it very sort of intuitively, and by then we all were doing it very intuitively as well. So I would follow him to a workshop and really just transcribe, transcribe, and then try to pull out what felt repeatable and what felt like a method. And then we had an internal document that I wrote that was sort of the manual that we could teach from. But when it came to putting a book together, what's the next slide here? Okay. We had to then decide, people kept asking when they would do a workshop, where can I read more about this? And we would find ourselves sending people to, you know, Rich Brown's 17-page article, which I mentioned his name because it's a great Atha article on where we were when he was writing his MFA. But eventually we were like, we better write our book before somebody else does. We decided to tell the story of the company as well as provide a blueprint of the method. And so how that kind of ended up playing out is the first section, if you read, is part one. It's really Moises's, it's in his voice and it's really who he was when he founded the company with Jeff Lehost and who they brought on board and what the early work was like and what was happening in New York at the time, what were all the influences. And I find it very inspiring and fun to think about, you know, those early days of theater making in New York. So he does a really nice job of kind of setting the stage. And I think kind of one of the things we think of moment work doing is really waking up the theatrical imagination. So he does that in part one. And then I got to write all the very difficult nuts and bolts of how do you actually do moment work in the room. And I say I, but you know, I would draft it and then he would weigh in and we would redraft and redraft. And that process took about three years to finally kind of figure out how to articulate it on the page because it is very experiential. And then moment work has three levels to it. The third being, we'll break that down in a minute, but the actual playmaking process. And because every play is different, we basically used that as an opportunity if you want to know more about how gross and decency came together or what were the challenges of making the Laramie Project or Andy Parris and Anushka Parris Carter's Uncommon Sense. You can read a narrative of how those pieces came together. And then there's a part three of the book that are rehearsal considerations and things that moment work can help you solve. Then the contributors each wrote an essay sort of addressing things like how do you conduct interviews or how do you enfranchise, what's here? A team of dramaturgs is the title. But how do you think of everyone in a room as a dramaturg or a contributor, a holder of the story? Yeah, and how do you know what elements of the stage you want to bring into the room? So that's the end of the book or some essays. So that's basically what's in the book. But as my college students often say, what even is moment work? What even is it? So when we get into a room to work on something, we have a hunch. As Peter Brooks says, he goes into the rehearsal process with a nameless hunch and then he needs to test it. So for us, that hunch might come about in different ways. Maybe it's something that you want to see on stage that you're not seeing on stage. A particular story or point of view or something you want to understand more deeply. I think certainly when Matthew Shepard was killed, going there was just a poll to try to understand how did this happen in this community and to understand it more deeply. Or what's a story you need to tell? It just keeps nagging at you back there that you need to tell it. Or something that you fear, that you want to kind of confront in the room. So your hunch can come from a lot of different places. Did you want to take over? Sure. So once we have our hunch and we get into the room and this is a little bit more about how we would teach the method because as company members we might have already become pretty facile in this next step but it's always good to remind ourselves that every element of the stage and we define that as anything that communicates from the stage. So that may be text, that may be lights, that may be props, that may be gesture, that may be all of the viewpoints or elements among others. That everything that communicates from the stage is worthy of exploring on an elemental level. So we call them the elements of the stage. And so I even say, we even say they can be conceptual. So they can be props or costumes but they can be the element of surprise, an element of style, of suspense, even of withholding or the lack of light, darkness or obfuscating something. So we spend lots of time in a room with students and also while we're working seeing how all of those elements may open up doors or unlock ways to communicate certain ideas theatrically. So the point of exploring the elements of the stage is to come, I'll just say previous slide, is to communicate theatrical narratives. So we oftentimes think of a playwright getting into a room, sitting down and writing a play as this traditional model of coming up with a narrative that we then get into a room and stage. And I just have to say, even after the last couple hours talking, for those of you who were here previously, one of Moises' real urges to start thinking about this particular method was an anecdote he often tells us and I find it useful, which is, as a young grad student, directing student, he was actually told that a director's job is to make a world in which the text is believable. And that was, and for his mind, even immediately he said, that doesn't feel right, he said, well, that's like telling an architect, the point of your job is to make a building that doesn't fall down. He was like, there's so much more to communicate, there's so much more about being a director for him. And he said, I want to find the message in the medium in a way. I want to create the forms that communicate along with the text. So just to say, based on our previous discussion, that our work is all about how to tell story and communicate narrative in ways that are other than text. So I think it's a good charge, even based on our previous discussion, is how do you then set those, right? How do you own those and how are you able to recreate those? So those are the things that we often always still wrestle with. But here's a list, thank you, for how we might begin with students, even generating what do you think can communicate from the stage. So this is a list I made with a particular group of students from Drew University with Barb. And they came up with all of these. Each list is different for every group, for every ensemble. We often say, you know, if you're working with Cirque du Soleil, there's a list of things that they want to communicate with, maybe all based around the body or about virtuosity. Yeah, I don't see fire up there or trapeze. But I do see Meryl Streep. I don't know how she ended up on the list. Meryl doesn't communicate from the stage, I don't know who does. Yeah, so for us, we're not super fussy about what's on this list. If somebody says, well, is the audience an element of the stage? We say, well, let's put it up there and then put a question mark. So the list is just your reminder that as you're creating your narrative, to go back and look at the other tools you have in your toolkit, because so often we end up just editing text and editing text, and sometimes you could solve it by letting one of the other elements carry some of the narrative weight of a particular moment. Let me keep going. Okay, so we alluded to this earlier that when we teach it in the way it's broken down in the book, is that level one is really learning how to get your hands on these elements. So that was a huge list you just saw. But when we teach, we tend to start with the same things. The actual space we're in, gesture props. We get some clip lights in the room. And that's when things really start to come alive, when people can really start lighting. I know as an undergraduate, even taking a lighting class, I don't think they ever let us hold a lighting instrument. So really enfranchising everyone to let go of their labels of I'm an actor, I'm a director, I'm this costume designer, and letting everyone in the room be a moment maker, and bring their skill set to it. Like here you see a picture of Moises in the center there, the top picture of the two. And he's probably directing a moment there, but he could just as easily be manipulating something in that picture. So the first level is really like learning a vocabulary for talking about theater. One of the definitions of moment work is a process in which to analyze and critique theater. So when you're seeing something, what is it that the lights are doing that are making this moment impactful? Why did they choose to use neon lights on stage? And really thinking about how all those elements are reading. Are they warm? Are they hitting you in your gut? Are they just beautiful? And really looking for all the opportunities for how the elements can read. And we usually teach that without imposing any kind of a hunch, because I'm a very literal person and I immediately just start trying to illustrate. If I have a hunch in my head, I'm going to make moments to that hunch, rather than just tease out, you know, what does this scarf do in the light? Does it float? Can you change the shape of it? Really just exploring those things for their own value. And then level two, and I want to just check the time. We have like five more minutes? Okay. Is really, yeah, you want to take that? Sure, yeah. Once we start, and I should also say we often hold text until some of the last moments or elements that we explore, simply because we know that because we are so habituated to starting with text, that text will often, I say, get in the driver's seat of the narrative where it wants to go, no matter how many other storytelling vocabularies or forms you've found. So after we get to text, incorporating it sort of on the equal playing field as these other elements of the stage, you generally find that you have a moment that is communicating something. So if you collect a bunch of moments, say 10, 12 through experimentation in a room, and they all sort of dance around a hunch, then we might start level two, which is making short form narratives based on either sequencing the elements that we've made thus far, or beginning to layer, like literally putting two moments on stage simultaneously to see if the forms or the content begin to speak to one another and create discourse, and also then when the audience's imagination meets that discourse. So there's a lot of tinkering. We often say it feels like we're in a little bit of a lab. We'll move a sequence around. It's like the duration of a layer and begin to make these longer sentences and see how they speak. If I could just jump in. One thing that we didn't say right off the bat is that when you make a moment, you frame it in these brackets, and the brackets are the words, I begin, your moment happens, I end. Or if you're making a group moment, we begin, your moment happens, we end. And then when we move to sequences, we say we begin, and you thread two, three, four moments together. Maybe you're starting to overlap them. So you might be sequencing them. You might be layering them. You might be pulling bits out and putting them in a later moment. And so that sequence will become we begin, we end. And just the act of putting it in the brackets, I mean I find for myself, it really helps me when I'm overwhelmed on a project to think, I don't know where this moment goes, but I know I'm going to begin and I'm going to explore one gesture for a character. And I'm just going to show some text with this gesture, and we'll just put it on the board and we'll title it and we'll go, ah, okay, there's something in that. I don't know where that fits yet. And then comes the mystery of how do you make longer form narrative. And I think what the book does well is it walks you through level one succinctly in a way that you can almost drop into any group and have a valuable similar experience. Level two will be based around whatever hunch you gather. So it deviates a little bit and creates, we deal with it in the book in terms of examples and case studies. But then really level three is how do you make this into a full production over the course of possibly many years. And so the book then just looks at our experience doing that. And so it doesn't bear too much to say in this book talk much about level three other than anecdotally through the book. And as Barb said, I think we covered everything in the book. It gives the antecedents to the method. It gives some philosophical and theoretical underpinnings. It walks you through the manual. It gives you the case studies and the history of our company, as well as these essays that we've all written. It's sort of a, I call it a Swiss Army Knife of a Book. It really has a lot in it. A little something for everyone. So if you're just a big Laramie project junkie, you can find your place in this book. And we have heard that people are using it in their classrooms that it's always your fears that what's on the page won't work when you try to get up on your feet. And we're getting some good feedback that it does in fact work. We only have six copies out at the front desk, but it's retailed at $18 and we're going to sell six copies today for $15. So if you don't have a copy and you want one there out at the front desk. Pretty color photos as well. So here's a little bit of what we... Oops. That's all right. We teach the method and currently are building our presence in MFA programs as well as undergraduate universities and colleges. But we also hold our own workshops throughout the year and have expanded now into doing some on interview techniques, some on the moment work just specifically. And then there's some people in the room who took one of our company members, Amanda Gronick, was a genius structural mind. And so she taught a recent class about making theater out of interviews, but really from how to structure them together sort of way. So check our website if you're interested in learning more about that. Pick up our book if you want. Slide there. That was it. That's it. Okay. Whoops. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you. We're going to just take a minute to get set up for our next book talk and then following that we'll have a few minutes for questions and then we'll move into our practical round table. And once again, thank you so much to Vectronics. Okay. If I could... Yeah, that'd be fun. Oh, no more days too. Oh, no more days too. Yes, yes. That's all I'm thinking about. Hi. Oh, don't be there. You are. Okay. Great. All right. I'm going to get started so that we have some time to talk collectively. Thank you so much for bringing me here. It's so lovely to be in a room with so many people who care about device theater, ensemble made theater. I'm going to talk a little bit about this book that I worked on with my collaborator Chloe Johnston about ensemble made theater in Chicago. Great. And I'm going to start by reading just the first paragraph to give it some context. Those of us who make performance are in the business of making worlds. In traditional theater, that's often done from the top down, with a small group of decision makers, writers, directors enlisting other artists, performers, designers to realize their vision. But Chicago has a long tradition of theater that reimagines that relationship, performance processes that center on collective creation, authored not by one, but by many, by everyone in the room. It is a city that imagines itself to be a little rough and tumble. A city built by immigrants and working class people. A city that rebuilds itself again and again. A city that will, quote, get it done. Chicago doesn't have a Broadway or a Hollywood. It has neighborhoods, the boundaries and meanings of which are fiercely defended by the people who live in them. And it has storefronts and parks and church basements, all of which become homes for ways of making performance that are flexible and resourceful, driven not by dreams of a name in lights but by a radical commitment to one another, to the relationships and artistic risks that are made possible when there are no writers, no actors, no directors, just a room full of creators. That paragraph seems complicated in light of our previous presentation about copyrighted law. One of the things that we do in this book, it's both a handbook and a history. It documents the practices of 15 companies who use a co-creative ensemble or device practice to make their work. I want to just say quite honestly, device is not a word we use in the book maybe more than once. Our editors made us put it in the title so that people would know what we were talking about. We much prefer co-created or ensemble made as ways of thinking about the work. And part of what we were trying to do in this book was to archive a largely non-scripted practice. Chloe and I strangely went to the same graduate program. We're both graduates of the PhD in performance at Northwestern, but we were not there at the same time and we didn't meet doing that. Chloe is a neo-futurist, so she had been working in ensemble-created work for a very long time. As I was the co-founder of Teatro Luna and All Latina Theatre Company, and now I'm the artistic director at Free Street Theatre. We never met. The nature of Chicago is that it is so segregated that if you are working in a mostly white theater company on the north side, you may well never meet anyone who is working in an All Latina Theatre Company on the west side of the city. The theatrical ecology doesn't run that way. But we had the kind of great fortune of both being asked to give a workshop at a symposium on performance and practice, and there frankly weren't enough people at the workshop to break into two different sessions on device theater. You can do a lot. Device theater is improvisational sometimes in the way you make it, but you do need people. And there weren't enough people. So we very quickly within five minutes kind of combined to make one workshop and we were so excited about that and so curious about sort of how we didn't really know about each other's work. So often ensemble-made practice doesn't start with a script and it doesn't always end with a script. Maybe it ends with an outline for whoever is running the board, like bring up the lights now. So we wanted to find a way of archiving it. We wanted to encourage cross-pollination. So often we train in the methodology of our company and that's it. We wanted to trace relationships and threads across companies. Actually we were really surprised by how similar our practices were that they had very different politics and we were curious about why that was and as we were writing the book, we found that a lot of people had learned from the same people. What happened? So we wanted to trace relationships and threads across companies and we wanted to create something useful to practitioners and educators. We wanted a book that we could teach in the classroom, something that gave some context on companies working but also really was offering people exercises on how to recreate work themselves. Though Chloe always says that her dream audience for the book is like a high school teacher who doesn't care about theater at all and is just trying to make history class more interesting. I say my dream reader of the book is someone who likes to get drunk and play theater games at parties. One of the things we do in the book is trace a particularly Chicago thread of ensemble creation back to Whole House to Viola Spolin and Neva Boyd who were making work with sort of documenting songs and games from immigrant populations coming to Whole House. How many of you are familiar with Viola Spolin? Yeah, about half. She was the mother of Paul Sills who went on to found campus players and Second City and I don't mean to do this ascribe her only importance to being the mother of him but he is sort of better known as a practitioner but she was writing down this idea that you could play with people and that that would be generative as a way of making theater and performance and she was in the 1920s making performance that brought together people who didn't even speak English they didn't speak the same languages as each other to make work about Chicago and we were so interested in using that as a kind of originating thread. I want to say that the artistic director of Teatro Luna also thinks it's really important to put the asterisks on that that they were collecting those games and those practices from immigrant people at Whole House so that we don't want to mark them as the originators but Viola Spolin was the one who wrote them down per conversation earlier, she has the copyright so we were also interested in where these two show up side note, in my research about Viola Spolin I found out that as a young woman until she became a professional actress she dressed exclusively in men's clothing so I'm so obsessed with that and I want someone to write a book about her it's probably not me but I was like that's so gay fairy godmother I'm going to quickly run through the books in the company so you can see they're quite different 500 Clown is a clown theater company they do plays like 500 Clown, Frankenstein Macbeth, this is from Frankenstein really physical, very little text and talking all white why am I a hater? I just have to mark that happens about face youth theater about face itself is an LGBTQ and theater that does mostly scripted work but their youth theater has always been for about 20 years ensemble devised they do really extraordinary work Albany Park Theater Project also a youth based theater but this is a show that they performed at the Goodman so you can see that they place a high value on the aesthetics and design of their work which is not something we often associate with youth made devised work Barrel of Monkeys is a group of adult actors and writers who adapt to the writing of grade school students for the stage so it's quite funny to take the work of a third grader and then have adults interpret it it's something every house has a door these artists formerly known as Goat Island are now operating under the title every house has a door and the work is pretty esoteric highly intellectual yeah I won't say more about that Feme Melanin is a collective of young women of color by young I mean they're in their 20s who make plays about kind of being feminists of color I don't know why I said kind of that is what they do Free Street Theater is the oldest company in the book I'm the artistic director now but it was founded in 1969 in response to the 1968 riots in Chicago we had back to back riots and the city decided that the way to solve the racial and economic tension in the city was to start a free street theater so Free Street Theater was actually started by the mayor and then what became the Illinois Arts Council I want to say that it has become increasingly radical since that moment and now performs mostly site specific work designed to address gaps in representation Honeypot performance is an Afrofuturist feminist collective that makes work that draws on house music as its primary aesthetic influence Looking Glass Theater we debated a lot about whether to include them in a book about co-created or ensemble or devised work they assign a primary playwright to their work but use a co-creative process to do that they're maybe best known for being Mary Zimmerman's theater company so they are tricky their earlier work I would say is more in the spirit of ensemble made work than their current I'm not sure they would agree the neo-futurists best known for too much light makes the baby go blind at wrench they do 30 plays in 60 minutes yeah that's right not 60 plays in 30 minutes the second city we also argued about this but in the spirit of tracing things back to Hall House we thought well Paul Sills very openly ascribes his work and improv to his mother and to thinking about the radical democracy that can happen when you bring people together in a room to make work with each other so they ascribe this deep social justice ethos to their work also our editor thought it would help us sell books I'm trying to be really transparent about some of the stuff that happens in these conversations Southside Ignoramus Quartet might be my favorite company in the book I put two pictures here because I think they're all Mexican Americans from the south side of Chicago doing what they call purposefully raw and real work but they perform in a tent in the founder's backyard there were no theater spaces owned by Mexicans or in Mexican communities on the south side of the city so they decided that they would quite literally build one it has a beer window air conditioning in the summer and it seats about 40 people I think their work is interesting for space not just process Teatro Luna all Latina theater company they've actually moved to LA so whether they count as Chicago theater I don't know but they were in Chicago for about 16 years walk about theater they do mostly physical work I think not unlike what you were describing with tectonic add the text last actually their process sounds very similar to what you were describing one of the things that's been really interesting even though what the companies make turns out to be really different in terms of aesthetic so many people are using similar techniques there's not a one of the companies in the book that doesn't have some kind of process of sticking everything on the wall many of these companies have turned over their whole rehearsal space to a writable surface others are kind of carrying around piles of giant post-its little post-its everybody has that everybody is thinking about how do we check in with each other as a first step then how do we build our comfort as an ensemble how do we make lots of small things I don't think anybody is like we're gonna make a whole play right now we have to break the play into smallest unit and how different companies to find that has been really interesting and then the final company in the book are the young fugitives there all kind of masculine what's the right way to they are all probably people who would be read as men of color regardless of whether that is their kind of personal identification sort of complicated they do very highly physical work they're trying to engage with questions of violence in the city this is a piece about this is from a play called track 13 about Deontay Mackey who was shot by an off-duty police officer and killed in Chicago and so they did this mime performance about it it's really quite extraordinary so this is all very very different work some of what we were trying to do in talking about this one is to sort of assert that there is the reason why you see so much of this happening in Chicago some of it is affordability I mean I'm talking to people in New York you know it is expensive here it's actually not that expensive to make work in Chicago relative to most urban cities we are the second largest second third largest city in the country it depends how you're counting so you see a lot of people can take can spend three years to make a play without having to sell the play there's a strong kind of social justice we don't like what you're telling us to do so we'll do our own way ethos but also some of what we were really curious about is how do we encourage people to use each other's work for their own purposes which is sometimes complicated but I think like even if I read Tectonic's book I probably couldn't do it yet as well as you can do it so I think that I hope that is not like undermining the purpose of the book but the reality is that we don't lose anything by sharing our practice with each other not just the product there's only to be gained from doing that and so we were really trying to create a context in which we were hearing about each other's work and able to kind of pick up the book and execute and exercise also the way our company's philosophy informs so much of what we do so for example three of the companies in the book we don't need it anymore three of the companies in the book offered a pushing game and like what's so funny to me about it is in Teatro Luna which is a all femme company their pushing game is like I want to tell you what I see in you it's so beautiful we're going to gently push against each other while we describe each other to each other the young fugitives who are talking about violence and they're expected they're trying to deal with their own anger they're actually like sumo wrestling trying to push each other as hard as they can out of a circle and then walkabouts pushing game is all about balance because they're going to need to be able to have five people up on shoulders so they're like practicing not losing their balance these sound like the exact same exercise but the context of the company makes them so different from each other so we're really curious about the places where people were doing you know we had artists arguing about who had invented an exercise you know like an I come from exercise I'm like I have heard like 15 different companies say that they invented this exercise the reality is Vila Spolan probably invented that exercise and nobody's giving her any credit so we asked everybody that offered us an exercise where did you learn this and how did you adapt it because it's in the adaptation that the work is happening and I'll leave it there so I'll start first just by asking did you all know each other or did you two know Goya and vice versa before would you mind sharing a few thoughts that emerged in hearing about each other's work I can go first obviously maybe it's not obvious but I feel like tectonic looms large in thinking about how you create work as an ensemble how you create work based on interviews I don't know that anybody has studied theater and not thought about the Laramie project at some point if you've formally studied theater but what I appreciate about the book which I pre-ordered so I got it as soon as it came out is that the translation from an exercise into a play is a really hard leaf so thinking about how generous it is to offer a path that far is really a usable gift I got so excited I was like I wonder if I could just take a whole year and go to Chicago and just dip my toe in all these places I just think that must have been incredible and those pictures alone were just I think you're probably giving visibility to a lot of companies that I didn't know about I knew a few of them just very exciting to want to go find them and seek them out and support their work I think what you started with was really great context because I was I went through a few different experiences hearing that piece of text one was because I spent a little time in Chicago I know that all to be true and then part of me was like New York's just as good having this weird competition comparing New York and Chicago and I think I think that what you set up at least and I'm so curious to read the rest is just a real deep dive into how the culture influences the work tracing it back owning its history taking that time and spreading out and going deep and I think that is and I just have to eat it and say like we don't have that much of a feeling of that here there's not the community and history as much as Chicago and so as much as we do honor our predecessors and attribute all of our techniques to where Moisesen we got them I'm really excited in hearing that you talk about that in the book because it seems like that means a lot to you and it now means a lot to me too and we'll get into this with the round table but I made me laugh that you said my editor made me put devised in the title because I remember I was assistant directing a high school production that became the first UK production of the Laramie project back in 2004 and the British people were all like that's a devised piece and I was like okay like that wasn't even language we were using when we made the Laramie project or we were using moment work to build a play and then eventually we just sort of accepted that that's what we were making so it'll be interesting to drill down into that in a little bit that's a lot of what today is about that sort of slow acceptance but really I was excited to discover both of your books being published in this year because as much as so much of how the word devised has been embraced in the US comes from funding and from arts institutions really the great stakeholders of it all are the artists and the education and the universities and so to have all three of you who represent both ends of that conversation and to have your books speak so directly to that full conversation was really wonderful thank you to you and Frank and the Graduate Center for hosting us and creating this thank you did anyone have any questions that you wanted to ask to either or any of the panelists you kind of touched on it a little bit before but that transition where you find terminal velocity from an exercise into a piece and we sort of were talking about it legally but I was curious I suppose that's maybe what you were writing the book for was to try to help people get from exercise to piece I wonder if you how successful you feel the book isn't that but also just for you as creators where do you find that terminal velocity and if you would just expand upon that let me ask you a question in terminal velocity would an example be like that blob that we were talking about earlier is that what you mean by terminal velocity that's a good question I suppose maybe from my experience it's like what brings people together is one thing and then when does does that transition into a specific piece or I suppose maybe device theater for me is what keeps people together when there's no story and then I suppose terminal velocity is when does that transition into story maybe it's probably worth saying that I don't know if we would make the definition of your ensemble made because we usually come into a room with one or two like Jimmy and I are co-creating a piece right now we haven't decided are you the director are we both playwrights we don't need to know that yet but ultimately even if we bring in an ensemble of people we are going to make final artistic choices and that's how I think we get terminal velocity is that we accept and it is difficult often with students because you enfranchise you enfranchise and then in the way we make work whoever's hunch it was is ultimately going to get to make the final creative decisions there's a lot of pushback we're not shy about arguing with each other and there will be tears and all that but so our in general we sometimes you have to kick out the person who's in charge take a step out of the room for a second we're going to make something and show it to you and then they might see it and be like oh my god you're right there will be a lot of discourse and I want to say that many of the companies in the book we talk about the place for leadership and a director because I don't think there's a single company if you're really being honest about practice you need somebody who is stepping into the role of the audience to see it's something beautiful to make work together but we make work for an audience and so we have an obligation to their experience also and you can't see that from the inside and sometimes that rotates it might be like you guys are going to do it and I'm going to watch now we're going to do it and you're going to watch but defining leadership and who has the authority to make a cut or a change if something's just not working it's so violent to say kill your darlings but there has to be somebody who is imbued with that authority and I think for each group that makes work that looks different it may look different project to project I think one of the things that we try to remind ourselves is that the play often is going to tell you if we agree on the hunch and we trust the process oftentimes those decisions are made based on really clear dramaturgical expressions back from the material so it won't often result in a taste issue or I just feel like it should be this you can point at it and say what beat is this is it necessary according to the dramaturgical rules we've set up is it communicating the strongest and that's why we always resort back to structure because it's hard to disagree with structure we can all see it but also just to touch on part of your question which I think was about playing and making which is I often think you know Ann Bogart trained me and I spent a lot of time with her viewpoints and that is a training method as well as you know some codified steps in order to generate and composition but it's also just good to be trained and be facile and remind yourself like going to a gym and so we will do that as a company make sure that we have the most moments that or just remind ourselves of the elements and just make really basic things just to keep flexing those muscles even if we have no expectation of it appearing in a piece and I think that that you know keeps us all on our toes so I think that both are inter interplay in any rehearsal room the playing and then the aha that may be a usable form or aha that actually hits a beat in our piece and so therefore we absorb it into our process or our proposed product thank you are there any other questions thanks for coming I'm in the middle of reading moment work now and I was just wondering if there was any if you could speak to either sequencing moments together or layering them and if there is any like intuitive guide as to how many to do it once or could you do I'm sure it's perfectly possible to do both and figure it out moment work escalates you know so in many ways writing the book was a challenge because our method is really lather rinse repeat make a moment you know get feedback on that moment make another moment make a whole bunch of prop moments make a whole bunch of like oh we have to deal with a bunch of representation who can play who in this story make a bunch of moments and so sometimes the layering and sequencing kind of happens organically you like the way the chairs are set up in this moment but the text is wrong or you want to pass a prop along so you end up taking bits from different forms and I think often we call it scoring a moment you can score a sequence where often the first time a group is making a moment the lights will come on the sound will go people are talking and moving and so you have to take a step back and say okay let's score each one of these elements and look at its narrative line and figure out like does the sound need to start when the moment starts does everyone need to be moving the minute the second the moment starts and really like let each element have its let it land for people and that's true of sequencing and layering too and I'm the queen of making dumping everything into a moment and hoping something is interesting so that can take some careful teasing out from whether it's your moment work teacher or just you as a observer saying what happens if we remove the sound or sometimes you need to just pull everything out and say can I just hear that text you know so sometimes if you try to layer too much you'll know and then you can really ask yourself I like the metaphor Moises will say it's like when you go to a salad bar and you get all these delicious things and you put them in the salad and then somehow you have a bad salad like you can't really have tomatoes and beets together like you have to choose one so I think you sort of just have to feel it and know and different people have a different aesthetic it's overwhelmed and some people want something very spare and I think that definitely applies to individual elements in a moment and then there's the question of layering and sequencing moments which I think might also be of value and some of that is so dependent on the material because it gets into writing essentially narrative technique so are you following a character that it feels like the next beat you want to make is in pursuant to a character's arc or is it to elaborate on a thematic thread that you're finding or just cut it off and explore the opposite just to explore the element of juxtaposition so lots of different things will inform on what to maybe juxtapose layer and structure and sequence rather so it's funny though just on that topic because you can pick up a book and see different examples and maybe that will help you most just learning by anecdote but I will say no matter how much we write performance those principles of play writing still find their way in you know like how much do you want to build tension by introducing a ball in the air right and the audience wants to watch it drop or invest in a point of tension and that tension doesn't have to exist in character plot or words but rather can exist on a discursive theatrical plane so it's just moving kind of good play writing techniques into really theatrical vocabularies often times I have a question what are you all working on creatively right now what's your next big project so at free street we turn 50 5 0 in June so we're working on a project called still here which is a manifesto for survival in Chicago we're talking to hundreds of people our goal is to source material for that project in all 50 words of the city and then we're going to perform in all 50 words of the city in one day that's our stunt and then we'll do the show but we're really interested in sort of like how do we imagine a city that makes room for all of us Chicago is I'm sure New York faces these problems but Chicago notoriously is credited with inventing modern segregation inventing practices like redlining the systemic problems of the city are so they're built into the way our city was built and so much of what we try to do at free street is think about the ways in which theater and performance might be an ally to larger social justice movements and to justice in and for our city and so we're sort of talking about this 50th celebration as a performance meets a protest like we demand a city that makes room for all of us You teased your project I did, I did tease it a little bit hers is called still here ours is called here too stories of gun violence stories of youth activism that they happen here too so we're sort of using this extraordinary year of the parkland shooting and everything that has happened in this year up to the anniversary and we've been interviewing young activists around the country and finding out how it's not just the march for our lives students who are active and really just it felt like a lightning rod moment that I haven't experienced since the death of Matthew Shepard even with all the other movements that have been so powerful in the last few years they galvanized the country in a way that is extraordinary and finding out what was happening that created this culture how intersectional can we make this and partnering with lots of different communities to make their own version of a play so you know if Tectonic is interested in form and content often our work has this sort of social justice kind of theme because these are the kinds that we're excited about but what is the next form of an interview based play are we going to repeat the forms of the Laramie project from the year 2000 or are there new forms so that's one of the things that we want to ask formally as we're working on this thing that really stirs us and touches us as we talk to young people around the country about how they're dealing with this gun violence epidemic if anybody knows young activists and you want to send them our way that's appreciated do you want anything to that? We literally just came out of a week in the woods where Barb and I we like we glamped together in my in my upstairs construction side of a home right now but with paper all along the walls just like writing down our ideas charting our possible narratives and transcribing interviews so we're sort of in the thick of that formless hunch our hope is that we start at Penn State in January and I'm guessing there will be modular pieces that communities can insert into the narrative so we're exploring like whereas Laramie project is the one final word on what happened in Laramie Wyoming we're going to be talking about this gun violence epidemic for a long time and so there's a plurality of narratives and we want to create a structure both online and in communities where we're not going into a community co-opting their stories and writing a play that we're writing versions of this play in kind of a rolling premiere so we start there and we have another commitment at western Washington I love partnering in the universities and then finding community partners to me that feels like I get to make some beautiful art with some places that have some resources and a vested interest in bettering their communities and I get to learn about my piece as I do that can I say something quickly about form one of the companies that I mentioned the young fugitives actually one of them walked in I was so excited and one of one of the things that came up as they were making their piece track 13 was like not wanting to replicate a stand and talk about violence in their lives which is so often what happens in your theater and so this very radical commitment to thinking about kind of mime and physicality and alternate ways of telling a story so I always am so excited when people are taking subjects particularly around the violence that young people are subjected to and thinking about like what's the way to tell this story that doesn't ask them to be kind of reduced to the story of the violence in their life does that make sense well thank you so much I want to say that like there are two groups of people who are so empowered by what you do not just in your artistic practice but in your writing which is one as I work with students around the country I learn how important it is that people write about work in cities and share and disseminate and be as transparent and open as possible how transformative that is and then also artists I can't imagine any artists who wouldn't love for their work to be documented and remembered and sometimes that's someone like you who has a company and writes about yours and others and others and sometimes it's you taking the agency to say we have to tell this story because no one else is right now so thank you and thank you all for being here let's give them one more round of applause now what we're going to do is we'll bring up the lights and I'm asking that everyone help make a big giant circle of chairs if you are one of the invited panelists that just means I want you to be sitting somewhere on this side of the room but everybody should have equal view of the room and of each other thank you let's see this one I know are you on the piano right? I don't know I'm just going to slide somewhere around I'm fine is the microphone I know right I'm just trying to look at the stuff I'm trying to okay so if you don't have a notepad or just something to write on grab one if you don't have a pen those should be coming around does everyone have a piece of paper and a pen? there's no test this is just in case you hear something and you go oh that's good and you want to write it down now you have a paper instead of your phone pens right here so this is a bit of an experiment for those of you who have been with us today I apologize but I'm going to recap what we've done we started with a great super electrifying and expanding workshop on the contracts that the Dramatis Guild has pulled together the contract templates around device theater specifically partnership agreements and production agreements or production agreement rather and then we moved into the book talks that we just had with Tectonic and with Coyapas sorry with Barb and Jimmy and so now what we're trying to do is arrive at not a solid or a regular definition of device we don't want to collapse things but really the reason why I wanted to bring this together and I'm so thankful that everyone's here is because device is often a word that we toss aside as maybe an obligation something that was placed on the field whether it's something we inherited from the UK or something that funders give us or something that people who run initiatives at the public theater insist that we be called but it has some functional purpose and if nothing else I think the more conscious we are about our vocabulary the more critical we can be about the way we make work about how we engage partners how we engage audiences and how we talk about our work so I've invited some folks here today all of whom I have asked to share a two sentence definition or their abouts of device we're going to go around with all of them when that's done if anyone here else feels like I really have to share my two sentences that I've just come up with absolutely if you hear anything that sounds particularly right to you or particularly wrong to you or anything if it resonates in some way jot it down because the second half of this and we're going to clip a pace is I'm going to bring up a word document here and then I'm just going to follow your lead if anything was said that you think is particularly important to hold on to I will type it into the word document three I will delete it and we will keep working through until we start to arrive at some productive language for what does devised mean that's it what I imagine will be the focus is not just what does it mean in a mechanical sense but why what's at stake because if we don't have stakes for defining this word then y'all just came here for no reason but you didn't so I'm going to go ahead and start I'm looking for a chair is someone sitting here oh can I thank you no no so I'm going to start I'm going to read my sentences and then I'll just turn to the other participants and anyone can go in any order I ask that we not do questions right now oh it's not on here excuse me after I told you everything about phones I have to go get my phone I just asked no questions or cross talking at the beginning let's just get these definitions out and then we'll have plenty of time to go for clarity later alright stand by everyone I love having all of your attention right now as my phone doesn't open oh and when it comes around to you please give a brief brief brief brief introduction of who you are just so people understand what's at stake for you so Andrew Kircher director of the device theater initiative at the public theater and also a teacher and scholar in this field devised does not point to a specific genre aesthetic or methodology it is a critical category and while many consider device theater to be antithetical to the dominant playwrights theater I offer that it is actually antithetical to the hyper professionalization of the American theater devised for me represents a radical dramaturgy a means of continually remaking the theater and its professional structures to reflect a more expansive and inclusive population of creators and audiences that's my sentences alright oh you should have seen how many M dashes I had but also Alyssa Simmons no cross talking so thank you Alyssa will you please read yours my name is Alyssa Simmons I am an assistant general manager at the public theater and producer of prelude oh yeah and I produced prelude 2018 yay so my sentences are devised speaks to that which is created and equally owned by the participants or that which is inextricably linked to the process and the individuals involved in its genesis someone else hi I'm Jenny ball supermoney and I am a fellow at the public theater I said in traditional theater we make a play in device theater we make and play hi I'm Natalie Gosnell I am not from the theater I am a professor of astrophysics at the Colorado college I'm here this week to work with Jenny on a science art theater project that I just recently learned could be classified as devised theater so I'm new to this game my sentence is that device theater is collaboratively creating from a point of inspiration where the creation itself is not bound by stereotypical disciplinary boundaries hi I'm Catherine I'm part of sister Sylvester and I wrote device theater is collectively authored disagreement authorship can be both by both human and non-human agents written in languages not limited to the verbal and in the second sentence a way to try out other social relations for world building hi I'm Jimmy I'm a member of tectonic theater project you have to read our book no I'm just joking I took a literal approach I chose to define devising and not devised so devising is an action rather than a product when the content and or narrative of a piece including text if applicable is generated alongside simultaneously with staging hey I'm Dan Rothenberg artistic director of pig iron in Philadelphia devised theater describes performance works made by a process in which much of the script emerges from encounters in the rehearsal room devised theater often generates performance works that are not intended to be restaged by other groups so the very notion of script expands to include a range of decisions which are not typically associated with playwriting hi I'm Aya Ogawa I'm a playwright director and translator devised theater upends the conventional creative process and performance in which the playwright and play script is at the center and the director interprets and actors embody the script it potentially allows for a more collaborative process that disrupts the traditional power hierarchy and gives the performers, designers or ensemble more agency in process and ownership over product hi my name is Aisha Jordan and I'm a performer and creator creative both my definition the creation of a work or material developed using text sound music movement improvisation or other various inspirations often happening individually or through collaborations between two or more entities hi I'm Ryan Jay Haddad actor, writer solo performer in the public theater's emerging writers group and I wrote the devised theater is performance that is not generated on paper but rather arrived at in real time and space in collaboration between artists or artist and audience it is only committed to paper this is very personal it is only committed to paper once it is necessary to replicate the event my name is Modesto Flaco Jimenez I make stuff a group of individuals coming together to create a piece of work from nothing or piece of source material you want to fuck up with no hierarchy owned by all hi I'm Maximilian I came to devised theater from reading Studs Turtles interviews and I'm basically trying to fill in the gaps with historical material by interviewing people who live through certain events to find the parallels with what's going on today hi I'm Alisa Matlowski I'm a theater maker and I had absolutely no idea I was going to have to say anything so I'm going to pass the microphone you don't have to thank you I'm going to check oh yes Deborah you may have already heard my definition but the process, oh I am Deborah Murat I'm the director of business affairs at the Dramatist Guild the process of working collaboratively and through non-traditional means with a group of individuals some of whom may or may not be writers with the goal of creating a new work you can pass it to Sandy hi I'm Sandy Garner I'm a New York based independent producer working with artists and groups of artists on work and the devised theater and I said is a process during which a group of creative collaborators work together responsively in an iterative way over time to generate material that they then shape into a live performance piece my name is Sam Shenwald I'm a writer and performer I'm also a current member of the devised theater working group at the public I said devised theater is a mode of time based art making that values process in the same way I'm Kate Lynn I'm a freelance director and teaching artist also working with Sam right now in the devised theater working group devised theater is a space that values the collision of our impulses interrogations and obsessions a process full of constant and collective generating generating of material followed by a simmering down to reach the material that stays alive and hot within repetition I'm Saul de la Ciudad and I'm a deviser devising starts from a place not tethered by civility but rather motions that seek to not preserve a need for an ending devise is an abundance not a means or logic of scarcity because it requires us to disposition humanism and tune into listening not as an object but as a mode or field of study it's a way of creating theater that welcomes the ideas and contributions of everyone in the room that relies on collective vision rather than the singular vision of a playwright or director it happens in the spaces between people it responds to the space it responds to the world outside of the space because the people in the room can't help but bring it in devised is any playmaking process that does not start with a playwright alone in a room did anyone else feel inspired to jot down some thoughts that they want to share? It's okay if you didn't anyone? Okay great so now we're going to move to the second part I'm going to sneak by you Flaco I'm going to bring up a word doc on here thanks Mike and as I said I'm just going to write what people say so if there's something that was said where you go that has to be in our definition of devised again we're not leaving here and running through the street screaming we solved it we're just doing it as an exercise yeah that's space four so yes Koya I'm sorry I don't know how to write it down only when you need to replicate it is that what you said? yes only when you need to replicate it great something that struck me as radical when I heard it was equally owned by the participants great anything else that stood out? I love what you said about listening being a field of study great listening is a a field of study that's process based and generative it is process based and generative what Barb said about it's a form of play and it doesn't necessarily start with the playwright yeah that's any reductively what I said is it's any playmaking process that doesn't start with the playwright alone in a room along in a room if I can I lied I am going to talk Gemini you said something along the lines of it is a form of play what was that? I said it's not where you make it's where you make a play versus make a play make a play can I just write that because I really like that can I disagree with something? yes please as a writer I'm going to speak up for the idea that device theater actually can start with writing as a kind of devising I just doesn't have to be written in the same way that playwrights write writing can be done in a devised way and writing can be at the center of a device practice is that what you're saying? I'm saying writing can be done in a devised way so what would you change here? devise is written down only when you need to replicate it because I think you can actually start from a text do you want like maybe only written down when you want to replicate it but then to balance it with but but a device work can also begin from a text so before I call on another hand I want to just point out so this right now should be treated as a placeholder that we have two things that are diametrically opposed to each other it can be written down when you have to replicate it or it can be done with a playwright and I think this is one of the core challenges of devised is that we try and make space for those two things instead of coming up with what is a third definition that doesn't require us to say it's this or this and kind of wins when we say it so if anyone has any of those thoughts of like how can it be both instead of having to put a qualifier does that make sense? on this side of the room mentioned that it's the individuals involved I think that speaks to what you're saying of it's not attention necessarily it's about the preference of what suits the theater makers involved to the participants yeah Dan you said something about that right it's not made for other bodies I thought it was done at the time when I said it you're never done Dan just I said it's not usually intended for other people to restage so I'm really struggling to explain how that works right well to that point Dan that's kind of what I was centering on that the idea that a piece is built on the people that are in the room so if you were to restage it it wouldn't be the same piece because it's different people different bodies different experiences and so that's kind of what I was poking at as well this idea that the piece itself is informed by the people who are creating it so I feel like it prioritizes a different energy but I just don't know how to put that in I was I'll put this out there as a theme that is kind of what I feel like you're talking about that it's a process that prioritizes the relationship between the creators rather than the product rather than the play script that you end up with it prioritizes the relationship between the creators over all relationship or between the participants and the creators over all and okay so this is another point which you're remarkably glad for all these terms being thrown out just if we could get rid of is equally on it can be equally on great where did I put that in the middle of the line it can be I think equal is a really important word right there's equal in the room there's equal in the law there's equal in all these different things I think equal is important that everybody's heard and listening and all of that that nobody's pushed away but at the same time you've owned then you know bothered me going back to writing I think a lot of work has source material whether that's writing an interview an article a television show that we're adapting you know like I want my dream is to do like that I didn't know I was pregnant show on stage you know what I'm talking about but you would not end up with what you end up with if you did not bring this particular group of people together to work on that source whether it's written or not but I also want to first I want to capture what you just said how can I do that well it's that without the particular group of people working on it it wouldn't become what it is and I do think there's something about you can't replicate it without that group of people unlike you could have a different version of a script I don't know that I'm helping you Andrew but I also want to I want to say that prioritizes relationship and process but I'm not sure that I believe it's over the product again I think we have a deep obligation to the audience and many divisors consider the audience part of their creator like a 500 clown or second city their piece is only loosely rehearsed because it involves audience engagement they can't even imagine what it will be until the audience is invited in I just wanted to add I don't know how to articulate this but for those of us with experience devising with young people they have a very strong relationship with school and anything involving writing gets an extreme reaction back which sort of stops the devising process and what we kind of want to do is support them in being able to observe the world and their place in the world and their ability to use improvisation and to write that way without this kind of writing is extremely fruitful in terms of getting them so there is something in here when we start with the writing that sort of stops for me I have some reactions in terms of like it's actually the taking away the pen and saying to people you can use your voice without the pen you know and we can put it on the stage so how can I capture that I don't know where you ended was I heard two things one was you can use your voice without the pen and the other thing is there was something about empowering people to observe the world yeah oh don't be there we go and I'm not organizing these in any way right now we'll get to that in a second I'm just going to dump perceive the world and what with the other one it gives you a voice without a pen I don't like the word gives a voice because people have voices it recognizes amplifies amplifies voices I think there is something about being liberated from the oppression of writing and that writing particularly English has lots of rules and there's a lot of us who feel like we're wrong and so we can't write and so we can't contribute to the theater because theater is a literary tradition well okay we just put something there the way it's taught in school we learned it as a literature I think in our country it is a school for white people that is a literary tradition but I don't think for most of history that it was a literary tradition yeah true I'm just saying the way that a lot of the young people I've worked with the way they've been taught it someone gave them a book and then they go oh this isn't about me a response to a literary tradition? I'm just going to write that and obviously we'll want to adjust it because what I like about what you did there is that it's not saying it's not vilifying the text or saying that the text is not the source of art making because the text still has a prime position but rather the literary theater which is its own thing and perhaps even the sort of if I'm hearing you right the sort of the strict frameworks of what a text can do and who has the ownership or right to text is sort of a dismantle thing right? I kind of also want to push back again to my idea it's a form of play that doesn't begin to play right alone in the room I think that for one thing it's more useful to define what it is and what it isn't I think that a devised piece can start with a structure and then be opened up to a group of creatives and that's kind of like what devised theater is the opening up to a group of people to start or continue creating so maybe we remove it doesn't start with the playwright alone in the room I think it's important to remove kind of those big work like playwright things that signify it's exclusive almost yeah so instead it doesn't begin with prescribed roles and you made another good point which is let's not define it in the negative it's not this, it's not that but be affirmative about what it is so I put that and the other thing I just want to note is if anyone has a definition of terms because there's times where we're throwing out words and we're being slippery about them I'd like to anchor that, that'd be great too two things, one I think that it doesn't have to begin with prescribed roles but also it can't be replicated I feel like some can be replicated as a performer I've done things where I've had to step into stuff so I think that where did I write that? it's top, second row I think we already sort of get that when we say it's built on that kind of like explanation of labor around with but I like, there's maybe another word it's not just built with them but that it's like it's for those bodies it is like four all right, now look everyone's gone I guess there's a part of me that's thinking that we have to let the material that somehow the material tells us how to work with it so the content prescribes the method often if you are not wed to one way of devising devise another listen to how, you know, what does the material how does it want to come through? because there could be so many different relationship structures in device theater maybe it's and I think that hearing everyone talk I just realized that I've always thought the definition of device theater means that it's created by an ensemble and now I'm changing that definition for myself, I can be a solo with two devices why does that happen? I think it's important to kind of rectify all these people and their roles and who they are in regards to device theater and that it requires accountability from the hierarchy if it exists within the structure of device theater so if there's a director if there is a this if it's devised that there needs to be accountability and showing that the work was created by a group of people, that it was devised it was generated by people in a room however, whatever the definition is that it's not, maybe that's the thing it's not unless it is one person devising on their own but what you said that I think is really valuable is you signaled back to what Koya said which is you still gotta have someone people have functions and roles and decision making responsibilities so what you said is it's not about not having that hierarchy it's about having that accountability in that hierarchy, that's great I have a question which is I feel like a lot of this is what we're putting on this document is for ensemble device theater like prioritizing hierarchy prioritizing the multi-visionary product can that happen from someone devising on their own so what I don't know, I guess my question is what kind of device theater are we trying to define here because it's too big try and jump in then because like even if I'm devising a text and it's just me and the audience together and I'm just spouting things once I do I'm trying to create something I can repeat over and over there are inevitably there's a director who comes in or designers who come in and they become it's not an ensemble of like other performers with me but it's still like a process in which the text is living and breathing and people are going no I don't think or maybe you should and so there I mean I don't think unless you're really really a genius you can put up a piece of theater truly just by yourself right so my question is what makes that different than from developing a new play for any kind of collaboration can I does it have to do with improvisation I just read this great article that Eric Migosian wrote in 1991 taking you step by step through how he creates a work and it's a lot of these things it's clearly a devised work but he's the only person in the room so it doesn't have to be an ensemble to be devised but doesn't it have to be improvisational it doesn't improvisation have to play some role in the can you devise a piece without improvising because that word's not up there right and I think it is in that the word play is up there but I think you're right also especially following you bringing us back to violence but improvisation in all aspects is at the core of this too who does not I think someone said one of the first people who spoke said it's not specific to genre or aesthetic but I think that's what we're all getting at it's all about the process itself and so I think that the question occurred to me is something is now created is it no longer devised sure I can say that what I mean in that regard is that there's no such thing as devised theatre that is to say you can't point at something that's a piece of devised theatre it's a critical category that helps us make space for the fact that the underlying process was devised and artists created the unique way of making work the end product might look remarkably similar to a play but that it's how the making is happening not along normal playmaking lines but that's my personal definition yeah just to add another thing that you said along those lines a means of continually re-making the process and structures of theatre no just the word play because it always makes it seem like then it has to be a play you know what I mean so let's get the word play out of there I mean it's not that it has to be out of there because there are things that become plays but then like just also performance pieces or events or you know what I mean I don't know right now we have to use the word performance or event or experience at all catch up you were talking about taking out play as a product not play as right like I don't think that that's not always the end product now no verb yes great end product maybe it be plays performance events experiences call it that concert is because that's the goal just the fact that it's process driven yeah what does that mean only because I think everyone yeah but I think we all thought different things what did I mean that I thought of it when we were talking about hierarchy and things like that what's creating the piece is the process that you're putting into it and what results at the end is due to the process and what's owned is due to the process so there are so many divides types of processes that define themselves right in the end great and what again not to speak in the negative but then it sounds like what as opposed to other forms of theater where what is made is not conscious of its process because the process is is a given okay I'm listening here and I'm getting the feeling like I have no relationship to the word divides I reject defining it as a definition because I can't link to it but I think about what Peter Brooks said when someone said to him about a stage and he said this is not a stage this is a playground this is where we play and John Joseph Boyce talked about social sculptures and I think that somewhere in the playground of a social sculpture it's more comfortable than what was started this isn't necessarily something to put up there but something I feel like I hear and I want to explore that maybe Divistheater is a response to thinking of theater as something that can be proper so right Divistheater is attempting to focus on experience instead of property I know this is not true but I just wrote that I just did you show up at 330 I understand that that's like we have to work because 910 no but ideologically perhaps there's a place to start and then well this is bumping up against I just want to like let's keep this going but I want to point out that we're bumping up against which is so what because I get up every day and I go to work and I dedicate my life and I make huge sacrifices in my life to work on something called Divistheater and ensure a shit can't be because I think they make pretty plays do you know what I mean so why because we don't get to so what we will labor on what does it look like and what it looks like seems to be incidental I don't know if you want them for the definition is that what you're asking I feel like it should be in the definition I think it's intrinsically related to capitalism right and I think a lot of the device methods that we've arrived at in a contemporary sense have been because we're rejecting hopefully a relationship to something you're all born into in this country which is a system that profits in really horrible ways off of really strict working systems that disempower people who are doing a lot of work and that can't be valued in currency maybe and I think capitalism has made its mark in the American theater system in really unfortunate ways and I hope that people who are participating in Divistheater have an opinion about why that devising method maybe disassembles that economic model that we inevitably live in great, I put up and this is not I was trying to bring together the device methods or a rejection of theater's relationship to capitalism and the actualization of creative labor cool, that's great I liked just some of the words the radical dramaturgies I think is important I like the word collective that would use I think what you also said to think of it as a collective that usually created by a collective with the intent to get back to your word to create a live performance I think that's also very important to say that the intent is to create a live performance well, that's, yeah, you having the word live performance, that is the first time and the radical dramaturgies I think we should so when I think about the why so much of what so many of the artists that I talk to reject the gatekeepers because those gates were put to keep them out you know, like why wait for someone to write a play that is about the kind of person you are like why wait for an institution to put on the play that approximates the person that you are when we can make work that is specific to the people we are and the communities we live in together that approximate, I love that word approximates who you are that, see, yeah, yes cool, yeah I think I want to speak to how much I learned from Astrophysics about what device theater is I think I'm also one one thing is that I think Astrophysics and device theater, which is a word I didn't really understand as I was working in it both are about expanding our noble universe and intimating what our unknowable universe might be and I love that both these fields kind of teeter on the edge of human comprehension and human like collective understanding and the edge of humanity and to me making work that is devised or whatever you want to call it really, yes devised is really similar to how I really take seriously like the process of kind of stellar formation as a kind of devising process where things are created from the context in which they are in and some of those things they are proven in certain ways things are created from D-R-E-T-E-D I don't know if that means shh shh shh shh yeah and to me that's such a different metaphor from the extracted process that can otherwise be such a different Extractive process, yeah it's just a comment I don't know if anybody's been reading along as we're going down but I've been noticing at first there were so many contradictions of what devised was in terms of like can stellar creation be devised is it ensemble based does it get with a single person all that and with that last statement that Sam made about rejecting institution it seems like the only things I'm talking about right now that are you know solid and seem like singular and agree upon are devised theater's relationship to the world outside of itself rather than the world that's happening so we're sort of like trying to protect devised theater by giving it some sort of protective definition I don't know I'm putting that right now just so we don't forget that that's you caught something that okay I boiled it down for myself as any live performance generated through collective practice any live performance generated I boiled it down for myself too through collective practice and what was yours devised theater is what happens when you apply methods of content creation to the performance arts when you apply methods of what content creation what's that I'm with you but so like when you apply methods of content creation this is me trying to use the word devised in the center so I mean I'm saying like that's kind of trying to be as for lack of a better word the land as possible so that I can try to encompass everything but so with this you're saying when we apply the methods of content creation like think about how we made it to the performance art to the performance or a performance art but couldn't that include typing a script on a computer like the playwright does content creation generating content it's what happens when you apply methods of content creation to a performance art so like yeah so a playwright oh multiple multiple methods just one method apply multiple methods and it sounds like along those lines you're talking about the idea of aestheticizing practice like how do we get how we make on the stage which is both a good and bad hallmark of devised theater like if I get invited to devise theater please I know I'm going to see their craft on stage for now I think we're actually getting there now with the conversation going to the circle back and maybe Brian can respond to this afterwards talking about like sort of the definition of solo device and even when you were describing the process it sounds like the actor of the sounding board is really important that can we devise something on your own if you're sitting in and you're doing devise work and you're improvising and you write a play all by yourself what's the difference between that and just the writing process and is there another person or person that's necessary for devised theater to work even if you're just bouncing it off the audience they're still participating you were the one who I talked to me about like is it a play or not why the difference between traditional playwriting the difference is in the work that I create I don't like to be bound by the traditional definitions of what a play is and so I don't I don't that's why I struggle with that and I don't I think that's all Brian can I add something that I know to be true of your work which is that I think in what we'll regard as I don't want to call it traditional theater let's say the literary theater there is an assumption that and not just legally but sort of practically speaking that the play script constitutes a work of art that it stands on its own can be generated as that and it's not just the impetus for a creation of a performance it is a work of art and Brian your work only exists in your body in your creation and for that moment that you want it to exist and there is no play script that goes and stands on its own although I know you're changing that this is an over definition that I had was that in device part of what led me to that term device theater was arguing about copyright at one point saying well you know these are the people who are the authors with copy writeable stuff and the other people are the interpreters well I weigh them in our world all of the artists in the room are generators nobody is an interpreter so that's part of so therefore each of those pieces makes up part of what that complete work of art is that people are offering they're not just lighting the people moving on stage who are doing interpreting the real work of art which is right and I recommend that you check out the drama skills they wrestle in those contract complements with how do you name the different types of authorship that play and the different types of collaboration which may or may not be regarded as authorship but are still collaborators of the creation of the work so yeah I think I've cracked it for myself so I was sitting here and I was like thinking about that idea of like solo devising and listening to Henry talk to you about your personal work it's kind of like the Holy Trinity in a way like where a single person wears the hat of playwright and of choreographer and writing design, yadda yadda all that and it's still collaboration which we kind of made the essence of devising in this document because you're collaborating with yourself in various hats so we still have the sort of collaborative art it's just Ryan collapsed it all into this I don't but we have turned from you I'm just listening to it I just did a piece that had me like rethink this whole shit so I just need to listen to it and talk about it the practices of the team like as an actor I've never got told nah bro you could your writing time is here in this room the hours that were paying you was for it in this room so you don't need a write at home so it's not even a going home for you to write these poems or if you come up with three lines during that one hour I guess that's what you did during that one hour and as like the person that had to deal with all those hats to like for that moment and be in a room that then my writing is being credited my performance is getting credited my body is being taken care of so many layers of all of this but then ownership still being on me it was beautiful and I'm still trying to figure out what all that shit is so I don't have any questions asks for building other spaces I just show up doing my shit I don't know spaces I don't like giving spaces weight like that so I just show up to be addressed so yeah so I'm in that headspace right now that I walked into a room I created a piece about education and theater and being the artist walking into a classroom and then just talking about the DOE and having those two worlds clash and all being devised and I came in the piece was already just a solo performer and they were like hey you do this you want to come and see this and read it and let's play in the room and all of that played then it's a two person show now and all these things got created that just got put in it got respected all the credits all the money everything that is was checked but I still don't have a language for it this is not everything it's an erasure of roles not labor because what I love is that you were saying like my work was recognized and the multiplicity of my work was recognized but I also was not asked to make in this way so it was like go home and memorize this and do this and do that everything was in the room yeah sure I think one important distinction whether it's a solo work or ensemble is about the agency and the activism of the piece and then going back to the thing about the devise being existed in the body of the creator the fact that like a few years in the actual participants you know who are the people you might have interviewed for the real living embodiments of the work or like even in the tectonic model other people are acting as if they're the protagonists or whatever one of the questions is like how would you that you ask the participants is like how would you see yourself on the stage so that aspect of learning the fictitious with the reality so I don't know how that well there is yeah there is a sort of there's a realness there's a presence yeah because it sounds like in most cases we're not talking about a purely representational theater there is I don't know I'm saying this to see if whether people agree but the body is still present the artist is still present so sorry I said that I don't want to give her any more credit alright so what were we saying though the like the realness the presence um I mean it depends I would say the artist but like 600 items work I think their work is all about the presence of everybody and the recognition of everybody whereas I don't know if I would put that on device theater in general you know what I mean I just mean everybody in the room like everybody has seen maybe I want to do a little bit of proving but I want to do some learning now so I'm just going to read and let's be ruthless let's not care about feelings let's also not worry if we delete something we're doing nothing with this definition we're doing everything we're doing everything we're doing on the streets so if I read something that doesn't feel right just say it let's cut it let's simplify alright device is inextricably linked to the participants just cut it entirely or is there anything you would change I mean I guess it just depends on if by participants we mean the people who created or the people who participated would you like to say the creators no I would actually make it not the creators that's necessary oh because in your mind it's the creators and the public okay so then keep participants and then it's open to interpretation sure it is not usually intended for others to restage yeah no maybe so what if your archive is an archive like somebody did it and then you show it again like people do that all the time but is that the intention or is that in that case it's an archive so you're already stepping inside of the intention to re-perform it for some new purpose anyway what can you think of other reasons one thing I don't know if it's not usually I'm saying I guess I mean it just seems very personal yeah okay can we just cut it because it's not a statement it's not a personal choice but you can say if it's restaged verbatim that it's not an original production but it's still a device piece of theater right although I think that that could be true for a lot of works but it doesn't matter this is hard it's built with and for the people in the room I don't think that for the people in the room with but yes that was my slot goodness I was thinking that four for that two per four did you mean built and by built with and by okay it's built with the people in the room it is so cool yeah what sometimes you say I'm like what what if you know because what if there is someone that broke heart you know playwright and that isn't in the room during the process if we're getting like real nippy here you know it's built with people for people it's built it's built it's built okay I have a question because it feels like what is the role of the audience in devised performance because it's devised that's also I think there's what I feel carrying the group is that there are some that consider the audience as part of the participants and some that say the audience is distinct from those that are which I think we can say of theater as a whole maybe I wonder if there might be something problematic with the way we're going about okay so right at the beginning we decided that we weren't going to say against things maybe that's actually a really helpful thing maybe opposition now that non-positional energy is more useful than trying to come up with some kind of summation for all of these different things to come up with the umbrella we're trying to use okay so are there any things you would want to I don't know I'd just like to open up the possibility to be against things yeah well I I agree we could say things that are against alright if there are things that we want to establish as clear like I said in my own that it is antithetical to the hyper-professionalized theater so I totally agree with you someone at the beginning said against scarcity that was a really nice so I started yeah that was me and I was going to say in addition to that devising requires listening not as an object of study but as a field of study which is you only have a listening as a field of study but it's supposed to be not as an object of study but as a field of study so not in the wrong place but as an object of study but as a field of study or mode of engagement can you unpack that a little bit so like part of part of like the problems that we're having with like trying to define this is that a lot of a lot of this stuff seems stagnant you know the point of this is not to do that we don't want to you know like we want to talk about what it does in order like I just don't I don't agree with this these notions of solidifying something as you know like this yeah and I think field of study you know thinking of things as a field or like consent as a field you know those when we when we get to that point of which you know umbrella terms of like playground things like those certain notions you know I think that that's very specific but also very much so not limiting can I say back what I think what I hear from that too is that it devising requires when I hear listening not as an object of study it means like in this case perhaps it's not a study of the human experience and not looking at it with that sort of critical distance but that but that listening becomes like the practice that is enacted in the creation is that what you're saying? yeah but like you know like I kind of want to move away from this whole like people and audience or like oh I'm going to devise a piece where I extract these stories from these people no that's just fucking violence that's violence that's not devising like I mean like I mean I don't think I just wouldn't include that because it's that's yeah okay I'm going to keep reading from what is anyone just a chunk of that I just would really love to amplify what you just said because I think when you said why I think about like why I'm in the room I can't think about the why of devise theater because it's not my personal disciplinary practices but like I think what I why I'm here is I feel like it's a radical re-enactment of how we communicate and I think that in order to do that you have to listen first and so I just that really resonated with me and I really appreciate you saying that that's a nice sort of companion those two things great I'm going to go back to editing for a moment if you got something hold on to it just for a sec alright so it's a process that prioritizes the relationship between the creatives can we say what did you I heard no but also I was just going to say if we're going to leave that but we can take that but can we say between and among because I don't think it's always a one to one relationship you know it's people feel better if it goes between and among sure it is a process that prioritizes the relationship between creatives can we replace the word prioritizes because I don't think that the emphasis is necessarily on the relationship I think that was what I said and I was saying prioritizes relationship as opposed to product the relationship between the creatives versus the product which I don't think we have in that sentence prioritizes the relationship although as you were saying I saw that head shaking so I think that it's one of those things that we always hold on to with devised is maybe it's about product or process negotiating that or resisting that so I sounds like the cut is okay live performance create created collectively can we backtrack for a second does anyone else have a problem with the web creatives we cut it let's not return to that word no it felt very Madison Asimov okay okay live performance created collectively this is like collaborative creation which maybe is not the same thing I guess I might have a problem with the word live I know we're talking about this specifically like in the context of what we were talking before during Debra's presentation about you can devise a script and the script isn't a live performance it's a finished piece of art that was devised so so if we remove that then all we're left with is that it's created collectively which that's up for debate too so alright let's go Andrew it's created collectively truly up for debate I want to debate that alright let's debate it that's fundamental to what we're talking about like I actually do agree with that notion because you can collaborate with yourself from the past you could understand yourself as someone's mother and someone else's sister and someone's friend outside the it's all not about solo plays in the big picture but does that mean you embody more than one person I think that's not true so I guess it depends on what you define as a collective and working with other people is not a collective process I didn't say collective that's where I'm like I feel like if we take if we take that notion of like accepting that all the collaborators be it one or ten have like you can radically reimagine what everybody's role is going to be because you're deciding that for what this needs to be but if we take the collaborative part out of it what are we talking about it's like a real question if we're taking out creation and we're taking out collaborative what is it I think that's different from what it was before different than the theater how do people feel about this it's like it is a collaborative creation we should keep that but all theaters are collaborative how does that distinguish itself from anything that's not some of our definition will be consistent with the definition of theater but I think that your point is totally well taken it empowers people to perceive the world it liberates the artists from the oppression of the literary theater I like that idea but I don't necessarily it doesn't have to now we're still going to audition now I feel like we get to that later in a more broad way I like the agency question mark what's that you had the agency question mark oh agency question mark that was for ages I'm going to ask you Sam to hold on to the idea of agency we don't lose scientific device to somehow about transforming the idea of agency and creation that's yours, keep thinking about it make sure it heads up in here devising requires listening not as an object of study it's a radical reimagining of how we communicate I feel like you have to kind of say those things together great, we'll keep that for now alright, the realness the presence we'll come back to that devising methods are a rejection of theater's relationship to capitalism and the explanation of creative layers no laying that on us there are some shows that are devised that make it to Broadway and that's very capitalistic so do you think that so here's what I throw back to you what I'm seeing is maybe would it be better if it was something is a rejection of theater's relationship to capitalism because what I'm offering is that we're talking about two different things the creation and the product the product can be a capitalist joint but is the action of I think it depends on how it's made like it's made cooperatively in a sense that's not based on you know because it's like okay if you have to figure out how the fuck you're gonna get money to pay for your think are we working as a cooperative as a group like we're all paying for shit together are we relying on a certain type of funding or a certain type of system i.e. the capitalist system to produce so that's my question because I mean I would love it all to be rejected no but it's a good question and what I want to call attention to with someone who's saying this and the reason why I put it there was about theater's relationship to capitalism not a rejection of capitalism but maybe there's another way of saying that yeah I feel like maybe it needs to be maybe it's a questioning of what a questioning of the theater's relationship I just think there are a lot of new understandings that are a relationship to capitalism about money and then on Broadway shows they'll bring in the advice and sessions where we make something in the show and that's part of the process it's not towards divides as a product but it so then in that respect it's a contribution to rather than a questioning of that's why I feel we keep part of the reason we keep getting confused is there's these three different moments of energy I feel like there's the energy the impulse that draws the artist together there's the time in the room and that methodology and how that works and then there's the presenting of the product and the audience which some people call product and some people are a little worried about and I guess even saying that it prioritizes the creative artists sounds like we don't care sounds like the people don't care about that last moment so that's why people who are like I really pride myself on it being good and like financially solving worthwhile for the people who watch it it feels like when you say it prioritizes that I just don't know how you we did I feel like it's another way of saying it's always collaborative is to say it prioritizes I'm trying to find these verbs like it springs from this impulse even though it doesn't always end up sure it just seems like the intent is maybe not to have you know huge amounts of profit you're not getting in a room to make a lot of money but you can it's not like the like he said the reason why I said something similar was not this is where I'm talking with my language it's not about the end result whether you productize or not productize it's that the way we make theater in like most institutions is so drastically shaped by American capitalism and by hyper-professionalization of roles and systematizing of creation that divides represents a resistance to not the idea of making money or making good work but of following those prescribed forwardist models of theater that's, but I didn't say that I said I don't have a real problem with that because I think it's spinning back out in the other direction now you have the way that like you see ads on subway for Fiverr where they can task grab it and they use the same language that we use in here back into so when you talk about the relationship of this kind of work which comes maybe from an oppositional place to capitalism you've got to be really careful because we can be very idealistic and this language ends up spinning back out into that thing and that's productized itself okay so what do we do about this I'm just going to flag about like 10 more minutes and then we're just going to freeze it where it is because I'm not going to make some final definition this was just an exercise of frustration but I do want to honor there's some thoughts going around so you've been waiting patiently for a while please I'm just wondering if everyone's getting confused about different different parts of this if there was anything about defining the process and defining the product what Dan was saying that there are different we think about it in different ways that you know this one sentence may relate to the process but not the product or if there's any use of splitting this up at all yeah no absolutely and this is a good question of does devised is it a term that refers to the entire life of our project or does it specifically refer to how artists work together or refers to the end product product sorry so I think we do not have time to do that that's a very good point that breaking it into figuring out when are we talking about observation it seems like we're like the scientists or people in a room with an elephant and everybody has a different part of it or like a person giving you an orange or expressing so I look at this what we're doing here is trying to the actual act of us being here thinking about this and talking is maybe devised that theater is a metaphor why what I love is what I love is I can we get through that I was semi-conscious about who was involved in that I go through a big letter out to all the people I love and also then wanted to figure out who are people who look at the elephant differently so I think that's a super student observation that the frustration emerges from our sort of confluence of perspectives so thank you for that if I try and zoom out which I like to do more than zoom in maybe that like radical reimagining and I feel like we're getting in arguments partly because we get to define the value systems that are important to us in the making so devising actually allows us to create the value systems and I'm wondering if there's like a way that we can put that in the definition devising allows us to create something really early on she said try out other social relations a world building it actually gives us the space to reject what we want to reject or go into the unknown of the system that we don't live in so I think that that could maybe allow for more space and more space for us to not get too stuck in the ways that some things are valued and others aren't because I think we're always going to disagree and that's what's so wonderful this process kind of reminds me what the what the term queer went through maybe like a decade, decade and a half ago in like a number of different cities circles and what have you in that people kept trying to turn the definition of this thing that was actually about being an intangible and debatable thing and a certain number of corporations and corporate interests and like other kinds of powerful interests have since co-opted it and there's still a space for like queer radical imagination and I wonder if that's something that we're experiencing now into the future of like yeah devised is going to be co-opted and taken up by powerful interests they're still yeah and they're still going to be a space for radical imagination and creation for the realness and presence within for the realness and presence within I would cut that devising as a questioning of theaters relationship to capitalism and exploitation of creative labor because like all the while like oh I think that like this is very American centered that you all are like projecting upon this like what this is I think that it's I just don't I don't think that I mean I have opinions about what I think that like theater should do and what theater is doing in the world and how it is operating and like well like I think like it's important to question the relationship to capitalism there's a lot of devises who fail to do that um yeah I think that uh what's really important one thing that I find really important is that um it allows it allows it gives us it gives us the potential to reject the gatekeepers the institutions because it does not wait for the work to be made that approximate for the work to be made that approximates who you are I'm going to try to do this up in a second I'm going to go ahead and like I said this is an impossible task so I'm going to go ahead and stop us here um I am so thankful because look one I love the conversation that emerges this is this is an experiment I've tried before with authorship uh and trying to unpack that question what does that mean historically and contemporary sense um and I have a lot of dogs in this fight because like I said I get up every morning and I come to the theater and I got to justify that and um so the full trajectory of today was so invigorating for me and I'm so thankful for everyone who came and participated in this and kept opening up that question because for me and I'll just share my own agenda because I had a mic so I had to say the last word um is that um I work in the the in the theater that offers the best example of what American producing can look like it is it is majestic in how it can execute theater in the way that the American theater has decided theaters make right and yet what I love is that I have been given space and others with me I'm not alone in this to actively not interrogate that but to um but to ask to what extent is this machine uh simply uh uh infected by the biases of the people who created this machine and how can the inequities and the gatekeeper problems how can how can so much of what we uh ascribe to a problem of curation and artistic direction be yes that but also reflective of a much deeper problem the way we budget the way we contract the way that we staff the way that we uh who we put in the lobbies the way that we advertise shows all of this is reflective of such a deep inherent bias that we will never change our field and so the reason why I get joyous about my job is I get to get up and work with artists or bring together a brain trust like this and I'm actively going to steal this and take this thinking so that I can keep thinking about how our theater um can participate in that transformation and and can um move away from the systems that constantly replicate themselves so thank you so much for coming I'm sorry to pull us away from this now we're gonna have some wine right and we're gonna keep talking here cheers to you all yeah um uh uh uh the dog uh uh uh which is basically basically like now I didn't do that I like I basically spend the first I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I