 We started here with a few wonderful presentations by Fio Minna-Kambo, by Kambo Minna-Kambo. We had free schedule as a randomly two of our presenters. So we're gonna start it off with Be The Street. Hi, I'm Ana Kuga, I teach at Ohio State, and I have been working on this project, Be The Street, for the last three years. Can you hear me in the back? Yes, cool. Thank you. Okay. And this is the very first time that I've presented about it, because I've been so busy trying to make it go that I haven't had time to really reflect on it in any kind of sustained way, other than doing production dramaturgy notes for the project, because I was, besides being the principal investigator of the codramatur, and so that's taken up most of my time. So I'm happy to share this work with you. It's very preliminary, and I'm very open to suggestions on which, because I talked about four ethical issues, which of these issues seems to you to be most fruitful for exploring in a published article? And if you have any readings that you would suggest to me, because I engage very lightly with theory at this point, I'm also really happy to take any suggestions. So thank you. Okay, so I'm gonna start with the quotation from a poem by Bertolt Brecht, a quotation from which our project took its name. And this is a poem called Speech to the Danish Working Class Actors on the Art of Observation. So your schooling must begin among living people. Let your first school be your place of work, your dwelling, your part of the town. Be the street, the underground, the shops. You should observe all the people there as strangers as if they were acquaintances, but acquaintances as if they were strangers to you. What is Be the street? Be the street takes place in the underserved West Columbus neighborhood known as the hilltop. I have a spacebar, spacebar to move the slides. Okay, cool. The median annual household income in this hilltop is a little less than $40,000, about $10,000 less than Columbus's median income. And this is Columbus, Ohio. The neighborhood occupies a sprawling geographical area with a population of almost 64,000 people spread over 12.5 square miles, which was the hilltop for a community-engaged device theater project because we were interested in exploring issues of migration, mobility, and placemaking with a diverse population. The hilltop has longstanding African American and Appalachian populations, as well as more recent African and Latino immigrant populations. Be the street was formed by half a dozen faculty members from four departments and a center at OSU. Theater, dance, Spanish and Portuguese comparative studies and the center for folklore studies. We wanted to pursue our research interests in performance, migration, storytelling, and placemaking with community participants. We wanted to work with participants in their community, not on campus. And we wanted to find ways to get their stories out in front of audiences composed of both their fellow hilltop community members and OSU community members. We wanted to train our graduate students in ethnography and device theater. And we wanted to contribute to OSU's growing reputation as a place where graduate students can study and practice cutting edge device theater techniques. We applied for and received a grant from the University's Humanities and Arts Discovery Themes and received $100,000 for a two-year pilot program starting in the fall of 2016. We were funded again with $20,000 of grants in 2018 and 2019. And as I said, I'm the principal investigator and droptorch for the project. First ethical issue. Why do this? In theater of good intentions, Danny Snyder-Young asks theater practitioners to consider, quote, whether theater is indeed the intervention needed to make the change for which they fight, close quote. This is the first ethical consideration that my colleagues at the Ohio State University and I pondered as we sat down over coffee to chat about applying for a grant to create a community-engaged device theater program. After all, it wasn't just the people of Hilltop were crying out for more theater in their community. No one had asked us to create a theater program with them. In conversations about the neighborhood, in fact, residents mostly voiced a desire for better economic opportunities, a more peaceful environment, and a better public school system. While I won't speak for the other faculty members, I will admit that just as much as I wanted to improve the lives of the people of the Hilltop, I was selfishly motivated by my desire to get off campus. And this is who my research interests and my passion and ability in placemaking while engaging in the practice of traumaturgy. I thought and maybe even said aloud something like, well, the experience of device in theater probably won't hurt people. And it might help build community and promote interaction among diverse groups of people. As Michael Balfour notes in The Politics of Intention, looking for a theater of little changes, funding institutions, sometimes pressure theater practitioners to promise more than theater can actually be expected to deliver, to promise transformative individual growth or social progress. The Discovery Theme Grant application at OSU indeed asked us to demonstrate how we would address real world problems. We vowed to earn national and international recognition for OSU as an incubator of civically engaged performance, bringing together eminent artists and community groups to nurture vibrant dialogue, shape policy, and improve quality of life. Four years later, I can say, that we have promoted some vibrant dialogue and maybe improved a few people's quality of life, at least for a while, but we haven't shaped any policy yet. In an attempt to promote vibrant dialogue, the project's first artistic director, Shalana Stokes, who teaches at Yale now, came up with a structure that was based in her own research on pageants, formed various groups with different partner organizations, and then bring the groups together for a public sharing of work in which each group's piece forms an act in a loosely connected performance hole. This structure has the advantages of promoting interaction both within each ensemble and potentially across different ensembles if the project brings the different ensembles together early in the workshop phase, before moving into rehearsals and public performance. In practice, the logistics of bringing the ensembles together early in the process can be difficult, schedule conflicts, transportation, child care, and so forth, yet we did make an effort and are committed to making more of an effort in the future. Second ethical issue, and you'll see a pattern here where I tend to bring up these problems and come to very tentative, if any kind of resolution or just end without any resolution at all, recruiting participants. How do you attract them? What do you tell them? And when do you tell them? Do you pay them? How much do you pay them? Do you pay someone who's undocumented with no social security number? And if so, how? As a Mexican-American with a joint appointment in the departments of Spanish and Portuguese who teaches migration and who researches migration and performance, I withdraw to potential participants from Hilltop's Latin American population, and I long to hear their stories of migration and survival. Was this appropriate intellectual curiosity, a desire to nurture self-expression or a colonial impulse to appropriate the painful experiences of others? Whatever the motive or mix of motives, on many Saturdays, I found myself in a flea market in Hilltop trying to convince parents and grandparents to let their teenage children stop working their booze for an hour and allow them to participate in a theater workshop, a workshop that we were gonna hold right there in the flea market in between the cosmetics area and the old coin counter. Some parents were understandably reluctant to make do without their children's labor. Others were suspicious. Where were we taking their kid? Who would lead the workshop? While we managed to pull together a few workshops in the flea market, it required far too much energy and persuasion for what sometimes turned out to be just three, two, one, or no participants. In the end, my colleague Paloma Martinez Cruz had a far more practical idea. We went to our Lady of Guadalupe Center where OSU already had volunteers working in a food bank under the supervision of another OSU faculty member and approached the center's director about holding workshops there. Soon we had a stable group of eight or so participants ranging in age from an infant to a 66-year-old. Lesson learned, oh, I do have a lesson here. Take advantage of the resources you already have and don't bang your head against the wall trying to convince people to accept something that they may not want or need. As other groups formed at the YMCA, at the Hilltop branch of the Columbus Public Library, West High School, a clean-term cleaning service, and I'm gonna show you some images. What we did was we just started offering workshops in the community with no commitment necessary. And then after a while, the workshops with some organizations morphed into ensembles. And with other organizations, they just remained one-off or in some cases, like with the middle school, we did about 30, 40, 50 workshops there and it never became an ensemble because we couldn't get the concept forms signed by the kids. As other groups formed, we were faced with the question of whether to tell people from the start that we were considering a public performance at the end of the semester. On the one hand, full disclosure seemed fair and honest. On the other hand, we didn't want to frighten away potential participants. And on the third hand, we wanted to be sure that if the workshop process seemed more valuable to the group than the performance product, that we couldn't end up out of the performance without that seeming like a negative judgment on the participants' work. In the end, we decided that we would have a public sharing only if the participants wanted to go ahead with it and we told them so from the start. Yet, we also offered a carry, a $300 payment for participants who reversed and performed. Was this bribery or a token compensation, a way of investing in the hilltop community or a way of ensuring that our funders could consume a product at the end, right? And then say, oh, this is fabulous work. Yes, we'll give you more money for next year. Why $300 for seeing the process through to performance but not just for attending a certain number of workshops? The first year of the public performance, 2018, we didn't tell participants about the payment at the start of the process for fear that some people might participate only because of the money. The second year of the performance, 2019, we told participants about the payment from the start. And it didn't seem to make any difference. People came and went from the groups at about the same rate as the year before. So it seemed that our fear that some participants might stick with the project solely for the money was unfounded. And in thinking about it a bit more deeply, so what? So what if some people did participate only for the money? Who are we to police participants' motivations, right? Okay, third ethical issue. Ethical issue, devising topics. Do you accentuate the positive and the beautiful as James Thompson urges in performance effects? Or do you tackle the problematic head-on as a long series of theorists and practitioners urged from Brett and Boald and Michael Road? On the one hand, the Hilltop faces many social challenges. Drug addiction, human trafficking, school violence, street crime, and the aforementioned economic and educational opportunities. Lack of economic and educational opportunities. Powerful theater can be created from addressing these issues. Yet on the other hand, that is not the entirety of the Hilltop as one might be led to believe from local media reports. There's also much to celebrate in the neighborhood. Gardens, murals, families, friendships, solidarity, and entrepreneurial efforts. In the end, different ensembles took different approaches, depending on the goals of the graduate student and faculty facilitators, as well as on the attitudes of the artistic director. Because we changed artistic director for one year to the next. So the second artistic director, I think is much more focused on the celebratory than necessarily addressing problematic issues. When facilitators use a participant's story for a device of performance, a story involving a social problem faced by the participant, to what extent are the facilitators morally obligated to intervene to solve, or at least ameliorate the problem? It's easy to tell ourselves that we're not social workers or psychologists or high school administrators. Yet when a high school girl who was regularly fell in love from school and bullied told her story during one of our workshops, one graduate student facilitator felt a responsibility to research possible solutions, not just an individual solution for that girl, but a systemic solution that might work for at least abortion of the neighborhood. The facilitator found that in some neighborhoods, grandparents had been purposefully recruited as crossing guards in order to watch out for an attempt to prevent bullying. That seemed like a creative solution. The facilitator approached a faculty member, not me about the issue, and the possible solution. They talked about it, yet concluded that it was unlikely that the administrators at the participant's high school would be willing to work on implementing such a plan. The subject was dropped, the semester ended, and the girl may or may not still be being tormented by bullies. She no longer participates in the stream. Yet her testimony about violence in her community, along with her theater teacher's testimony about school violence and school lockdowns, not only constituted one of the most powerful moments of 2018's final performance, it became part of the final video of the performance, which is now on our website and helps publicize our program. So not only did Streep not help ameliorate the problem of bullying or school violence more generally, the project, in a sense, continues to profit from the victimization of one of our participants. And now, I don't know if I'm furthering the victimization or helping by ethically addressing, trying to address this ethical issue, but I'm going to show you the clip from the video. So have a good day. Hello. It's all good. This is Chris Ray, the theater teacher. It's been a long time, because the lockdown brothers are trying to get sound, confident about trying to teach at my classroom. And this is a lockdown, and we're in the hallways at lunchtime. It's not the time we go to your lockdown, apparently they've been a burden but at the floor, the next day they found out right while a SWAT team came to direct from our school. And you see our lockdown, there's a security guard running out of hallway, screaming at it. These are all in the hallway, they're shoving into the classroom. So they have to take the whole front of the building, you look to the backside of the building, it was a gunshot when it often came through the building. Even our office personnel had to go into the safe closet space. It was terrifying, especially in that moment when there was a lockdown, because it's just chaos throughout the whole building. You can all feel it, it's scary. Gun violence, it's a never-ending thing. And being in school alone, I should have to feel insecure. I should feel welcomed in a place where I should be able to grow as a person, not feel confined and trapped. The biggest thing I've learned from in the industry is that it's okay to trust people. And it becomes really hard to open up to others when you're still in a bad area. And it gives such a bad breath to have so many good things that keeps going through this area, like peer programs and programs like this that just come into our neighborhood. It's really helpful to a lot of the kids around here. Thank you. Thank you. But going through this process, I've heard other people's stories and seen that I'm not alone. It's actually more common than it is now. Yeah. Ways. So what she said was that bullying is actually more common than it is now. Okay. Ways of time. Ways of time. Ways of time. I'll let that go and go back to us. We're in the technology. That's the teen ensemble. We'll talk about the library. This was a, we brought in the Albany Park Theater Project, which a few of you may know, to do training at our graduate students in faculty for working with untrained actors. And this is OSU's STEAM Factory, which was a space that the university rents on the outskirts of Hilltop. It's been actually the next neighborhood over. And the first year we had our final performance in a cafe, but the cafe turned into a bookstore cafe and all the space got eaten up by bookshelves. So the next year, we couldn't find a space actually in the community, so we did it in a space that's like right next to the community. Okay. Fourth, ethical issue, communication with participants. How am I doing on time? What? Okay. Do you set policies and procedures for communication between community participants and faculty facilitators, or do you allow communication to proceed on an informal basis? How do you react if participants reach out to you for additional contact in a context outside of the project? During the first two years of Be the Street, the artistic director and I had no set policy for communication with participants. One teenage participant began to text and email us about her personal life, mostly texts about her family conflicts, her pets, and her emotional struggles. Because the communication didn't bother me, I never asked for the stop and sometimes applied different texts with brief, encouraging texts or what I hoped were encouraging texts of my own. The third year, the artistic director shifted to a new person when the participants then began to email about personal matters. The new artistic director interpreted the emails as an inappropriate breach of boundaries. This led to a discussion of whether faculty involved in the project could each have a different practice of communication with participants or whether the project means a communication policy. On the one hand, and you say, this is another pattern of this talk, I have one hand, second hand, sometimes a third hand. And on the one hand, I disliked the idea of institutionalizing communication and thought that the matter could be easily handled on an individual basis. If you don't want to receive texts or emails from someone, ask them to stop or even block them if necessary. On the other hand, I began to consider whether accepting the texts was a positive outlet and a source of support for the team or whether it was creating a kind of dependency that might somehow prove detrimental to her in the long run. And inevitably, since I worked for an academic institution, I began to engage in cover your ass thinking. And what if I'm violating a university rule or policy by communicating by text about personal matters within OSU program participants? I checked with our university's youth protection program consultant and was told the texting and email is not covered by university policy, but that she personally would recommend a project policy that a parent always be copied when emailing or texting with a minor in one of our programs. Moreover, she forwarded a sample of a project communication policy in which any one-on-one text or email communications with minors is prohibited. When I forwarded the message from the youth protection program consultant to the team to get her thoughts without a CC to her parent, but asking her for her parent's email address so that I can CC the parent in the future, she replied, I've been meaning not to be as annoying via phone anyways. I've already managed it with most people. So I'll just archive your number and not worry about it on my end. Haven't heard from her since. In some ways I'm relieved. This is safer for me. More importantly, I understand the need to protect minors from certain kinds of conversations. Still, I also feel that it's too bad that we have reached a point at least in the United States where minors have been so abused by teachers, coaches, doctors, priests and pop stars among others that we can no longer trust adults to communicate one-on-one with minors who are not their own children. As a devised theater program that includes minors, are we only responsible for the minor as program participants? Regardless of what they may be experiencing in life as a human being outside of the program that benefits our institution, does a policy that all interactions revolve around the program with the CC to the parent really serve the best interests of the minor participants or does it simply attempt to protect the institution and its employees? I leave you with questions rather than answers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So we'll get ready and Jess, you can move over and send out a chat invitation. Okay. We have them all. So we're going to go from one paper to the next and then we're going to open it up for conversations and you'll have both of these papers in your mind working with each other. Questions that were posed by Anna might have even more difficult questions and solutions that Jess offers up. But while we're ready, I would just like to take a moment and read some of the simple questions that you brought up. Yeah. So that we can have them percolating what we go to Jess's presentation. So as I heard that we kind of refer words, we have, how do we do this? How do we start up a project that engages with the community? The second ethical question, how do we find and communicate with our participants? Or rather how do we find and interact with our participants? The third ethical issue was about communication. The third one was about devising topics. So maybe the third one, maybe that would be a better order. Devising topics, thank you. Devising topics, how do you, and who has the power, which is something that I didn't go into a lot there, but to what extent do participants have the power to determine what it's going to be about and to what extent do facilitators have that power? And then the responsibilities around communication. It actually sounds like too, there's maybe a fifth set of ethical questions around working with minors specifically and your responsibility with them and how far does that go beyond communication too. Right. Yeah, I was, thank you. That was really interesting and it's, I'm really, hi, I'm Jess and I'm really happy to be here chatting about this work that I've been up to because I think you and I are wrestling with a lot of the same questions. So I'm Jess Kaufman. I'm one of the lead artists and the lead producer on a project called Beyond the Wall. Can everyone hear me okay? Okay, great. She or hers, I'm based in New York and the work I'm gonna talk to you about today happens at the US Mexico border. So I'm gonna present the work with the group and give you a brief history of what we've been up to for the last couple of years. But I'm gonna do it through the lens of some key dramaturgical questions that have come up. My practice is I'm a dramaturg and a creative producer and frequently like the instigating or generating artists and the work that I do. And so I've been framing this project with my collaborators through these kind of key dramaturgical questions. And I'm hoping that at the end we'll have some time to chat and that this room full of dramaturgical minds can help me engage in brainstorm some of the questions we're wrestling with right now which there's a lot of overlap. So I'm really happy that these two things are in conversation. Yeah, and I specialize in Latin American theater performance, so. Excellent. That's what I'm gonna say to you. Well, I'm gonna dive in and start with the history of the project, how it came to be and let's see where we go from there. So back in 2017, Trump was being inaugurated that January and I was not particularly wanting to think about it. So I decided to cheer myself up by taking a young friend to the playground in Brooklyn. And as you can see, as some of you may know, the trees in Brooklyn have fences around them and they protect the trees. And so she and I went to the playground and we ran into a friend of hers from kindergarten and the kids started playing with the fence around the tree and the dad and I were talking politics and at some point I looked over, saw these two kids playing with this fence and thought, oh, what if we make giant puppets of children or of people at a scale that we can turn the border wall into an object of play or turn it into a toy and give people a chance to reconsider their relationship with that site. So, yes, this is my child's fence and that's one of our puppets floor. So lucky for me, I know a Mexican puppeteer from grad school and I gave her a call and said, you know, is this insane? And she went, yes, it's insane, but we should try it anyway. That's not it. So this first question that Anna really brought up, she said, you know, we should get the community involved and we decided to look for local participants at whatever site we chose to help build and operate the puppets with us because we're looking at this question of, you know, can we and how can we, as outsiders to a community, honest from Mexico City and from the East Coast, neither of us is from the border or had spent much time there and there's a big problem in those areas where lots of artists want to make work and they go down there and they use the city as a backdrop and they don't make an investment in the community and we wanted to make sure that we weren't doing that. But so how can we as outsiders make something of value to this community that has lasting impact beyond just one performance of puppetry? So that's kind of how we were framing things in the first year. So our first real practical question was how do we find a location, where should we do this? And so we wrote up a little brief and reached out to our networks. Anna has pretty extensive puppetry network and I, being an East Coast person of my middle upper middle class, have a lot of political people in my family and we were able to, through an anti-mind who's an activist here in Chicago, reach some folks from the DNC who put us in touch with folks in Arizona and suddenly we were chatting with a political organizer from the Phoenix area and, you know, we got on the phone and the first thing she said was, no ballast, you have to do this in this town, no ballast, it's the perfect place to do what you're talking about. And, you know, we were thinking at this time about reframing the wall as an object of play and trying to explore, you know, the liminality of the border itself, countering this idea that, you know, I think we're taught to think that a border is a hard line and there are Mexicans on one side and Americans on the other and they're different and they butt up against each other. And really, if you think about it, that's obviously not true. It's a liminal space, borderlands, culture is its own unique blend. It's not how it's conceived or presented in a bigger picture. So this wonderful woman who helped us, her name is Zulema. She told us all about Nogales. She went and did a little tour of it and filmed it for us so that we could see. And through her and some of those other national level connections, we were able to be in touch with Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security who has a cultural affairs division. So we were able to talk to them about some of the logistics. And this just as a side note brought up a big theme in this work for me, myself, as one of the instigating artists, which is what are the ways that I can leverage the privilege I have in service of an idea without being like, I'm gonna come and bring you my resources, you know? So how can we combat that condescension while still making use of the resources and connections that I lucked into having? So that's where Nogales is. It's in Arizona. It's about an hour drive south of Tucson. And it's one of the only cities, most cities along the border have a sister city across. So there are lots of sister cities all along the West Mexico border. Nogales is somewhat unique in that the border actually runs through the middle of the town. So half of the city is in Arizona and half is in the Mexican state of Sonora. And both towns are called Nogales. They have several local governments, but both towns have this motto, almost Nogales, Nogales together. And there's a real attitude from the community that it's one community. And of course, it's not that simple. It's a very complicated place. But Zuli thought that this would be the right place for us because there's a lot of positivity and feelings of togetherness in the area. That's a picture of the town. Slightly exploitative picture, but you can see on one side is the Mexican side of the town. On the other, on the left is the American side of the town. And that in the middle, you can see is the US-Mexico border wall, which is already existing. Right now, what you're seeing is this kind of dark brown, it's called baller hall. So it looks kind of like prison bars. You can see through it. You could reach an arm through it if you were allowed to, but you couldn't get a body through it. So that's been there for a long time, already existing. So when people are talking about build a wall, they're actually talking about replace a wall that's already there with a bigger, scarier wall. So once we had our location, we decided to build a prototype. A friend of ours was kind enough to give us residency space on Governors Island in New York. We got Anna an artist visa, a P3 exchange visa. The process of that was a whole nother foray into borders in our lives and how they manifested different spaces. It took us about four months and probably a third of our initial budget that first year just to get that visa for her. So she came to New York and we built, oh, I should do this that way. We built a prototype puppet. We invited a puppet here and kinetic sculpture artist from Connecticut to come and join us and cover these. She taught us some of her techniques. Anna brought stuff that you know him? Yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah, she's awesome. So she came and stayed with us for two days on Governors Island and taught us some of her building techniques. Anna had some stuff that she learned in Prague and abroad and in France because she's travels. And we ended up with a prototype puppet named which we call Floor. We did a little work in progress showing that's a picture of Floor's head. It's enormous. She's about 15 feet tall, fully assembled. The head alone is about 40 inches tall. So one of the things that's really nifty about puppets is that you don't know who they are and what they're good at until you bring them to life. And the day we did the work in progress showing with Floor, the day that photo was taken, we discovered that this puppet design, these puppets were really great at high-fiving little kids and really good at dancing. And people's reactions were overwhelmingly positive and delighted, only one or two small children cry. So it was a really, it was an artistic turning point for me as a dramaturg and for Anna and I's collaborators to observe and say, oh, well this is what she's good at. So this project is probably about celebration. And how can we then frame this as a celebration of the positive? And as we were doing research and getting to know Nogales, most of the news that comes out around the border, most of the information that we have access to outside the area is negative. Some of it's factual, some of it's skewed, but there's very little positive press coming out about all the great things that happened at the border. And it was really interesting to think about what it might be like to live in a town where everybody knows you as, oh, that super dangerous place where border patrol deports people and people are passing drugs through the wall. And so we're really looking for a way to use the puppets in their natural celebratory state to draw some positive media attention and some positive local attention to the great aspects of that area and what its unique blended culture has to offer and teach the rest of us. So meanwhile, we were connected to two local organizers, arts and economic organizers in Nogales, one on either side of the town. We met a man named Raul Leva on the Mexican side of Nogales. He's a journalist, he's worked there for about 20 years and he's also an arts presenter and promoter. And we were connected to Stephanie Vermudez who is an entrepreneur and a mentor and a young business leader in the town of Nogales, Arizona. And each of them we met separately and each of them separately said, oh, I used to have my organization, my group used to have this festival. I was thinking about bringing my festival back but I wasn't gonna do it this year. So we heard that from both of them and thought, oh, well, what if we just combined forces? Would you be interested in that? And they both said yes. And all of a sudden we went from a puppetry performance to a bi-national day-long festival which was super cool. And they were both really game and it was a very fruitful collaboration. So again, that's one of the principles that we're trying to really focus on in this work throughout and I hope that we'll see this as a theme and something we're trying to learn how to do better is how do we, instead of imposing an agenda, we wanna do a puppetry performance, going in and saying, okay, well, what do you want? What is interesting to the community? What's valuable to the community? And how can I then leverage my resources to help facilitate that? And this was one of the first moments where we discovered that thinking. So we made our way down to Nogales for the festival. It was November of 2017. The project had been, I initiated it with Anna in February of 2017 and we made the festival in November which was a crazy short time frame. We drove across the country in less than four days in a minivan with puppets and a good friend of my name, Talia Shaliff. She's the one who had given us residency space. She decided she wanted to come along the day before and I was like, sure, bring it back, hop in the car. Do you drive? So we made this crazy journey and the whole way, this whole concept that we're gonna go down there, we're gonna have local participants build these puppets with us to amplify their voices, amplify their experiences and create something big and beautiful and celebratory that pushes back against the narrative on this town. But we didn't have any confirmed participants. So we're driving across the country making Facebook videos, making phone calls, reaching out to people we had partnered with, organizations we wanted to partner with but hadn't gotten a hold of, trying to get some people and we got all the way to Nogales and didn't have anyone confirmed. So we had about four days to build the puppets. We were planning to make five, made five and we had two, one pre-built and one partially built. So it was a lot of work. And we just kind of got started. We had been lucky enough to get some residency space on the roof of a art gallery museum in the area called the Museo de Arte Sonora. It's about a block south of the border crossing right in the middle of downtown on the Mexico side. Super visible and we were up on the roof building 15-foot tall puppets and people kept like looking and saying like what are they doing, who is that? And our whole first day we had nobody. And towards the end of that first day, a couple people who knew Raúl came and just kind of, they were like just checking us out to see what we were doing. It was these two women, Jack Subele Gonzalez and Elena Vega, both of whom are artists. They're both moms, they're both feminists and they're super bad people and they both came to check it out and they said, oh cool, we're gonna call some of our friends and see if we can get you some participants. The next day Elena came back with her kids, Jack came back with her camera and they brought with them something like 40 participants. A giant group of student teachers from the local university and we also, oh, did the pictures come up? No, that's it. They were there. Oh they were there, okay great. Oh great, so those are Elena's daughters. As I told you years ago, they're both quite a bit taller now. And then we have this group of students from high school. So you see, starting to go right there is Oscar Lancaster, he's a high school arts and sports teacher in the town born and raised in Nogales and he brought some of his students with him and this was another big turning point from a dramaturgical perspective in terms of what we were doing. That these students came and at first they were kind of like, oh, you know, our teacher's making us be here. We're teenage boys. They were like flirting with us and it was fine, we were having a blast. And they come from, as Oscar describes it, one of the more challenged schools in the city where people, they hear a narrative all the time of like, life here is terrible. There's nothing in the future for you. And I was like, I don't speak any Spanish. Necesito un amigo. Do you know, Power Drill, are you cool with here? Make holes here in here, I trust you go. And over the course of the couple of days they actually got super engaged and were really excited just by virtue of being trusted. They re-engineered part of our design and made it way better. We still use their improvements today. They've come back to help us leave puppetry workshops before and we're still in touch with these guys and they still help us out all the time. So that was another big turning point for us when we were like, okay, teenagers are really good participants for this project. This is a particular meaning to these guys and how can we, in our next steps, get them involved more deeply? I'm going too slow, I'm gonna speed up a little. We, at the same time had, so we got to the day of the festival, we had five puppets built, there we go. So that's Floor, that's the prototype that Anna and I built in New York being puppeteered by some folks. I think I put timers on these so more photos will come, I'll just let them roll. We set up two different spots for the puppets to start, one on either side and they took a route along the wall, met at one point at the wall next to one of the pedestrian gates, had a little party, waved to each other through the wall and then took a walk along the wall together to a second site, which will come up in a minute or two when that photo gets there. So this is them walking along, you can see that kind of tan peachy wall is what it looks like when it's right next to a pedestrian crossing or the main, car crossing in the area. The town incidentally is also where, if you've heard of the train La Bestia, it's a freight train that goes through most of Mexico and lots of people who are migrating hop on this very dangerous train ride and ride this train up through Mexico to get to the border crossing and that's in Mimales. We had a bunch of, we had a meeting at one point where there was a community center, we went to chat with them and they were like, oh, we're since still walking kids, we wanna be in your parade. And I was like, God, we don't have a parade. And she was like, I know, so I'll tell them no. And I was like, no, no, no, say yes, we'll make a parade, it'll be fine. So we ended up having a whole parade and we paraded the puppets and the kids on the stilts all the way across along the wall and we met at this second site where, as you can see the wall, you can see through it the whole thing and they got together and they played and they waved. And in one of the most significant actions, again it was very improvised, the whole performance, the most significant action they took was they reached through the wall and touched hands. And that's something that people in this town used to be able to do. People would get together with their relatives who couldn't cross and have lunch at the wall and talk to each other and touch hands through the wall and kiss. And now at this exact site, there is a pedestrian fence so you cannot get closer to the wall than five feet. They've also installed mesh along about eight feet high, I think, so you can't pass things through or reach through anymore. And now, as you may have seen in some very widely publicized photos, it's actually covered in park fire, giant coils of park fire, so you really can't get close to it. And it was really meaningful to see how the puppets were able to amplify this experience that the people in the town had been engaging in. Now I will say, we started doing some reflecting on it and there were definitely some challenges in that first year, getting, talking to Stephanie and Raul about what it was like to work together. We learned a lot in terms of where our own experience was and where we work better. We started a really clear, critical, reflective practice so that we could move forward really thoughtfully. And we moved into this new question, which is how can we, or can we, invite a more responsive engagement with the local participants and collaborators to deepen the rigor of the project and expand its impact? So this was what we did going into year two. We did a couple things in response to that question. The first, we started a binational penthouse program. We worked with Oscar and the students and we contacted a local high school teacher from the Arizona side. And we've piloted it twice. We haven't quite figured it out yet, but we're close to having a really workable penthouse program. They started with a picnic at the wall. We brought all the kids together. We did some games and we really focused on the dramaturgical question of identity because puppets are bodies and bodies have identity. And so we're talking with the students about how is identity formed? What's your identity? What's unique about having a borderlander identity? And then transmitting that to, what's the identity of the community? How is this community's identity formed? Is it what you think of yourselves? Is it what outsiders think of you? And how can that then be expressed with men through the puppets? And then the hope was that they would be our puppet builders. That's another photo. So this is the same photo but from different sides. So this is from the Arizona side and that's taken from the Mexican side. We also diversified and expanded our leadership team because the first year was like me and Anna with Stephanie and with Raul. Last, this past year, there were, as you can see, 10 of us plus an intern. We included me and Anna. Talia came on full time. Jack Suveli and Elena who had come in and brought us all those participants the first year. They've joined us full collaborators as has Oscar and Raul State. And then we also found Analia Briones and Jimena Pacheco who are both Mexican, one in Mexico City and one's based in Montreal. And they both do like PR and marketing and all kinds of great stuff and pieces. And then we met Michael Fenlison who works in Tucson and runs a local art center nearby and he came on board as well. So we really focused on helping me expand this leadership team as much as possible with really strong local connections, people that are awesome and really invested in this work and who are local and have a local perspective so that it's not just me and Anna trying to figure it out. Let's see. We also, we did one more third action in response. We decided to take 18 months before doing the next festival because we wanted a little bit more time to move forward monthly. So we did our second festival about six weeks ago. We did it at the very first weekend of May. We had, again, it was a bi-national festival but instead of being one person running a festival, another person running a festival and the puppets kind of tying them together, we really worked as a team to create one big festival that was bi-national. It was all day. We invited local artists to come and show and sell their work for free. We provided them with tables, chairs, and boots, some of which were donated by local businesses. We had stages on both sides where we had local musicians performing. We played some films and it was really awesome. And then of course we had our puppets, our giant puppets. Let me see. Oh, the pictures aren't coming up. Okay, there's one. That's Linda, one of the puppets we built this year. That's Nefis. She's a local rapper. She's performed on both stage. We had as many musicians as possible perform on both stages. I'm gonna go like two minutes over. Is that okay? Thanks. And this is just for comparison. These are two of the puppets from this year. There's Linda on the right. And that's what the wall looks like now. That's the exact same site as in that picture I showed you from two years ago. So it's actually a good barbed wire. They've gotten a lot of press because the town feeling feels that it's unsafe and unnecessary and they're really pushing back against some of the federal government's decisions to try and bring a little bit more. But again, this is part of what this project is about. That idea that this town is the town of barbed wire. That's photos of the barbed wire being installed by guys in military suits. It's like the most widely shared photo of Novalis in the past year. Can I ask a super quick question? Is the barbed wire on both sides or just on the other side? Nope, just the American side because we don't have, I don't believe the American side is that. I don't think we have the right. So on the Mexican side of the wall, it's painted and covered in art and murals. And on the American side, it's covered in barbed wire. And yeah, we also did quite a lot of critical reflecting this year in the past five weeks. And that's probably why I'm here today. I'm still, as a dramaturg and creative producer and one of the leaders of the project, I'm in a period of deep reflection trying to figure out, okay, what can we do better? What are we not doing well? And how can I help make that happen? And how can I help facilitate that? I mean, the biggest problem right now is that we've kind of fallen, haphazardly, into this hierarchical structure. So Ana Diaz, my collaborator, Ana Diaz-Barriga, she got into a PhD program, which is awesome news for us as a project, but it also means that she's had to take a big step back from being actively involved in running it on the ground because she's doing research instead. And so I kind of fell into running it basically myself. And we had all these collaborators, I had all these ideas about collaborative leadership, but we didn't embody them this year. And we got down there and everyone kind of differs to me and partly because we function as a nonprofit through my fiscal sponsorship, which means I, the individual, have all of the funders' irresponsibility and all of the financial risk, which then automatically creates a hierarchy. And that's a problem, especially given the message of the project. It was reiterated at some points during the day. There were some challenges on the Mexican side of the festival that weren't appropriately addressed because I didn't know they were there and it all fell, you know what I mean? There was too much single point of failure. And, you know, I'm only one person. There are some things that I'm not good at, like time management. So that's the biggest issue I think that we have right now is how we can take a pause and look at what we've been doing. We've been looking at this as a project-based thing. And now I think it's time for us to move to be organizationally based. And how can this group of people come together and create an organizational structure that's dramaturgically sound and that's reflective of the dramaturgy of our project. So our kind of key questions right now, what I'm really fixated on and what I think and hope my collaborators are excited to fix it on with me is what are the strategies that we can use to make our leadership really collaborative? So we can execute this work more thoughtfully and respond more deeply to the community's needs and our own artistic potential. And beneath that also, you know, what are the cultural barriers that we're not seeing and how can we uncover and navigate them more deeply? In the past five weeks, I've had a one-on-one meeting with every single person on the team just to be like, lay it all out there. What was great? What was terrible? What worked what didn't? And I learned a couple of things too. There were moments where like I made cultural mistakes and I didn't know. And vice versa. The language barrier is still an issue among us. It's something we found some ways of navigating but they're not great. I've started taking Spanish classes but I'm a long way away from being able to have a really nuanced conversation about organizational leadership strategies. And so then a lot of the work of translation falls onto two of our most comfortably bilingual people. Anna, my collaborator, is a professional translator. So the whole first year, she had this massive burden of interpreting for me that I didn't even realize. And I think looking at what does it mean when two of the leadership team are translating the rest of the leadership team and are you able to listen to what I'm actually saying if you're also trying to think about how to translate it in two minutes? Some technological tools have been helpful. I know like Elena and I, both the language, she and I, we can't really have a deep one-on-one conversation because of our language barrier. Facebook Messenger now auto translates between Spanish and English. So she and I had our first one-on-one conversation about three weeks ago. But we're looking for more strategies and I'd love to hear if anybody has some thoughts to more strategies and how we can work with our language barrier, treat it less like a barrier to overcome it, treat it as an asset, work more biologically. And, you know, looking back and saying, you know, well we've had this person, this body, this privilege at the helm for two and a half years. And who have we excluded in that process and how can we turn and then invite them in? And really listen. So we started addressing these questions with those one-on-one meetings just to give everybody a safe space to really voice their concerns and see kind of gather all of our learning. We've talked about starting the planning for next year in September with a retreat where all of us get together for two days with like no phones and really sit down and say, cool, we're starting from the ground up what do we actually want to be doing? And how can we structure this in a creative organization? And find a way towards greater cultural understanding. So now, and this is what I'd love to put to you guys in conversation, what are some of these collaborative leadership models or strategies that you've found success with that I can maybe research and learn from? We've done some more artistic digging. I just came from two weeks in Europe where Anna and I did a week at the Prague Quadrennial and we built three puppets with a group of international participants, designers and theater folk and posed these questions to them. And then we did another festival in London with the same idea. We was an international group of participants and we talked about identity. So we're kind of finding ways in to talk about the artistic questions here. But I'd really love to get your thoughts and your thoughts on this and some of these ethical questions where we're still left. Thank you for letting me go over. Yeah. I'll leave that up. Great, for sure. Great. So I'd love to move and just offer up Anna if there are any things that you just offered with this presentation that might have given an answer to a question or a dimension worth hand to one of those ethical questions you offered out in your presentation. Well, it brought to mind a totally new thing that I hadn't, that I didn't talk about. But when we have graduate student facilitators at the Guadalupe Center who don't speak Spanish, that became an issue for graduate students because there were two or three facilitators and one of them spoke fluent Spanish, one spoke some Spanish and the third one spoke no Spanish. And the one who didn't speak Spanish had the most skills at movement and choreography. She was a dancer and choreographer and we really needed her skills, but she was kind of afraid to work with her. And so somebody else had to interpret for her. And at first she didn't want the, like the interpreting seemed awkward. So then I, as dramaturge, I suddenly, this has never happened before I think, but I started using my language skills as part of my dramaturge of the project. So I, like part of my dramaturge job was to interpret for this person. So I would say maybe a solution is just to know that you have to have an interpreter and plan for them. And maybe make it, if you have the funds, someone who's not necessarily involved in the project so that that's their only job. Right, I don't have the funds, always the funds. But yeah, I think that's one of the things that we need to prioritize in our budget moving forward is having a professional interpreter who's not like a member of the leadership team be present to help us and make that communication deeper. I was curious about the funds, the financing, how that works for your project. So I'm fiscally sponsored as producer through Fractured Atlas. They're awesome club for Fractured Atlas. So we have been entirely funded by private donors and a couple small brands from local organizations, local non-profit organizations, the Southwest Book Life Alliance supported us. Arizona Quality supported us. Nogales Community Development supported us. And everything else has been private donations. Home Depot gave us a bunch of materials this past year. I don't know if I'm supposed to say that publicly or not. The local Home Depot was very kind and made donated materials to us to say that. Yeah, they were wonderful, they were absolutely wonderful. And how much does it cost to do this? So our first year, well, both of the festivals ran at a budget of about $22,500, including in-kind support, really to do it super well. We need like 50, just for the festival. And everybody who's worked on this right now is volunteer. None of us are paid, and that's a thing we'd obviously like to work towards because it's a big time commitment that we're asking people to make. And this is another set of ethical questions too. We're inviting people into a project with a big time commitment that they're passionate about and finding ways to pay ourselves. So we did both years, we ran at about $22,500, including significant in-kind support, almost half of that was in-kind support both years. No, that's not true. Probably a third of those in-kind support the first year, about half the same. So it's a lot of the approaching folks who we think are interested and it's become a job and surgical exercise as well. If our goal is to get positive media attention and turn eyes towards this practice of like radical listening and talking to people who actually live there, well, who are the donors that are out there who are interested in this issue that want more access and want to know more about this area. And then donation becomes also a tool for us to build audience and help further that mission. I'm curious to know if there's any like... I just, I really enjoy your talk because I'm sitting here using the exact same ethical questions that we're wrestling with too. And I wonder if any of them really resonated any of the things that you guys are, that you're looking about and your research really resonated with this project or if there were other ethical questions that you see that maybe weird that I didn't talk about or that I need to be engaging. Yeah, the one ethical question that comes to mind because in my other job as a researcher and writer theorist of performance, I wrote a book called... What's it called? Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration, Heroes, Barters, and Saints. And under contract with Calgary. And... Look at that. Yeah, and I bring stuff not to plug my book up because as I researched that book, I traveled to a lot of the shelters for migrants in Southern Mexico. And one of the issues that came up for me was a lot of how is it that I'm able to move back and forth very easily and people who I'm interviewing for this book are stuck in a super dangerous situation. And what are the ethics of that? So I wondered when you were talking about doing the activities, seeing the beautiful photos of people at the site of the wall, it seems like a great project. I love the project. Thanks. Yeah. I look to go instead. You got it. I'd love to have you. But so I was wondering whether among those people who attend, who can move back and forth across the wall? Yeah, I can. It's a really big question and it's something that we can highlight. The first year, our goal was to have the festival happening simultaneously on both sides so people can move freely back and forth and have it really be one united festival that did not happen the first year. We had the festival on one side in the afternoon and the other side in the evening and almost no one crossed through because they were like, oh, we didn't know how to bring our passports. But this question of freedom of movement is a huge, huge question for us and how we can work with the people we're working with at the government level to try and facilitate that a little more. We've still never been able to get all our pen pal kids in the same room at the same time because we've not been able to get humanitarian visas. They're available, it's just hard these days and it's a really volatile situation. And it's something that we encountered that, again, like, like a privilege I didn't even think about, like Anna had to work for you so legally but our experience that first year of me being like, no, no, we'll just cross back and forth. We'll go there today and we'll go back tomorrow. And Anna was really uncomfortable about it and I was like, why you have a visa? But her experience of it was so different than my experience. And the fact that like going into the Mexico side there's like a metal detector that they kind of look at and on the US side you've been in mind for three hours and they interview you. And so like it's a huge question that we just, it's come up as a barrier in the work and how do you get figured out how dramatically to invite it into the work in an artistic way? Yeah, I think that might be a very powerful statement if you find a way to incorporate it. Thank you, that's a really great idea. So we have two presentations that are very much in conversation with each other. And to present to us we've illustrated that by being in conversation with each other. Which is so thrilling to watch and thank you so much. And now I think it's time to turn it out toward the audience and you've been given some questions that are illustrated on the floor. Two questions about the project and participants and topics and communication. This is my abbreviated, the most massive question. Resources, ideas. So yeah, usually we ask the audience to ask you questions but no, we're gonna turn it on you and you have to answer questions. I feel you can ask us questions, I can't speak for you, I'm happy to answer questions too. Yeah, I'm really curious to know what knowledge is in this room that we can share. Oh, sorry. In regards to simultaneous performance, since that moment is such an issue because some people have the ability and the privilege to go both ways, perhaps they're keeping a projected live stream. Which also brings the idea of this aspect of distance and not even being able to fully connect with both sides which is also neat to really address. Because I'm actually very curious on for your guys' team and collaborators, how many people have actually lived or spent time in those communities long-term that can accurately represent? Yeah, because I think it is really important that you guys are part, that everyone is going to the communities and having this full-wall approach of asking them what they would like and then representing. But outside of the room, who was actually involved in that? Yeah, so right now our leadership team, and again this is part of what we need to move towards a more collaborative model, right now we have me, Talia, Anna, and Jimena who are not from the area. And then from the area, Oscar's born and raised, Jacksonville is born and raised, Elena's born and raised, Michael lives about an hour away. And then, I'm forgetting people, Analia is living in Mexico City, but from Sonora, so she's from the borderlands. So again, we've been really working hard to invite local people into leadership and into any other position that we have. Anytime we need to hire a photographer or a hierographic designer, we're really looking to invest in people locally and meet people locally to make sure that those perspectives are centered. But again, one of the things that I don't think we did this year was de-center me as the face of the project. And that's a thing that we're trying to find a better way to do or that I'm trying to find a better way to do. Because we have this great diverse leadership team, but I'm the one doing all the interviews and trying to, you know, but, so yeah, it's an ongoing practice. Should I ask why that is? So what structure we have played that is centering you in that way and then I'm not an offer, but I'm curious to hear. I'm excited for your offer. I think the biggest thing that's centering me that way this year was that I was the instigating artist and that I have a financial responsibility. And I think because I had all the financial responsibility and was as the instigator leading our meetings, you know, I get down there, I know Leah calls me Kefita. And so, you know, anytime it was a question, I would turn and say, well, what do you guys think about that? What do you guys think about that? And the response would be, oh, I think this, but it's your call. You're the producer of the event. And so I think it's partly also time. We were really up against time and with one person having too much of the responsibility. And again, I think that's part of my experience as a leader. Also brought us to a place where I was like, I had too much of the information just like in my brain and hadn't delegated and hadn't shared. So I think a lot of that is me reflecting on my own abilities and processes as a leader and how I can improve. And I think that's part of what happened. I also think from a press perspective, on the US side, it's less of an issue. On the Mexican side, a lot of the press we got, like I'm the draw in a way. Like, oh, it's this producer from New York who's coming and that's part of what the story's about. And so they often want to center me in the story because I'm not local. And so it's again, no question of me being like, no, no, I can't do this by myself. And that's where our language barrier center becomes an asset because then I can insist that we have other members of our leadership team be present with me. Oh, because, you know, my Spanish is just not good enough. So I'd love to hear your offer. Well, I've lost a vision. You can talk in it at any time. Yes, please. The stuff that he says, which is a quote from Jeff, they have a beautiful model called the Cataclysm, which means snail. And so there's a rotating leadership model that is employed where everybody, I mean, this is a reduction of the actual practice, but you can imagine yourself as a small community in this project and there are many ways to prevent it in the context of small scale collaboration with this, where in leadership is either shared on a timed structure, so each person occupies a particular role with leadership for a particular period of time. We can not continue to survive those into leadership, but I can also continue to supply responsibility. It can break down the kind of centrality of power that this is going to have, but I also think, and I'm curious because you didn't speak to it and I'm sure that you all have stories, but what are the roles that each of you are holding and why? And decentralizing also things like forming agendas for meetings. What are the tools that you're employing that really simply allow decentralization of labor? So things like Google Docs. I think this is very obvious, but it's a very useful tool for making transparent processes as they're playing out and allows a kind of access point for multiple voices to help shape whatever is being conceived of, be it a meeting, be it an event or a relationship. But I'm happy to talk about that. I would love that. All of those are really helpful strategies and we started doing some of them, but some of them also it's like the assumption, right? That you're just like, oh, I'm a dramaturg and I'm good at making agendas, so I'll just get this done. And there was a lot of, we're under time pressure, so I'll just get this done, I'll just get this done. And also a lot of guilt at knowing that none of us were getting paid. And I was like, oh, I don't want to ask them to do this mundane task because they have other things to do and so that I think that I centered myself inadvertently by trying to lighten the burden on other people instead of trusting my collaborators to tell me what they were excited about and what they could do. And it's another thing we've been thinking about. Everybody did have a formal role with a title this past year based on where we saw them situated and what their skillset was. And now that we're getting to know ourselves and each other better too, we're able to better see like who's really good at what and what things, who should be in charge of different things based on their skillset and their interests. Other thoughts? Can we get her questions on the board because I don't think it's best to not remembering what they are. Yeah, hold on, I can totally do that. I have your words up there. But I think we should have them right in the middle of the game. Is there a, yes, can we write them? I'm wondering, this is a white board behind this. Oh, I'm speaking to us. Yeah. Half of the board? That's a great answer. Yay. Thank you. Be a collaborator. So we had Hal, and this is yours. Why? What would you like me to write, I should ask you rather than by interpretation? Write, why do this? Yeah. Second question was, how to recruit participants? Or recruit, yeah. Recruit participants, how? And then pay them, question. Pay the undocumented question. How much do you pay them? I have a lot of questions. What would be a third, when do you tell them that you're gonna pay them? All right. Okay, the third question was, how do you decide the topic of the production? And the power, the choice between the celebratory and the, what can we call it, the aggressive, or the ag, the celebratory and the confrontational, or, and then there's a minor question. So question there is, power balance between participants and facilitators to some of the topics. And then the fourth question was communication, how do you communicate with participants? How, within what structure, what rules, who sets the rules for communicating? Do we just let the university's most restrictive policy apply? Or do we have some sort of conversation with the participants, where they themselves get some say in what the communication policy is? Is this, can you see this? Yes, thank you. Great, great. And there's a fifth one, actually, that I didn't talk about at all, because we're not there yet with our project, but that would be the exit strategy. All right, so thoughts. So this question I have is specifically sparked by your conversation, but I am curious to what you would both say about it in relation to your projects. What type of ownership, especially because now your project has had a few years, it's had two years, so what type of ownership do the repeat participants have in creating some of those materials, structures, practices themselves, and how does that maybe take some of the burden off of you, or how does that inform the work and how does their ownership help create the project? It's pretty simple for us. As far as the teenage participants, we haven't had too much overlap between the two years. The guys that came back from the first year were kind of like workshop leaders. They kind of, you know, like kind of took the helm. And then the adult participants who came back are the people who have moved into like real true collaborator positions, like Oscar and Jack and Elena, and they've really become full collaborators of the project and members of the whatever-call-the-leadership team, and it's having a significant impact on the project and how we move forward. I think in our case, it differs from group to group. And we had five groups the first year, and then that was all too much. And so the second year, we scaled back to three groups. And at the YMCA, the senior citizens, there was a lot of we keep participants, but they're very kind of respectful of the facilitators. They're sort of like, yeah, we'll do whatever you tell us to tell us what to do. Whereas at the Guadalupe Center and at the Hilltop Public Library Group with the teens, there was much more input. And APTP taught us a bunch of techniques for generating material from participants. So even if the senior citizens are sort of passive in the sense that they're not gonna come up, they're not gonna just start chatting about their lives, but we'll have a walk your life kind of exercise where they have five different events that happened in their lives and we'll go to five different parts of the room and begin to make gestures and movements that express something about those events. And so those sorts of activities give them a lot of ownership of that. But as far as like, are they gonna continue this activity if we stop offering this as a class in the YMCA? I doubt. At the other end, at the other extreme, at the Hilltop Public Library, the youth wanted to do something during the summer and during up until January, because we do this primarily as an activity during the second and the spring semester, which starts in January, through April, May of the OSU semester because it has to be tied to a class for graduate students. But they wanted so badly to continue to do this activity that they started their own group and they come with Ghost, which is an acronym for something I forget. But with their, the community partner there is like, Bararian, who was a major at OSU years ago. So she has the skills to help a group like that and facilitate that group, even if nobody from OSU was around. And that's very convenient. At the high school, the high school teacher also was a theater graduate from OSU and he had those skills, but then he went to a high school in a rich neighborhood and left the project. So that was sad, because he could have carried on with those techniques. And he was fascinated because he'd had a much more traditional script kind of training, script-based training and acting and performance in theater. That was almost his whole idea of theater except for improvising. So this whole idea of devising with untrained actors thronged their own material, creating your own script, he loved that. Did that answer your question? I was just curious about the division of the girls. Yeah, but I do think that the team group, there's a big need for that. And I think that if one of the groups goes on and without us, it would be that one. Others have some response. I need a different question, sorry. Oh, no, no, no, no. It's okay. I just wanted to ask if each of you sought legal counsel? And if so, can you talk about that a little bit? I mean, did you feel the need to do that, working within the university, working through a legal office in the university? Yeah, I didn't. I didn't seek legal counsel, but the university told me I had to have legal counsel. So there's a lawyer from the university that vets everything, form every agreement with participants, the contract for the payment, everything, and advises on anything we want to advise on. And sometimes things we don't want to advise on. So you had to work through that office? Yes. Thank you. And for us, yes, but in a myriad of different ways that don't necessarily include hiring lawyers. We did seek legal counsel for Honza Visa, of course, the first time, because we didn't know what the process was. And we ran a couple of brief questions by them, but primarily the legal advice we've gotten has been from Border Patrol and from Homeland Security and just me going and saying, what are the legal considerations? What do we need to consider? And then through Factored Atlas, that we have access to some resources like for insurance and just being able to talk to them and say like, here's what we're doing. What kind of insurance do we need? What kind of protections do we need? Cool, can you sell that to me, please? So we've turned to lots of friends in various political activist positions because we are such an activist. We're affiliated with a lot of activist groups. We are, there's no such thing as apolitical, but our goal is to not like, we don't have a political agenda per se, but we're working with a lot of political groups who have lawyers among them and who've done similar things. So we kind of screwed the legal costs by leaning on our community. Thank you. Yeah, I had a question. In terms of the coverage from the media of the project, how did that, did that translate into affecting in terms of either local politics or Arizona politics in general? Not yet. I can't say that we personally have had like a strong political impact or outcome, but I think the coverage we've gotten, we've started to get some nice traction. We had a blogger wrote an article about us on HuffPo, we've had NPR, we've had BBC interest, we've had PBS interest. So I do think it's kind of telling which news outlets are interested in covering us and who's reaching out to us. And I think a lot of outside media, it's interesting that we've had a lot of local press that we've pursued. And then a lot of our wider statewide and national level press inquiries are coming to me from national level organizations who are trying to find positive angles or artistic angles on this town. And that's the center of so much fraud press. And so they Google and they find us and they call me. And I'm like, cool, well, here are all the people locally that you should be calling. But yeah, I don't think, we haven't quite gotten there. It is one of our goals to not necessarily create a specific political outcome, but to spark conversation and create a space for conversation that we think is not necessarily happening on the national level. And the long-term goal for us is a network of border festivals that happen all along the US Mexico border simultaneously. So the 10 years from now, this is a thing that happens every weekend of May, whatever, that all of the border town festivals come together, celebrate and show positive side of life in the border. And hopefully that would spark a direct person-to-person communication, which maybe would then have a trickle-down effect into actual politics, but where I think we're more focused on like one-to-one person-to-person communication rather than a bigger political outcome. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Cool. Any other thoughts or responses to these questions? We don't necessarily have to be answers, but rather, I've also learned to advise or communicate engagement. And here's something that we found was successful. I think my experience and you have that in the room. Just regarding your question about the texting and that sort of personal relationship, yeah, I don't know, I find it really interesting and there's a company where I'm from, Calgary, Canada, and it's a dis-arts company, and it's a small company. And so, like mad dis-arts disabled artists. And so there aren't like sometimes clear boundaries. And so that artistic director has told me that they have the same thing happen a lot. So they become, you know, like a really important person in like their artist lives. And so what they're looking to do is hire like a permanent position in their company as like counselor or outreach person whose job is specifically to take that on. I worked with a similar model with the city spotlights program in Boston where it was a group of teens that we were working with and I was a teaching artist there. And I wasn't allowed to have any social media contact with the kids, but we had somebody who was trained and registered in drug therapy and was an LCSW. And she was like a young group since she was like a graduate of grad school and she was designated as like teen advocate. And essentially she was like the guidance counselor slash cool older sister that they would all go through. But they could text her because, and go to her with any of the problems. And if any of the teens came to us and were like trying to reach out that way, we'd be like, oh, go talk to Carmen. She's like, she'll take care of that for you. And if she doesn't, like let me know and I'll try and find somebody else for you. But it was, yeah, we had a designated person and that model worked really well. That's an interesting idea. And she was also a teaching artist too. She did workshops as well. I have the same issue with my ethnographic research too when I like talk to interview someone who's trying to cross Mexico and go to the United States and they're undocumented and they ask something like, do you have a place where I could stay? Or can you give me some money, right? What's, oh no, I'm just a researcher. I'm just here to take your story and then go away. Doesn't really seem like the appropriate response. And that's always the institutional response. And part of me thinks that's a good idea to have a designated person. But the other part of me is like, but they're reaching out to you and aren't you kind of saying, coming up with like a policy or a designated other person who's gonna handle it seems, I don't know. I think it's about having like the appropriate resources in the example. Because like, I totally know you. We're gotten to ourselves, we have empathy and we want to help people. But imagine if you get asked that over and over again. Sure. You know, if you can't help everyone. And I have 10 kids texting me all the time. If it had been more than one, I probably would have told them to stop. Well, I'm sorry, but something that we do too is we've got, we have a couple, a part of what we've done is like my local partners who we can say, oh well I know someone you can talk to. So it's not just like, oh you should go to this organization but you should go to this organization and talk to, talk to Ms. Jones. Or you should go to this organization and talk to Pancho. So that we can point them and connect them to a specific person. I found it a little bit more successful than that. I just wanted to say, just when you brought up liminal space, and this is sort of a big idea that, I like to use. That the, yeah. And I mean, I use that a lot in my classroom when I'm teaching clear writing or screen writing. That, that that idea that something, you know, a liminal space is, it doesn't have borders. And yet this liminal space is, is saying, yes there's this huge border now. And that just in terms of media or the big idea around it and how the conversations are happening in between artists, that this metaphor and this idea, I mean even the liminal space, like when people are wanting to text you, like is that, it's a permeable boundary once you start having an emotional connection. You're never gonna get away from that. It's never, that's never gonna disappear. And so yes, it's gotta be regulated. But the metaphor of it is so fascinating to me. And I, I imagine there's ways into creating more interest. I mean, it's an anthropological idea. It's a, it's a psychological, it's a psychospiritual. It's, it gets into so many areas that seem so, I mean, yes, we're talking about boots on the ground stuff, but when we lift up and we start to, you know, how do we draw people's attention to this, that whole concept of liminal space? And, you know, that's in between dream time and waking. That's, that's the liminal space between dawn and day and sunset and all the animals that come out at those times. You know, there's, and your puppet, you know, so that's kind of what took my attention as well. And that actually, when you talk, when you can find a way to bring that in, grantor's actually like it. Yes, they want, you know, they want, or at least I found that. They want those hard numbers and they want the facts and all that stuff. But when you can lift it up and say, this is actually what we're talking about in terms of our, you know, I'm kind of mythic if we're going to talk about, you know, we're in a revolutionary time and people, so that's, I just wanted to throw that in. Thank you. I mean, it comes up a lot in that when we work with the teenagers, I think it manifests, we have this question of like, in what way is this one Nogales and in what way is it two? Because it's not, is it one or is it two? We started with that question, do you think it's one town or do you think it's two towns? But it's, it's not that it's, in what way is it this and this and that they're both at the same time overlapping and existing? Yeah, so. I don't think that applies to the clumpus, but there's two. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they're kind of wall-worn throughout that they're sort of for this, that relation. I don't know. Is it one thing or another? I don't know if what, the way you're using liminal has anything to do with Victor Turner and his anthropologist. No, it has everything to do with a smarter, more educated person than me saying, your project's about liminal space. I mean, it sounds really good and from what I've understood of it so far, it's appropriate. Well, you can check out Victor Turner if you're interested and he talks about the liminal as like a stage and ritual from where you go from like being a child to being an adult, right? And you have the bar botanist zone and then, right? And that's the ritual that marks like the end of the liminal. So from Victor Turner, there was the liminal was a stage that you go beyond that you trans, what's the word trans, not transgress, but transent, thank you. And that's not happening on the board, unfortunately. Right, and I think it's kind of what we're trying to promote and it's really interesting, especially considering that we're working with young people. We have a lot of juniors and seniors too and this is something they've done with us, like right before the college, so they're in the liminal space for themselves as well. I mean, I've been thinking brainstorming, the idea of out-growing a border, like is there a way that you could make the border of liminal space? Yeah. And that there could be, could we imagine a time when we don't need the border, right? And I think if there's any political agenda in this work, it's that we're coming to start to ask this question globally too. As like a global community, in what ways are we out-growing borders as human beings? Are we? Maybe or not, but yeah. We'll try not on one more question in the conversation though, but I come at this from a couple of different perspectives. When I was 18, I was actually part of a community theater initiative where a bunch of fully-established artists, their creative candidacy called the Amy Project, where women or established artists come in and help mentor. In this case, we were vulnerable. Women at the end of high school from a variety of different backgrounds. So I've actually benefited from these kinds of programs. Just to sort of touch on this idea of having someone who is especially there to correspond with these students or with these young people, you have to remember it protects you as well as it protects them. And something that I wish that I had when I was 18 and some of my peers have had with someone who was there. And also, I was very attached to my mentor and felt very connected to her, but she was also a working artist on the rise to becoming a national playwright. And so I think we need to also think of it as protecting ourselves and protecting these people and we do deserve that kind of talent. So I just wanted to play that in your heads. Obviously, I wouldn't necessarily be a global community, but we were a global community of people. And when I look back on it, that's something that I think that all fell off. So I'm sure. I'm curious to the extent that you want to share more about that, like, did you feel like you communicated with this mentor outside of the process or you didn't? We did, but it was inconsistent. Like, sometimes I emailed her and I'd want to tell her about how I was feeling and also sometimes she didn't respond. And some of my peers got a lot more responsive mentors and then as a result, like, all of us were vulnerable on different ways and for different reasons. So it actually kind of like exacerbated certain mental health issues that some of us hadn't been addressed because why is it that like, my peers here is like getting all this attention or care and like, this is sort of the model between me and my mentor. And so I think it sort of allows for equal playing fields, which I really like, where it's not, it's just like, it's not about like, being, you know, feeling like you're preparing yourself and especially if you're not a person you're so vulnerable to that and especially someone coming in to protocol, help you and empower you. The last thing you want to be doing is feeling like the way you're being helped and empowered is the point of detention or joint competition and so that's something we all really struggled with collectively. So the people who got more attention felt like some or the people who got less attention felt like it was somehow their fault that they were getting less attention because they weren't as attractive to my mentor. Totally. Or like even when we were, I was seven, I was 17 so like in some ways I'm under range today like we were between, I'd say 17 and 24. And so some of the folks who like had language already need to talk about their needs. Me at the 17 year old with some other folks who were around the same age we didn't have that language. We were just like, someone's coming here to like do this beautiful theater adventure and help us learn how to use our voices and been that incredible because it was incredible for us. But I just feel that's something that, you know, I look back on it, it's something that I was vulnerable to and my peers again were vulnerable to again and again with like people who are established artists who wanted to do good and did do good for us who didn't know how to regulate that and give us a little playing field so that we didn't take any of it personally. And I just think it also protects them. Like as I'm getting into this role as being a mentor myself and having that privilege I feel so honored by that. The only thing about the boundaries and the ways that I can honor and protect is the people that I'm there for. So, and I just just thought on me today I was like, oh yeah, this program saved my life, you know, 10 years ago. So, and it did, but it still has those challenges. So if you have any other questions, I don't have emotional room to talk about it today but if you will. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, no problem. An Amy project down in Toronto, I'm not associated with it, but they do incredible work and I hope that they're from across the world. Amy project? Yeah, artist mentoring youth. And it's now not just about women mentoring women but it's about non-binary trans folks also in the community mentoring and they create the year together and it's an incredible initiative. Thank you so much for sharing. You're welcome. I'm sorry, I'm just sharing my resource too. Yeah, no problem. And I don't, you know, I'm sure other folks here might have been beneficiaries of these programs. Yeah, I'm taking that to heart. Yeah. You're welcome. Thank you for all of you. And let's give a round of applause for your solutions, your experiences, I think all of us here. I hope you've had a lot of fun. So helpful, and please continue the conversation. Yeah, love to get all the email addresses.