 for joining us on, I use this, let's use this to welcome our friends on HowlRound live stream, welcome. And to our friends here, thanks for coming to hang out for a few minutes with us. Derek, thank you very much for, we were talking last night about how people are appropriately expressing gratitude and love for Derek consistently through this gathering. And although it pains me to publicly share love with him, it is well-deserved because he is extraordinary and his work and his team's work in making this happen and Georgetown's support is extraordinary. So thank you for having us here. And I feel very lucky to get to be up here with two folks I get to call real friends and colleagues, Jasmine and Mark, who I'll make space to introduce yourselves in a moment. And we were conscious of wanting to use this time well and Jasmine and Mark have given me permission to sort of play timekeeper in the way that we're gonna progress. So I'm actually gonna take my five minutes of context now and then they're each gonna have 10 minutes, they're each gonna have five minutes to sort of give a little context for their work and then five minutes to give a specific example and then I'm gonna do my specific five minute example and that leaves us about half the time for conversation here and conversation here. So my five minutes will start now, yeah? Because that was the intro and here's my five minutes. My five minutes is about the fact that as Derek and I talked about this gathering, hello Jessica. As we talked about this, something that he was very thoughtful about in which I was deeply appreciative of was an awareness that the spectrum of work that we're all involved in, the intersection of theater and change and community and community development is a really broad array of practices situated in lots of different kinds of institutions and contexts but very frequently when theater people get together to talk about the power of theater in relation to change in community, we very often talk about the productions and what surrounds the productions because of course that's kind of the heart of our historical practice and also what's most visible and often most understood. There's also lots of people here at this event who work not just in what might be seen as a traditional presentational production but in many participatory and very engaged and community-based kind of ways. I was excited for the opportunity to talk about civic practice which is something that an organization I'm a part of, the Center for Performance in Civic Practice, has kind of been trying to articulate for artists across disciplines as a way of working not because we think it's new or that we're attempting to sort of label other people's work but there's a lot of challenges for artists in many disciplines including theater to kind of frame the work they're doing in community that looks like process as a not marginal but often central part of how artists engage in communities and in particular when artists engage in communities with partners in the community development world or partners in the policy world or even the legislative world and so what I wanted to do as a frame was to acknowledge that Mark and Jasmine are theater artists who they make shows, they tell stories, they make projects and productions that look like the rigorous and aesthetically adventurous work that we all do in various ways. There are also artists among many others out there who bring their assets as makers and as process designers to the work of organizing and to the work of problem solving and coalition building in spaces where their artistry is present. They are engaged in the act of theater making but it sometimes looks different, narrates different and is different legibly. So this conversation is an opportunity that I'm grateful to have to sort of acknowledge that work that's happening around this country and around the world where folks are saying I make but the tools I use to make are also useful in moments that are not just about generating my fully produced creative output but are actually useful in the generating of community outcomes and the way I participate in contributing to community outcomes in instances of civic practice may look more like listening to residents and community organizers that I engage with and figuring out how my assets can be thoughtfully put into collaboration with community outcomes that are community defined rather than artist led and then artists bring their practice to those moments and make and contribute and design and lead process and practices. Again, we all make stuff in here that looks like things that might happen on this stage or outside of the stage but we're also deploying our practice in collaboration with folks that don't self-define as artists towards community defined outcomes and that's what I've asked Jasmine and Mark to speak a little bit about and that's what I'm gonna speak a little bit about and then kind of invite the conversation but I wanted to start with that frame of civic practice in relationship to listening, relationship building and deploying those assets with a real specific set of intentionalities. So, how'd I do on my five? Oh, okay, good. Okay, good. That was true, not a lie, which was the room I was in before where I was doing a lot of lying. That's another session. So, Jasmine, do you want me to do the five and five or just give you the 10? Five and five would be great. Okay, so again, when I interrupt my friend and colleague I've been given permission to and I've been asked to. That is important. So the first five we'll start now. So, my name is Jasmine Cardenas. I live and work in Chicago and as an artist working with Looking Glass Theater Company doing a play about working people I met an organization called the Chicago Workers Collaborative and over the course of a year working with them as an assistant director and as a community engagement connection person I learned a lot about what was happening with Chicago Workers Collaborative and that production opened and closed and was incredible but was very different from the experiences that the people, temp workers, precarious workers are experiencing the challenges they're experiencing in Chicago and across our country and across the world. So I said to the executive director Tim Bell, Tim I use this technique called Theater of the Oppressed and I would love to work with the group in some way just to see if it might be something that could help what you're doing and Tim said yes, which made all the difference in the world. Tim had been using theater in the style of Teatro Callejero in the streets with the eerie neighborhood house like 20 years before that so he understood the power of theater to work in communities and so we started working Theater of the Oppressed. I brought it to them as a tool like just as an idea and immediately it was resonating because precarious workers and temp workers are people who go to a temp office not a college degreeed person who then ends up as a Google assistant somewhere in a Google office, not that kind of temp worker. They go to an office and then they get told to jump on the bus that's waiting for them and they get taken out to a factory out in the suburbs of Chicago or in the city limits and they work on the line making effin vodka or next to ovens, very hot ovens where they make baked goods as they sell at grocery stores in Chicago or where they make the Costco pizza or where Amazon is a shipping center and they're working very hot in very extreme conditions whether it's a very cold freezer because it's a meat packing factory or very hot ovens and then they make minimum wage or sub minimum wage. Most precarious workers are immigrants or returning citizens and so by that I mean many of the workers are African-Americans who've gotten out of prison and want a job and they say they don't check your background that that's okay but what we've learned over the course of our work together is that Latino immigrants are treated very different than African-American precarious workers and there is, from the point of the temp agency and the factory owner, there is hierarchy and the preferred one is the one that is scared that doesn't want to get deported and doesn't know that they have rights and the one that they want to get rid of in the factories is the black worker who's an American who knows that they deserve a bathroom break every couple hours and so they pit the workers against each other on purpose they'll put a monolingual English speaker in a factory line with a monolingual Spanish speaker and yell at them to not talk to each other so that the Latino who's maybe been there working a long time can't train the black worker in what to do and the black worker's confused and doesn't understand what his part or her part on the line is and then there are problems so they can get fired easily or they put them next to the burning hot ovens so that they get exhausted on that job and the Latino workers get mistreated and they yell that a lot and they're just quietly working, working, working but as soon as someone tries to mistreat a black worker a black worker might speak up for themselves and the Latino's like push that person a little more and so there's a lot of infighting and disagreement amongst the workers on purpose systematically designed this way so that they will not organize and so we've been using teatro and thank you and what's been incredible is that through the process they're experiencing each other's oppression and recognizing it being able to add language to it and hear each other and realize the same thing is happening to them that they're not islanded that I just work, I go to work I'm trying to finish my thing and go home with a paycheck but actually that they're treating her that way and him that way and them that way so our scenes that we create are about their experience and so you might see a temp agency and welcome to the carousel of opportunities temp staffing agency and you see that the Latino workers they're told hurry up they walk inside looking for work at trabajo, trabajo and they get sent out to the factory and the workers like but where will they go and how much and when do I come back and they're not giving any details and they just rush, rush out the door and the black worker walks in and they're like here's this stack of employment forms you have to fill out and it's gonna cost you $50 for your background check and $50 for your P and a cup and it comes out of your pocket and you see that scene and all the Latino workers are getting sent out the black workers filling out the forms but can I go to that factory, can I go I'm dressed in my boots, can I go and they're not interested in sending that worker out to, yes. So now that was the first five and now to get to your specific however you wanna share that five steps now. So the scene works the scenes that have been developed come from their lives and what's been incredible is to see that the workers are workers and some of them are actually organizers who are, you know there's three of them are part time organizers of the organization and the theater of the oppressed tools have really been incredibly supportive to them as organizers, right because they're trying to get their comunidad in their neighborhood to come out to the meetings to do an action for a mom who maybe wasn't paid and has four children and needs a check and so we do an action outside of a factory and we invite the press to come and as we've been performing these things we've seen both that the workers have been experiencing an incredible amount of collective healing together because of the opportunity to speak about the oppressions that are all that trauma that gets dumped down but also because of the way they're received. So like last year we were doing a scene at the Chicago Women's Foundation and the audience are professionals, women, men, professionals in Chicago and they're hearing these scenes for the first time and theater of the oppressed is interactive so we do a forum theater and we invite the audience to stop the scene, the action after they've seen the scene. You see a supervisor firing an older woman because she's too slow on the line and one of the audience members comes up and offers her intervention is that she replaces the supervisor and fires the woman but in the kindest and most dignified way. Thank you for your years of work. We can no longer have you here. We would, you know, you need to go now and she does this in a respectful way and the entire audience does what you did and it was an incredible moment for the workers to see middle class Chicago recognize that that was not okay. Recognize that this older woman needs the work, she is working and she needs that paycheck and that firing her kindly wasn't helpful. And that singular moment resonated so much in the workers because we're working with Waukegan workers and that's the northeast suburb, Chicago Southside Englewood, Chicago Westside Latinos in Little Village and each one of those has talked about how we need allies as the supervisors. We need allies that would, you know, what they problem solve was maybe, well let's switch places with the older lady. You do this part that's easier. I do your part, you know, let's switch places on the line. Let's find other solutions where she doesn't have to lose her job and the organizers have been able to take these experiences and it supports them in their organizing because they've become much more confident facilitating workshops with different kinds of workers in their neighborhoods. As outreach method, they're getting a larger interest because when they host a meeting, it's not sit down and write the whole time. It's come, play games and then people are like, how does this have anything to do with my, you know, temp work and then by the end of the workshop they realize they feel stronger, they're more informed, they've learned a ton. So it's directly affecting their ability to organize and even for some of the workers where the collective healing has been incredibly supportive, we've also had individuals realize that maybe it isn't too late to learn English and in their 40s and 50s are trying to take English classes because they feel empowered through image theater where they didn't have to talk and they were still leading groups who spoke English and they spoke only Spanish, they realized that they could still lead. So there's just been incredible, both individual growth and collective growth from the group and the groups are growing. There used to be just when I first started, there was just one or two people in each site really doing, you know, hitting the pavement and now there's groups of five, six, seven, 10 and they've supported workers who've gotten fired on mass. Like 150 people showed up to work one day in Waukegan and were let go and our workers from all the sites showed up to Waukegan and we led theater, the oppressed workshops to talk about that experience because some of those workers had worked for that factory for 25 years. Some of those workers had only been there two years and they didn't understand that they had rights. So through the theater they're learning about the laws that protect them as workers and then they're realizing that we can organize so there's now those 150 people are organized by a community of 12 representatives and they are fighting the factory with legal support from the organization to pursue, you know, pay. You know, they can no longer get those jobs back because ICE has their name and their social security numbers on the list somewhere but it's been very practical the way the theater has affected the way they meet and what they're doing in their meetings and it's just been incredible because we're getting invited and again these are working moms and dads. So even though we call ourselves the workers resistance theater they're not professional actors but you wouldn't be able to tell if you saw them perform. Jasmine, thank you. Thanks, I wanna acknowledge your work. I don't know that I got it all in there, but. And I wanna note that like Jasmine and I think like other artists out there Jasmine doesn't have an institutional home. Jasmine is a freelance artist gigging in Chicago who works at the largest and most well-resourced institutions in Chicago as a performer and as a collaborator and also cobbles together the work in lots of different as a temp worker as a precarious worker in the arts and change economy in Chicago and is super known and respected for that work in the city there as she should be. I also wanna know as we shift over to Mark that and we'll come back and be in conversation as we shift over to Mark that Jasmine's story is about theater of the oppressed is the tactic that she's using, right? She's talking about Bois' work which is one way that in this country we've thought about theater and activism for a while and internationally as well of course. It's not the only way. There's lots of practices and I think Mark is gonna share some experiences that aren't necessarily theater of the oppressed centered and work he's doing. So do you want the five and five or do you want a 10? All right. I'm gonna hopefully not take the 10. I don't believe you. I don't. All right, the first five starts. Hey y'all, so good morning and so a couple of things. So in terms of the first part about like what the work is and contextualizing kind of approach I've got to be honest is so much of it's a long period of my life where I knew I wanted to be in theater I just didn't know how. And then I met up with Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles and it was just kind of the world just changed overnight and I found a way of working and a way to kind of combine so many things that I care about. And so a lot of what I do is just really kind of grounded in that practice just where I grew up just sort of a group as an artist as a human being you know. And so there's that kind of practice if you don't know Cornerstone is a theater that works in and with communities sometimes adapting classic plays sometimes creating new plays with members of that community and then performing first time kind of often first time artist acting alongside professional company members to do plays about their home. And so that's a big part of it. And then kind of from there like other things kind of came to light the work of John O'Neill and the Free Southern Theater the road of Dudley Cough and Roadside Theater. You know, I'm just familiar with Dr. Campesino and some of that practice. Michael's work is just again just a big influence. So a lot of I just kind of want to name that that what I do is really it's part of a tradition. It's part of other work it's work that others are doing and I'm trying to just kind of add to it but it's not mine. So there's that. One of the things that through a lot of this work for a long time I've been I've kind of operated under the belief that you can do this play and people will see it and it'll change something in them. It'll resonate somehow they'll feel something they'll think about something it'll increase empathy and all these things are good and over time if we can do this often enough then we can make change. And I don't really believe that anymore. Like I just don't, I don't think a play changes people. I think you can have a really good experience and they can be deeply moved but I don't really think it can boost our empathy that much because my experience is sitting in the audience is like I'm annoyed by the people around me. Like the guy next to me is like has his elbow on the armrest, is man-spreading and I can't move and I have to crawl over people and they're just annoying. Like I don't, I'd much rather not have them there. So the shared experience of we're gonna breathe air together like don't eat it. And so then what? Then why do this? Like what's the point? Like you know it's like total existential crisis and then what I realized it's something that often happened in work that when I was at Cornerstone you tell people, people ask like how's the play going and you start to share the stories and almost always somebody says well I wish you could tell that story. I wish more people knew about like what's happening in the rehearsal room and I've come to the realization that I don't think the output is the thing that changes people. I think the process is the thing that changes people and I know I've seen over and over again going through the process of making, going through what we do to create, to kind of imagine, to rehearse that is meaningful. Like that when you have to work with somebody who is not like you who has different ideas, either as simple as like I think I should go to this side of the stage instead of that side or like deep philosophical things where like I don't wanna work with a gay person, I don't wanna work with an African American, Latinos should not be here. And so how do you find a way to stick together to find kind of a collective meaning? How do you find ways to just kind of bridge those gaps and I think when you do that all in the process of making something, hopefully something that is good, something that you have ownership of, you share that, some of the things that, like how do you know that this makes a difference? You see things like people start to give each other kind of rides to and from rehearsals because everybody's got jobs, right? So how do we know it works? Like they're spending time together in a car, they're giving each other rides. How do we know this works? They start to bring food. It's like, hey, I brought some food for all of us to share and you start to see these sorts of things that these indications that relationships are getting built, right? These indications that they're friends. That's five, but then you're second to five. Okay, so with that as kind of the foundation, right? So if it's not the play then how do you start to make process the thing? So I'm just starting to work on a project. I wanted with the intent of policy change, like this is very much about changing housing policies. So I have the fortune of being able to visit a lot of different cities and everywhere, seriously every single one I drive by, walk by a homeless encampment, like in every city. This is not like just giant cities. This is suburbs, like you're seeing it everywhere. And so I'm creating this new piece that really wants to, that the purpose is to shift housing policies in, we're gonna start with five cities, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Syracuse, New York, a city in Los Angeles, a county, a small one. And then the fifth city that we haven't identified, maybe Washington D.C., so that's its possibility. And what we wanna do is we're working with a whole bunch of partners, like a lot of people, national organizations, the local initiative support corporation LISC, you have network, the network of energy housing and building, which is an environmental housing organization of environmentalist housing groups. Americans for the Arts is helping with government advocacy lobbying through Newhab. There's a lot of policy walks there. And then working locally in each place with the city, kind of city government representatives, community development folks, advocacy groups. And there's two parts for it. So we're creating this play, this performance called Exiled in America. And Exiled will be performed. There's always an art partner in all of these, so it will get presented, produced at a local presenting house or theater. And then there's a process by which all of these constituencies that I've just identified meet regularly. All under the guise of help us make a play, because oftentimes what we've found is people have grown tired of talking to each other or they just aren't talking to each other to begin with. So we can just become outsiders, the nucleus that just brings, that just kind of can draw folks together. And then we want to create a process, like I talked about with the cornerstone thing of it, how do we just start to make something together? And through that, how can we start to imagine what better housing policy is? And because we're dealing with plays, we can leave behind the realities of their day to day. Like I get that there's any number of landmines here, but we're making a play so we can set whatever rules that we want to make. And so we can just kind of start to put that aside and hopefully start to imagine collectively what we want. And if we can imagine it, we can see it, I believe we can kind of make our way there. And if we can create a process by which we're enacting it, then we stand a better chance. And so that is kind of what it looks like in practice, all of these things. You have one minute, so I'm gonna ask you a question. Is that okay? It's a good 10 minutes. Yeah, you were right and I was wrong. So I want to ask you, you're talking very specifically about a desired policy impact. And the work I hear you talking about that feels important to make really visible is the process that you have developed as an artist over the years of bringing stakeholders together who have different agendas and finding a collective vision which is what a director does in a rehearsal room. So you are sort of bringing that to organizing a coalition of different players necessary for policy movement in a community on an issue like homelessness. So in the minute that you have, maybe if you could share one thought about when you get that group of different players together, how does your theater artist self, your director creator self, use your organizing experience in the rehearsal room to help them imagine collectively what's possible. They're not self-defined as actors, they're not self-defined as artists. So how do you use that imaginative collaborative expertise to get those folks to think about policy and coalition building? You know, it's through, so this mentioned roadside and Junebug as kind of an example. So story circle process is kind of one way of like, let's just start there. Let's just start by just talking to one another. And so how do you start to just like a built trust? I think Maria or Stephanie yesterday and their emergent quoting from the day before it said like, yeah. Emergent strategy. Yeah, you move at the speed of trust. You know, so how do you start to build trust? So part of that is just like, let's just start by just kind of like start there. And then from there, we can create a series of prompts or a series of exercises of let's make this. So let's kind of divide into groups and have different representatives. And what does like like draw or make or sculpt or create a composition around what the right policy is, what it looks like when it works. So that we can just kind of sidestep that and just get to the imagining, sidestep the realities and just get to the imagining of what they would like to see. And then through that, you can start to build. Thank you. I want to acknowledge that like a lot of us in this room and some more than others have experienced, I mean, I'm Annie Hamburger there, who founded On Guard Arts. I mean, it's probably hard to find someone with more expertise at building unlikely partnerships to make large ambitious things happen. Like you have done that, I believe, for a while. And a lot of people who produce in non-traditional contexts and spaces have that set of skills that we're sorely lacking in civic and political discourse in this country and in community development spaces very often. So I just want to think about Melanie Joseph at the Foundry, particularly the last five to 10 years and sort of her work there at bringing people together. So that kind of coalition building is one of the kind of organizing things we're talking about here, aimed at policy change. So I'm gonna do, I'll do my five now. So Sojourn Theater is my artistic family, just about 20 years now where I make work and I also make work as a theater maker, but the Center for Performance and Civic Practice is a space where five of us spun off of Sojourn to start this center about seven years ago because we were getting asked to help build capacity in other spaces for other people doing art and change work and the theater didn't have the capacity to do it. It was starting to tap us out just in terms of the hours in the day. So we started this center because we felt in the field this movement. The work wasn't new, but it was sort of growing and people were looking for support at arts institutions, theaters, but also at arts councils and legislative bodies and health departments and policy groups. So CPCP, our center started focusing on how do we use our organizing, imaginative and collaborative skills to make things happen as theater artists in spaces that are not theater and performance spaces. So I mean, this is new. So the narrative I'm about to share, I'm still figuring out how to tell. We have different programs and initiatives. We fund projects around the country, individual artists working with community partners. We work with arts agencies, we work with community development organizations and help them think about how to receive partnership with artists, designers, culture makers and heritage holders. We got reached out to a few months ago by the state of Kansas. It was the Department of Commerce, the State Department and the Arts Commission which was defunded a few years ago in Kansas and is now coming back as a program of the Department of Commerce. And I'm gonna try to tell a sort of complicated story in a ridiculously short amount of time but to me it's the example that I'm very excited about right now. Trump's government, the presidency, the federal government and the Republican-led Congress have something called opportunity zones that they've been pushing as an economic development tool in the past few years in particular. And the Democrats have been pretty concerned as of many people because in particular what it does is it lines up the potential for tax subsidies and economic support for business interests in communities all over the country and it sort of bypasses residents who live in places. And community organizers and community development folks have been raising the flags and sort of chiming the sirens about this and there are some folks doing specific work where they are attempting to hold accountable at the state level. The opportunity zone proposals that a state government puts forward to the federal government because that's how it works. A state can put forward counties or regions with proposals for things that will aid that community's development. But again, what it is in many places around the country right now is business interests and developers who know how to operate those levers sort of saying, yes, here's a great opportunity for us. It's a blighted area, we're gonna buy up land, help us and in five years, there'll have been displacement and then we can make a mint on it. That's what's happening in a lot of spaces. So led by Congresswoman Sewell from Alabama, she's done an incredible job of helping make clear that states can actually regulate how those things have to go through a process of accountability to get to the proposal to the federal government. All this to say, a couple people at the state of Kansas are really committed to figuring out how residents can drive this process. And they invited us to help them design a process to bring state leaders, legislators, business leaders, community development organizers together and basically brainstorm on an approach so that the state would put forward proposals absolutely in service to resident desires and aspirations and needs. So I went a couple weeks ago and I led a day workshop for 50 leaders from around the state of Kansas. Legislators, business folks, civic folks and the goal of the day was to agree publicly in front of the state's secretary of state who was there for the day and who acknowledged at the end it was the first time in his two years in office that he has attended any public event outside the Capitol for more than an hour and a half. And he stayed the whole day. And the reason was these were folks that he's sort of accountable to in a lot of ways. He's an elected official and we were working. 45 seconds. Of course, thank you. We were working to come up with a set of values and intentions that this group could agree on in front of the secretary of state and then commit state funding to an engagement design for the following year to help make sure resident voices directed the proposals that go to the state government that then goes to the federal government. And the day went, it was a theater-based day. There was storytelling. There was improvisation. There was facilitation. And it was the stuff I know how to do as a director and a maker in that room with those folks. And as a result of that day, we're now helping them design a set of strategies for the 35 counties in Kansas where there'll be resident engagement in each county led by a resident who's becoming a champion advocate for that county. And we're using theater to sort of organize that process across the 35 counties. And it's very exciting, but it could really fail because there's a lot of layers that has to go through for what comes out of the grassroots work to actually be heard and moved forward. But we're trying to set practices of accountability based in ensemble at every level of the process. So that's the kind of work that I'm really, like I love being in a rehearsal room. Sorry, I'm 30 seconds over. I love being in a rehearsal room, but I had as much fun in that room with those 50 folks in Kansas as I do in any space I'm in with my company because purpose and creative practice felt very aligned that day. And our core values of racial and economic justice, which we bring into the room actively and vocally and are trying to work on in terms of resident engagement, are sort of at play in a way that hopefully feels like they can have a little bit of impact. So that's my example of sort of this deploying process outside of the rehearsal room towards purpose and impact. Thanks for my extra seconds, I apologize. So what we wanna do, we have 16 minutes and we wanna acknowledge that there's a lot of people in this room who probably have your own practices that relate to what we're describing. And so we either wanna make space for like a question for any of us to respond to or for someone to say, here's a way I'm thinking or working on this. But because we have for the most part been orthodox to this, we're gonna do the same thing. So somebody who is excited does not take the next seven minutes. So anybody who wants to ask or offer, I'm gonna sort of give you 60 seconds and he can start. And then at the end of the 60 seconds, I'm gonna with love and respect say we're gonna keep going. Does that sound okay? Okay, so Annie, the mic's coming over to you. Here it comes. And I'll start that clock and thanks for giving us the starting time. So I have a statement, an idea and a question. Is that okay? You have 60 seconds. So anyway, nothing as you know, nothing worth doing is without risk and the potential for failure. So hear her that you're doing that. The idea is I've always thought that one should work with like the EDC and get an empty parking lot and then invite all the homeless people into tents that you set up and then do performances in the tents. And it was all legal because you've rented empty parking lots. So I give that to you if that's at all useful. And then the third thing is I have to admit that in the past couple of shows that I've done that have toured the country based on life and wilderness, I've done post-performance panel conversations. And I'm starting to question the validity of that as a tool to reach out to the audience. I think we're all getting a little overloaded on post-performance panel discussions and I raised my hand as being guilty. So the question and with all these brilliant people in the audience I would love to hear what, it's what you said. What are people's ideas? If you're not giving up on shows, right? What are people's ideas for how one can enrich, envelop and expand a community experience around the show? That's a new idea. I imagine many people in here can respond. I have thoughts but I wanna start with the two of you if you have thoughts that you wanna respond to that with. What we've been doing is that if we get invited to do a one hour show, we actually only do a 15 or 20 minute show with people participating for the last five to 10 to 15 minutes of the first section and the majority of the time, the 45 minutes or 40s is spent in the work. So using games activities to involve the entire audience in a giant ass circle if necessary, out in the grass or in the gymnasium that we're in we specifically don't ask to be in theaters like this so that we can be physically engaged with the audience because we're focusing on trying to perform with and for workers so they learn about their rights and they can use those real expertise experiences to create images and to share traumas that are shared, right? Their shared experiences whether they got fired unnecessarily or someone touched them. Everyone has experienced this oftentimes in our audiences. So if we're working in a community that's worker-based instead of having a discussion about it we're doing it with them and that's the way we've been growing the collective because people keep coming back. Yeah, I think that's such a great question something I'm thinking about a whole lot like for this piece, we've got a process for the key stakeholders those most affected but there is a performance piece and so how do you give the audience that opportunity as well that isn't just talking because everything you said but how do you, and it also just doesn't put people on the spot because it's also can be really uncomfortable. So here's what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna call Mike Arode because he's like the master of it like he's so good at building in this opportunity these ways of building participation into the art in an artful way because I feel that's the key is that it has to have aesthetic and it has to have an aesthetic rigor and be part of the art. I wanna go beyond just like not turn to your neighbor like Jeff Sebel is somebody, is another person who's just a genius at it so like turning to these people who are like the best is we can get on the conference call. Thank you for that kind word. I wanna say that I think for me the starting place for thinking about that is actually that we whoever are making or shaping the event need to answer up front what the purpose is we have in mind. I find that there are three common purposes that folks bring to trying to answer the question you just asked and I find very often speaking about lying that folks including myself sometimes like self lie a little bit about what the purpose actually is and I find they kind of fall into three buckets. Purpose one is I want the chance to be affirmed in how powerful an experience this was for the audience and hence we're gonna stay and talk about it. Purpose two is I want people to have the chance to deepen their interaction internally and reflectively with the content and experience and I wanna make a way for that to happen for people with different learning and receiving styles and purpose three is there is a very specific impact or change practice that we aspire to that this event is impulsed by and we want to make way for these folks to participate in that movement for change and often people kind of say it's the third but it's kind of the first or second which is very human and it's not like that's a bad but that happens a lot and if it's really the third one then I think you either have to build it into the dramaturgy of the event in a way that makes the motor of that change aspiration be as important as anything else that's relevant to your aesthetic choices or you have to determine okay whatever your philosophy for change is whether it's communities of practice or organizing principles or radical change you then have to make space circles visiting folks who actually are connected to those issues and change opportunities for folks to connect is it dialogue is it an action that leaves the theater as the event ends you just have to decide like what's your theory of change in relation to your content and what's the degree that you wanna foreground those moments to be even more important than whatever was just shared or to be a part of what was just shared so I think like starting with answering those questions and then you know one can be really generative about the strategies for the specific event but I think you have to answer those questions first so other Anthony because I'm really excited because Anthony is at this convening and he is a lawyer and a professor of law at Georgetown University who brings students at Georgetown into community development circles so I don't care what you say I'm so happy you're here and now I'm really interested in what you say actually so well look this is phenomenal you guys are doing great transformative disruptive work and oh my god I'm so appreciative of the fact that you are in this space doing what you do I feel so alive by just listening to you and engaging you a bit as Michael said I do community development work law professor lawyer and I serve as a kind of developer I build affordable housing communities that are about being more than places where people kind of live each sleep go to work and repeat we're trying to create a community that's synergetic that is a place where people can collaborate around complex issues that underserved communities are facing because those problems are kind of like playing a game of whack-a-mole it's like you try to deal with one part of the problem something else pops up something else pops up right and so oftentimes you need kind of hybrid moving parts complex solutions to deal with the complex problems that people face and trying to provide a space where people feel as though they can step into ownership and agency in being partners working together to deal with those problems over the long run is a gap that we now have in our public-private partnerships where neither sector is really incentivized for the long-term play and commitment that's needed to deal with these problems and so I think that we need kind of social sector actors and organizations that can provide that kind of long-term social impact work here's the question I have for you the process is extraordinarily important the journey is often much more important than the designation right how do you within the process however create this kind of synergetic re-iterative approach in which the people who are part of the process become leaders of a process that continues without your having to be the intervener to orchestrate and direct the process right how do you assure that there is a kind of centrifugal force that emanates from your intervention that lives on beyond your particular intervention please do I just want to say thank you for that great question so last year I was really fortunate to be a catalyst initiative receiver of CPCP's work and I'm doing this work pretty voluntarily and just to have a small grant allowed me to have more focus time to because I said I am a precarious worker I piece together my paycheck from many jobs or volunteer things that someone generously decides to help me out a little bit and that focus allowed me to do train the trainer sessions where I said to Chicago workers collaborative let's do one monthly where instead of me I am still going to the separate sites but specifically where all of the sites come together and we have one session a month where Englewood is together with Labiita is together with Waukegan and we have four hours minimum together and so I want to teach them this technique because I go and do it there I go and do it there I go and do it there but as a result of that that's where I saw real change happen and their leadership of it whereas they thought it was fun and interesting and cool up until that point and then they realized that I was teaching process the why we're doing this what kind of setup would require this game versus that game how they're scaffolded and what the outcome could be if we do this direction versus that direction and only because I did that process of training the trainer like really thinking about it that my creating handouts that were bilingual even though my Spanish is atrocious because I'm illiterate and espanol I can speak it but I don't write it well but they're so generous and loving they took it anyways and use it and it's like and so I feel like that's been an important part of it and also when we get an invitation that I'm not available to I help them and support them and we decide how the experience is gonna go and who's gonna do which part of the session or that visit so that they feel super prepped because they don't have a theater degree they didn't take practicum hours to be a teaching artist out there in the world and I realize it's my job to make sure that I don't send them out there to sink and I want them to succeed and they are very successful without me I just am giving them another tool that goes along with all these other organizing things so that what you had asked about panel discussions like we still will do the organizing component of saying this Illinois Senator is placing this bill up for legislative to support workers rights in this way would you sign this petition before you go home or still adding these very active organizing elements to the experience for the public as well as physically doing it themselves? I find that people are really nice and people are typically kind and so and trying to just like there's two big challenges one is just getting them into the room to begin with and I feel pretty good about that because in my strategy there is like we're making this play they respond I'm not an actor I don't like theater I've never done it and I'm great but you are an expert in this and I don't want to go out and make something that's gonna make me look like an idiot and make more problems so I need you and folks are usually kind enough to show up and they'll show up once and then the hard part is how do you get them back and so to your question about leadership like how do you get them to own it it's you let them lead like you let them be experts at the thing that they're expert at and there's two parts like one is you talked about like we are artists we're directors part of it is like there's a dance that you make like you have to create enough structure which means that you're constantly leading and yet you also have to know when to let that kind of loosen your grip on that and let folks kind of take the way and just follow right but it's always I think here's where like it's what we do as artists and it's the skills that we bring as artists and so I feel like art makers are like that that's our expertise that's the expertise I bring in that's so important this is first of all you're the kindest man in the world so when you ask people to come and they look in your face and it's like all right he can do that start to cry it's true it's true he will yeah just on this notion of centrifugal force which is actually a really beautiful way to put it and professor Goldman is walking down so I know we're in our final moment okay that's lovely thank you can someone please take a picture from up there that would text her or something to me because this girl from Chicago is on a in a Georgetown event speaking and that's so crazy I have to show my mom someone should yeah well the other angle of that is Georgetown is pretty freaking lucky that you're here that's the deal that's the actual deal but just in relation to what you said we think a lot about capacity building and to get super micro about it there's the capacity building we do with the folks that we work with right like trying to pass on leadership and momentum but there's also like I feel like the most powerful moment I think for me that happened in Kansas at the end of that day was and it was kind of an accident because I realized that everyone in the room they kind of knew I was an artist but they thought I was like a professional facilitator or whatever which I don't know maybe but what I said to them at the end was I need you all to understand that I'm here in the space today not because I'm a trained like facilitator I'm here because I'm an artist and because I have skills that I have deployed today and every one of you there are artists in your communities who you only think of in terms of their creative output or their ability to contribute to the economic development of your community the mural, the small organization, whatever you need to realize that the kind of process that we're experiencing today that I happen to be guiding us through today you have artists in your communities who can lead process and work with you in ways that are different than you think and to me that's the centrifugal force that's the movement that we're all sort of a part of which is how are we making more visible the contributions, artists, designers, culture makers and heritage holders can make beyond the output that we are accustomed to them contributing to their communities and that means we're helping build their capacity the artists and designers, culture makers and heritage holders and we're helping those who don't think to reach out to them to reach out to them and be prepared to collaborate with them and we're helping the funders and the higher ed context validate those kind of collaborations as not just marginal sort of art but as a part of the heart of practice that creators can offer everywhere so that to me is like part of the centrifugal force that we're trying to establish in addition to passing on skills I would add there are aesthetic qualities to all of this like it is art with its own aesthetics and that's another conversation that I just want to always just keep on the on the front burner so that we can understand it as art making If we do another question we're going to go beyond our three or four minutes Emma do you want to put a question out and we'll let it hang in the air and that'll be our final question Just please And maybe I'll talk to you about it Jessica and Mark I think it's more specifically for those working as freelancers and independent practitioners and it relates to everything you were just saying as well Michael but I just would be curious to discuss with you how you think about capacity, logistics, fundraising partnership building and things like that when you do not have sustained organizational support and we don't have time for that now but I would love to have a conversation with you about that That actually raises the question we talked about how many people in this room have a home-based job in an institution whatever that means to you arts organization, university not for profit, whatever it is Just curious awesome and many people don't but just thinking about like a lot of the folks leading this work on the ground would not have their hands up for that one and so what is the precariousness of the movement that we're talking about supporting and building how can institutions support those workers in humane and ethical ways how do we create humane and ethical partnership And I would say if you are at an institution find those local artists doing it because I'm dealing with hungry people and I don't know how to feed them and I'm dealing with people that are almost homeless who have brought to my home because like I don't have a social service agency that will give them a shelter experience for a night or two and I'm not letting a single mom with her kids on the street but like my husband's like babe I was like so it's like find the artists and help them because I don't understand institutions but would really like to because I understand that there is money I just don't know how to act as I quite Cathy said everything we need is in the room an old organization and that is almost the beginning of a next conversation So let's stop on that and thank you very much Thank you Thank you Derek Thank you Jasmine, Mark, Michael Amazing We're going to take like a two minute sort of stay in your places as a few more people come in and as they set up the space for this next short performance and then we have a kind of we're not having the tent today as some of you heard already we have lunch in the building and a shorter lunch break with lots of like handheld options box lunches bagels so you can hopefully get your lunch at you know mill and get it on that break or throughout the early afternoon Come on in another moment of introducing someone who I know very very deeply and well Come on down Cathy Randalls yesterday very sweetly invoked earlier years of collaboration with her and the founding of a theater company that I was part of founding called Street Signs in Chicago which Rage Within Without Kathy's Piece was one of the first pieces we produced and that theater company we had in Chicago in the 1990s till 1999 and it moved with me to Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1999 where I got to find and work with the extraordinary Dala Pollock who's here who changed my life in every way and one of the things that happened a couple of years into being there as I got a call from another Northwestern grad who I had not known before that he was in North Carolina as well and wanted to meet and we did and that also completely changed my life he we started to work together he directed an extraordinary production of Jim Grimsley's Dream Boy Joe Calarco, Shakespeare's R&J a number of other projects in North Carolina for Street Signs and then when I came to Georgetown he with his wife Elizabeth Corley assumed the leadership of Street Signs so it's actually been one of the most moving parts of my personal professional trajectory to sort of have this little company we founded in Chicago be under the auspices of Joseph I learned so so much from Joseph about performance and particularly the craft of shaping and directing solo performance and developing new work and working with an individual voice he's extraordinary at it he runs the process series has run it for a decade or so in North Carolina he's an artist in residence at UNC Chapel Hill he is the artistic director of the Street Sign Center for Literature and Performance which feels good to say having founded it 20 some 26, 27 years ago and he introduced me to the extraordinary artist Cain Smigo who you're gonna see a piece of his work today I met Cain I think Ari is in the room with Ari Roth he came and did a section of his work and we were completely set on fire by it so excited to share some of that with you I'm gonna hand this over to Joseph Miegel it's always good to be in the room with Derek because we're often mistaken for the same person but and literally I'm his older dimmer twin and it's good to be here and one of the things just take a moment to breathe between each of these moments it feels to me that we all need to meditate a little bit I'm so pleased and honored to have been working with some really beautiful artists and I discovered Cain at UNC he's an alumnus there where he started Spoken Word now he's an international Spoken Word artist performing all around the world and the work is stunning I worked with him on a project he came back with three other artists from the Middle East around the Arab Spring and we did a piece called Poetic Portraits of a Revolution which we helped Cain's stage and then we took that forward and in the process series he brought me Temples of Lung and Air a hip hop odyssey of race and identity and I fell in love with the piece and we started working on it there we premiered it at Playmakers in August in the PRC Squared part of their series and we're going to be doing it in the United Solo Festival in October in New York and at Detroit Public Theater in November so you're going to see just a few scenes today from it and I think it will be a salve and a way of moving forward throughout the rest of the day so here it is Temples of Lung and Air and Cain's Mika How's everybody doing? You good, you having a good week? Nice, I was lucky enough to be in town during another program that I run with a global hip hop artist who are visiting from seven countries and it's just, they were here, yes some of you might have come to downstairs we had a little mini performance, they killed it but you know we all have our different ways of connecting with the world for me it's been hip hop since I was a kid I can remember the first album that I ever got was on cassette tape from the 90s which meant you had to fast forward to all the wax songs and it was by this group called Chris Cross which were, at that time they were the big kids for me but for most of us they were the little kids, right they were these 13 and 14 year old rappers from Atlanta produced by Jermaine Dupri and I got their cassette tape when I was seven years old as a gift from my mom and I think I wore my jeans and jacket backwards for like half a day you know on a Saturday in the safety of my own home and then quickly realized that it was really hard to walk it looked ridiculous and it was probably never gonna be a thing so that was my first experience with hip hop and my mom's partner for my whole childhood a man who was kind of a second father figure to me Burley used to always say that hip hop is nothing new, rap is nothing new it was the same thing that the last poets and the Watts prophets and Gil Scott Herron and Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Brock and a whole bunch of other people I never heard of did back in the 50s and 60s and of course he was right I just didn't know it at the time but hip hop in the modern sense is we understand it first came about in the late 70s, early 80s and in the beginning there were two main figures in hip hop that were really important the MC and the DJ in the very beginning the DJ was actually the star of the show the master of ceremonies what we now call a rapper was just a hype man the person saying make some noise for DJ so and so there's a owner of a Toyota Corolla outside and your lights are on that was the MC but soon as MC started rhyming their speech sliding in some clever wordplay suddenly the spotlight shifted from the fingers behind the turntable to the mouth behind the microphone but DJs kept up to through innovation with two turntables instead of one they could load in new records and switch between two records with a cross fader and the music never stopped and with good timing the cross fader could move back and forth between the record on the left and the record on the right kind of blending them in different ways like boom, scat, boom, scat, boom, scat, boom, boom now I've kind of grown up between songs between left and right my mother and Burley in North Carolina during the year and my dad, brother and grandparents on vacations they all live together up in West Virginia now grandma is a hefty woman every recipe gets a stick of butter and she loves feeding people the same the fame is cookies every Christmas on number one year she made 3,000 cookies no lie, she'll sit at the dining room table patient as a watchmaker learning the secrets of time until 30 metal tins gather like pyramid stone in the kitchen counter each guarding a different flavor of sweet they're rumballs that my brother likes to pop on a handful and try to get tipsy peanut blossoms German chocolate and ice cream to have no ice or cream but grandma I swear they melt in your mouth and they do and her version of gingerbread that she calls honey cookies cut into the shape of Christmas characters you know little red candy balls make Rudolph's nose and frosty buttons and every year among sheet trays of sugared snowmen and iced reindeer with limbs spread wide as Chippendale dancers in their closing pose are the gingerbread man with penises and little red candy BBs bright enough to guide a slave through a blizzard this is not a metaphor they're my grandfather's creations his tiny anatomically speaking contribution to the season's good tidings now grandma is the one who's kind of mischievous she's the one who's kiddin' around throwing in a dirty joke here and their grandpa is Catholic quiet pretty serious he's a World War II vet and my dad says it took him decades before he spoke a word about it even though he was on kids he lost his best friend Tex and probably some of his humanity but the balls of the gingerbread man are like the cracks in his grumpy old man dogma like horse play in the barracks from the purple-hearted boy he somehow managed to smuggle out of war jokes told over a breakfast of sea rations the last morning he saw his best friend alive and the sweet smell of grandma's perfume on nights he awoke in silent fever and realized her body was too warm to be a foxhole he's got a wisp of a dozen hairs left on the top of his head that I like to style into a point and put the Dairy Queen soft serve twist on the end he wears Walmart jeans he's stacked up past the belly button in Don's racism like a hand-me-down that was once called fashion early my mom eat when I'm four he's got a master's in African-American history and political science he'd been an activist in the 70s and 80s and a professor at a college in Baton Rouge, Louisiana grandma and grandpa call him Barley when I see them my father Chuckle says your mother sure does love chocolate my brother flicks a confederate flag zippo lighter he got from a friend at schools I see the stars and bars light up my neighbor's window his apartment building back home Barley's face becomes a silent war as he explains the origin 13 stars on a flag look a lot like 13 clansmen doing jumping jacks white freckles on the cheeks of the devil and he's grinning white rebel fleet writes quite legibly black elegy squeezed from the meadow don't tell me it's the symbol of our pride in the south several, several, several, several some people try to say came it's a symbol of southern pride but the truth is it was created to promote white supremacy by a government that fought to ensure that black people black, the blacks don't know how to talk right Cain most of them are flunkies they don't care for their kids they're not fathers not fathers the man was not my father teaching me to play chess I teach my homeboy Sergio across the street in my Sega Genesis collects dust while I queens cat fight on the stoop grandma says Halle Berry is a pretty black woman grandpa asks how Barley's doing smiling as he says the name my father says your mother sure does love chocolate in first grade my mom sent me careening over pine cones and grass and my bike becomes my spaceship my teacher that year is Mrs. McKnight she's black we learned basic arithmetic in February study Dr. King and Rosa Parks grandma says whoopie Goldberg is uglier than sin grandpa tells war stories claims you know the blacks were scaredy cats I argued with them until my tears chin strap my father scolds them both for being racist but then asks how Barley's doing in third grade Barley takes me to see Jet Lee and Jackie Chan on the big screen at a kung fu film festival and 10,000 imaginary bad guys die of roundhouse kicks in my living room we learned our times tables that year read our first novels write short essays grandpa says black folks can't speak proper English grandma calls Brazil nuts with the word calls them toes dad says chocolate now fourth grade is North Carolina history tar heels tobacco auctions and the Appalachian mountains we learned that slavery was here but it ended they tell us grandpa says Thomas Jefferson treats his slaves like family the Cardinals of the state bird, the dogwood, the state tree and flower Jim Hunt as governor we learned that segregation was here but it ended too racism was here but now black folks can be anything they want grandma says they shouldn't be married to white folks though I asked Barley in my mind why aren't you married they tell me a piece of paper doesn't make their love more real Barley puts me to bed rubs my back until I fall asleep in the summer my father puts me to bed rubs my back until I slip into a memory the first time I hear someone call the N word is kindergarten I'm six a black neighbor two years younger named Isaiah joins us to play when an older white kid named Jonathan calls him the word his smile opening slow and silent as the flame of a blowtorch and a house of wax I watched tears melt from Isaiah's four-year-old eyes and my cousin she's like the only teenager on the scene chases Jonathan until he escapes into a drain pipe like some deleted scene from Stand By Me looking back I know he was just a parakeet in Jim Crow's living room I mean we all parakeets of one doctrine or another I was a songbird caught between anthems between left and right for far left and far right the music in my head getting louder Barley's voice and my grandparents jumbled like a rookie DJ fumbling with the crossfader Brat Brat Reagan Ronald Reagan was a wonderful president Brat Brat Reagan was a right-wing demagogue a fanatic right-wing fanatic president wonderful fanatic in the morning in the morning in the morning this is national public radio you're at morning welcome to the Rush Limbaugh show in the morning black leaders met today in the morning black leaders met in the morning look put it to you this way the NFL all too often looks like a game between the bloods and the crypts without any weapons there I said it in the morning black leaders in the morning a game between bloods and crypts without any weapons in the morning blood without any weapons in the morning black leaders morning black leaders morning black leaders morning black leaders morning blood without any weapons are you confused? I was too so in fourth grade Barley comes in my class to speak teaches about something other than tar heels and tobacco auctions when he enters a room full of crayons drop a kid digging up his nose freezes mid nostril as puzzled eyes ping pong between us it's like Bart Simpson turning in his homework baby bop cussing out you know Barney or the whole Power Rangers team dying in a pool of blood at the end of an episode these things don't happen in a fourth graders understanding of the world white kids have white parents that's your daddy he's my mom's boyfriend I say I stare at the carpet fingers twirling hair but they ain't married marriage is the state religion that's not in the textbooks I barely speak to Barley that day Benedict Arnold with a juicy juice moustache after school my mom tells me Barley says I acted a little strange in class she asked what happened but the question festers oozes and a bubble bath war between G.I. Joe's and Ninja Turtles I wonder why I acted so awkward in class it's like I'm picking a scab on a wound I don't remember getting something has entered me and I was always the cultured kid George Washington Carver invented peanut butter before I ever read Friends Shaw I was a blind intersection Rosa Parks raised at the junction of white bathed in smart boy basking proud in the slick shine of this baptism fourth grade the first time I smelled the gasoline and realized fire sounds like a whisper and I too can be a burning threat the trusted steed discovering the Trojans lurking inside it now most days are smooth blue certainty this one was lightning making lanterns of the storm clouds a jagged truth illuminating what I hadn't seen before the way Burley's skin always entered a room before he did the way my grandpa pronounced the N word just like the kid in my neighborhood the way my father always said your mother sure does love chocolate and the words had become me how I became silence holding an X-Men lunchbox my body a slur spoken in my inside voice a parakeet whistling Dixie all along thank y'all thank you so much oh man thank you thank you so much I'll invite Derek back to the stage I really appreciate the opportunity to share a little piece from the show and thank you all for coming out and hopefully if any of you all live in the New York area you'll come out on October 6th to United Solo when I have the show much love peace y'all so we're at lunch break but let me just explain at 12.45 in this space which is 25 minutes from now we'll be beginning Love Dub theater company's stage reading of Miranda Rose Hall's A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction at 1 p.m. in the Divine Theater we'll be beginning E for Monsours How to Have Fun in a Civil War which will be followed by an excerpt from Imagination Stages Oya May the Beautiful which are sort of going to be in dialogue in that conversation that's about a 50 minute play within a 10 or 15 minute excerpt after it and this is a 75 minute reading that will then go into a not so much a traditional post-show discussion but a more expansive panel moderated by Roberto Levito with Jessica Grindstaff from Phantom Lim and Annalisa Diaz and the Love Dub team talking about grief and hope and climate and performance work so you have good hard choices to make and there's lots of food in portable there's box lunches as well as bagels and other portable things that you can eat hopefully quickly but also sneak things you know quietly into