 Everybody do is take your chair and switch in a little closer. You need to see some camera here. So I mean, maybe it's going to remain. You tell us, right? And I'm not sure if we're streaming yet. So I want to say hello to anybody who's playing TV. And thanks for joining us. If you tweet or Twitter, and you want to tweet any of the comments, just use the hashtag Daveois. You can also use the hashtag NewPlayTV. Daveois is D-E-S-V-O-I-X. Hashtag Daveois, hashtag NewPlayTV. And I'd like to welcome everybody. Thank you so much for coming to talk with us about... I think we're missing a couple of people who are... I think there are a couple of women who aren't at this table. Where are they? So Liz, why don't you take a place at the table? Huh? And where is Mila? Come up here, please. And your compatriot is... Masha. Masha is there. So you guys can... Some people can sit over here, too. Everybody wants to sit facing the audience. We're such good people. Okay, so... It's just, you know, in the DNA. I'm going to turn this over. I'll do an exit sign. In case of an emergency, there is an exit on the house right and the house left, and go out the front door. So for those of you who don't know, my name is Amy Mueller, and I'm the Artistic Director of Playwrights Foundation. And we are a new play development lab here in San Francisco to champion playwrights in the development of their work and support them and the community in bringing new work to the U.S. theater program. Now we're certainly going to get to some of these. So what we're going to do is we are going to ask some questions and we'll start by having... I think what I'll do is pass the microphone and everybody can introduce themselves. We'll start with the people who are currently at the table. And we're going to be asking questions and people at the table will weigh in on the question. And then if there are any comments that are directly related to that, just, you know, make yourself known. But at some point, probably in, you know, 15 minutes after we get started, I'm going to call some other people to come up to the table. These folks will become part of the circle and the people at the table will talk about the second question, et cetera. Okay? So we're going to... I'm going to turn the mic over to Phil Arnaud, who's going to give a little bit of context for today's conversation about international theater and international writing, in particular, playwriting. I run something called the Center for International Theater Development and it's really a front for me to get a lot of people into a lot of trouble. Most of my work has been in Eastern Europe, although I did spend a decade in East Africa. And about 10 years ago, there was really something new on the horizon in Russia there were some new voices that were getting heard. And I've been taking a lot of Americans, Kerry was with me in Moscow a couple of years ago, Rob and Paige have been over in that part of the world with me. And indeed, there were some 60 individual Americans who went and saw the work of the Kresnikov brothers, the work of Olga Mukina, these real pioneer playwrights and got very excited about it. And then we saw the translations and they were British translations and they went over like a fart in an elevator to the Americas. So I was able to make that case, not fart in an elevator, I think, but some other way. And in three years, we ended up with a project that actually translated 26 new contemporary ground scripts by 14 live, living Russian artists, Russian playwrights, and it's on a CD. And if anybody would like a copy of these, these are American English translations. One of them was a very successful adaptation where it was a translator and the playwright, Kate Myer Ryan, did Olga Mukina's Tonya Tonya. You can just sign up Susan Struth over here, works with me and we'll make sure we get you one of those. A very interesting follow-up, though, was how to get new American work into Russia. And it was real clear that American playwrights were on Mount Rushmore, it was Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller and maybe half of Edward Albany and that was about it. But there was this new writing movement in Russia and there was an audience, I think it was looking for, we believe there was an audience looking for new American voices. So I took four partners, people that I've worked with, institutions that I've worked with a year and a half ago to Russia, Sundance Institute, the O'Neill Center, Humanifestable of New Plays in New York Theater Workshop. And these Americans spent ten days talking to everybody and his brother and recommended 23 scripts that we thought would be of interest from that very short but very deep connection. And then I told the Americans goodbye and then actually there are two people at this table with the Russians who were a team of eight readers, eight Russian readers who could read English and they recommended seven plays and four of them were adaptations with very well-known contemporary Russian writers. Yuri Klodnya is a rock star playwright and he translated Susan Laurie Park's Book of Grace. Misha Dornikov, another rock star, translated Andy Baker's Aliens. Yurikaev translated Bogozian's Talk Radio. Maxine Kurskin, who's got a lot of productions now in this country, translated Adam Rapp's first play, Not Turn, and then straight translations, not adaptations of Chuck Me, New Playwright Deborah Zoey Lawford, and Nilo Cruz. Those translations were finished about six or seven months ago and there were eight mini-festivals all across Russia where there were readings of these plays and I'm happy to say that right now Andy Baker is being called the little Chekhov that there's a production opening of Andy's in Melanus Theater, there's a pop-up theater. I think she's got six productions, five of Aliens in one of the Circle Mirror transformation, Susan Laurie Parks. It really was a magic key and it also was a magic key for these colleagues of mine to be here because it was a very successful project. It was funded by our government. Imagine that. The Method of the President of Russia, the President of our country, the first state visit Obama made was to Russia and he bypassed Mr. Putin because Mr. Putin was not the President, Mr. Putin was the Prime Minister. And so Method of Obama signed this thing called the Bilateral Presidential Commission and this is why we all should read the international section of our newspapers because it was a $50 million fund for education, culture and sport and somehow some of it dropped into a cultural, very aggressive culture that Lee Brewer went over and directed the same shepherd play and a big project and we were able to do this project with the American translations and these six people who are with us today who represent theaters from across Russia. They're young producers, directors, festival directors and they're part of the name of the project is Beyond the Capitals, Not the Usual Suspects. These folks that you're going to meet today are in important places right now. In 10 years they're going to be running a lot of important things and in 20 years they're going to be running everything. Really smart. We started in Baltimore. We spent five days in Austin, Texas. We're here and we build in New Orleans which I think really shows what American theater is. Not the East Village as much as I love the East Village. But that's us and we're really happy to be invited. Sorry, that took so long. No, no, it's perfect. That is a really perfect introduction. Thank you. It was fascinating. So what I'm going to do is pass the mic around. Just introduce yourself. So you have a sense of losing the room. We'll pass it all the way around. And then I'm going to ask... Actually, no, we're not going to do that just because of the time. We're going to just introduce people at the table and then I'm going to ask you guys to talk a little bit about a question that I have. Okay? I'm Liliana. I'm from Russia from St. Petersburg. Thank you for asking. I'm publishing director of New Theater in St. Petersburg in the center of town or city for young directors, for young artists, for young actors. It's a new place. We found it one year ago. And it's a place for new drama, for contemporary project. We perform our shows daily. From Russia, Italy and American playwrights now. We have in the repertoire now three plays from American playwrights. It's Aliens from Annie Baker. It's Big Love from Chuck Me. It's The Days from Deborah Zellhofer. And we plan a book of grace. Yes. One or two years ago, we did the first week festival in Russia. And we did the festival for... Every year we did the festival for young directors. And each year, we performed 1935 shows for other directors, producers, for people. And... Yes, it's good. That's all. What do you want to tell you? This is the only... This is a private theater. This is no state money. This is her vision. She runs an agency in St. Petersburg, in Moscow. And has really committed herself to making this extraordinary, vibrant place in Petersburg. So my name is Maria Krupnikov. Just Masha. I am freelance, I've mentioned, facilitator for contemporary drama, contemporary drama theaters in Moscow. I work within, in some way, with the main four contemporary drama stages in Moscow, which is practical theater, dog theater, Joseph Boyce theater, and the Center for Drama and Directing of Kazantsev and Roshin. We're doing very different projects in the Center for Drama and Directing. We're a project which is named which is the workshop for contemporary young directors, and we cooperate in doing the shows of contemporary Russian drama, American drama, and we're cooperating with the Yale School of Drama. We did a project with Netherlands and some other international projects are coming. And it is a place where the young directors can try their power, creativity, and do the draft productions, which will be judged by the committee of professionals, and the best show will stay in the future. Okay, Guardian, I'm along for the ride in this four-city tour, which is why I'm hanging out with these folks here. And I've also had a chance to go, particularly through Philip's auspices to Eastern Europe, and ride on theater there recently for America. I'm Marcus Gardner, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm born raised proudly from the Bay Area, and I'm here because of my play Every Tongue Confessed, which is about 1990 church burning in Alabama and was translated into French. I'm Samuel Gallet, I'm a Bayerite for the festival. I live in French and I work with different theater, sorry, in France, and I am also a member of the Kobe Artificature, I think that you speak about it. Hi, I'm Liz Duffy-Adamsen, I'm a playwright, and mostly East Coast New York Massachusetts that I work out, I'm so lucky, I sort of have a theatrical one in San Francisco, and we're coming out here for like 12 years. And I'm here because, hey, oh, my play is being translated into French, or I guess it has been. The reckless Ritz and Spoodle Charter, they were the train play, which Rob directed in San Francisco like 10 years ago. Yay! And it's been a fantastic time, and thank you for bringing me. So, first question I'm going to ask you guys here at Daniel to respond to, and I'm going to ask you to keep your responses to a minute or so, just so we can push forward. The first question has to do with, we're going to just talk a little bit about playwriting and the role of the playwright in various countries. So we'd like to hear a little bit about the past, and I think I'd like to keep it to about 10 years, you know, 5 to 10 years. So what was the role of the playwright within the last 10 years before the present moment? What was the role of the playwright in your city, in your country, or in your experience? The role of playwright within the context of making theatre, making theatre. Okay. So to my point of the 10 years ago, the thing that we now call the contemporary drama in Russia was only at the beginning, and it started with partly intervention from the British Council, which brought to Moscow the Eurocourt people, which the first verbatim trainings and masterclasses. And this format was so appreciated by the Russian playwrights because they had classical training about what is a play, how it's done, how it's structured, but they were not dealing with the contemporary material to mean to use and using the firsthand information in the making place. And this house started the theatre dog. They were doing verbatims. They did several very socially oriented and harsh and sharp plays, and they built a theatre in the underground room of one of the houses. They started to attract the attention of the theatre dog, DLC, and how it started. And now it is growing and growing and we calculate with very different countries and maybe I'll stop here. I can say something very quickly. I think 10 years ago what we saw in Russia was the beginning of voices that were fully formed after the political changes. I saw playwrights and I saw directors that straddled the old and the new. But 20 years, 10 years ago was 10 years after those changes and I think there's something very unique about both the directorial artour voices and also the playwrights. Maybe I'm a bit wrong because maybe it started a bit earlier than 10 years ago. It is somewhere in the mid-90s. Yes. And the thing why it's happened, it is because the theatres, big theatres, Moscow theatres, regional theatres were not accepting the young writers and young writers has no way to realise themselves to keep their writing too because dealing with the literary officials of the theatres was not a very easy thing and they were very aware of what's happening but they were tend to use the classical texts and foreign texts that were already published and proved themselves. And there was no way to find the new writing in the theatre at that time. Well, this is a huge question and I'm sort of a bit darkened but I'll say just from my own perspective about 10 years ago here in the Bay Area that was right after the immediate wake of 9-11 and for me some of the strongest and most important work of new playwrights at that moment was done in highly collaborative situations with rooms like Campo Santo or were coming from outsider perspectives, particularly Middle Eastern perspectives for example in Golden Thread Productions but they were plays that were taking on and trying to ask the questions, make the debates, create the language and vocabulary and for what was happening and basically to pick up the slack where mainstream discourse had totally failed I think all of us just succumbing to a narrow sort of top-down narrative these were, so this was a very productive and very passionate time in which a lot of very important work was necessarily directly political was coming out and I think that was the immediate context for the work of the playwrights as well. Yes, I agree, I think 9-11 is definitely a marker for at least aesthetically in terms of aesthetics and playwriting. I think previously writers were told to ask or asked to write where they come from and that 9-11 in a really interesting way sort of united us and people were writing more about what was inside of them some of the major questions that needed to be asked about our government and about how we interacted with one another which I think is important. I still feel like writers were expecting the form which hasn't changed out of the school of school or arts in that moment and I feel like commissions really have changed the game a lot because commissions when they started the unspoken language was write what we want you to write and because we're a producer but you couldn't say that so writers were kind of confused because they were trying to write what they were asked to write but they couldn't write that so now I think the language has changed where in 10 years it's changed where writers are saying I need to write this can you support this and so what's really interesting is theaters I was wanting to support writers in that play which is becoming which has a huge impact on the United States just great. I think there is a lot of lots of playwrights in France and the reason interest huge interest for new writers and new playwrights in France there are lots of different aesthetics and perhaps in the last 10 years I'm not sure but I think there is a development of contact with the the other writers in other countries and more and more theater who are interested to read the text for their rights and so perhaps there is before the playwrights was often outside the theater and now lots of people try to to permit the playwrights to find his place with the team of the theater in the theaters and so I think there is lots of meeting between the authors with the playwright and lots of people try to work together and find new ways to go I'm so interested in what you guys are saying about to think but I think two things in the last 10 years I think there are sort of two different from my point of view trends or developments or ways that playwrights are thinking about things and one is aesthetic in that I think it is possible thinking that the idea that aesthetics the aesthetics of mainstream naturalism versus poetic nonlinear theater are not oppositional but are on a continuum and we don't have to be in our different camps and that there is the kind of storytelling that playwrights do is not so rigid I mean there was a young woman in the audience last night at Marion's talk back who who said she was like this is great this is not a theatricality we don't have that here but we don't have it in the mainstream so I want to encourage her she's probably not here at the moment other people but it's been around for decades so I'm hoping that the barrier is breaking down because theater is really ought to be bigger than that I think that's a conversation that's been happening and the other thing is kind of a little bit like what you were saying about playwrights being a part of the theater and not on the outside and that's a huge part of the conversation that's been developing people that have complained about playwrights leaving the theater to write for television because they can make a living in the television in television and with Todd London's book which every American here has read Outrageous Fortune pointing out that playwrights they cannot make a living and our government doesn't support individual artists and so and Lynn Outrage one year had the most produced play in America and she couldn't live on the royalties because for one thing the original producer company theater took 40% of her royalties as sub-wrights on top of other things so this is a huge conversation and I'm hoping that this is something that now things are starting to shift around and what are new models and playwright collaboratives like 13P and not unlike maybe, not unlike you guys you're writers cooperative these are new things that are maybe starting to build and they're very interesting role game very good wow there's a lot of good for thought so now let's open it up to anybody who has a comment they'd like to make please introduce yourself before you speak so my name is Laurent Muleisen I am working at Paris as director of international center dedicated to playwright translations into French called Maison entrenusitez hang on for a second I think it's still we can see them if they can step up oh sure sorry yeah so which is a huge association of professional translators who dedicate themselves to translations of foreign plays into French and also literary advisor at Comédie Française which is not the purpose why I'm here the that's why I'm here the secondary in this context and I wanted to react to what you said about what happened in Russia because I think that I'm not sure it was a question that there is from one part the job of the Royal Court not only in Russia but rather in the north and east in the all the east block after 90 or 91 which was quite a huge aggressive politic of exchange and bringing new rules and new context but I thought there has been also in Russia a tradition of people a little bit older that this generation of V.D. Baev and Brasov-Bresnikov who studied for instance with Koliada in Ekaterinburg which began their careers during the communism who was the first that were aware about the new possibilities to write new drama incorporating the Russian tradition which is a huge and solid tradition I mean not everything began only after 91 there are extraordinary plays of the 60s, 70s, 80s in Russia so I just wanted to ask if it's not also a question of continuation of confrontation of different models within the Russian culture and with let's say in a certain way the western culture which is for me maybe more interesting and you can start much more with these connections that we say the royal court came and we discovered what's new writing because you have a tradition of writing in Russia which is huge and which is wonderful would you like to respond to that and then if anybody else yes, alright there were workshops of Arbuzov from which the Ugarov I don't know about Koreda but Ugarov, Filina Grimina and some other playwrights agreed it was bringing up atmosphere where they grow and when the years are collapsed and they found out themselves without no way working with the theaters because theaters were not accepting them and theaters were not knowing what to do in this new situation of economy or what's happening in the country with all these things that started happening in the beginning of the nineties and they found themselves that they need to organize something and they starting uniting themselves and finding opportunities to build new theater so yes, the beginning was with them I I'm not a historian of the theater I know a very little bit about what happened in Yikatsenburg but Yikatsenburg became the very important support for the theatrical life in Russia because of the Koreda because of the Bagaev because of the plays appearing there and it was completely unique thing in the thematics that they were covering in the understanding of the world because they were speaking about very dark, very difficult, very painful things and it was very difficult to what was happening in Moscow and there were another place on the Russian map where Vadim Livanov who was working with the Young Spectator Theater at some point and was writing plays and after he graduated from the Moscow Richard Institute get back there and he started understanding that there is no way that young writers can get their way into theater and he united some young people around himself and so the Telyatsen effect appeared where the Klavtyev, the Dorinkov brothers and some other young writers appeared who are now like the most known writers in Russia and it is very important I think for Russia this small sports where the a bit older generation understand that they need to support the young writers and they keep an eye on them and they suggest them opportunities for example the Lubimovka and Nugarov-Yasnoy-Palano laboratories that they were doing it was amazing thing and it is not happening now because of the different things economy and there is no place and there are no thinking about other things but it was a time which gave opportunity young writers to get to know each other, to get to know young directors, to get to know young producers and bring off the new project I just want to say Nikolai Koliada K-O-L-Y-A-D-A is is a monumental figure in Russian theater he's never bought into Moscow he stays in Yekaterinburg he'll take productions into Moscow and they're mostly hummed and I'll take people to see the same productions and Bob Falls wanted to get his Tennessee Williams streetcar to Chicago so there's one interesting article written by a woman named Murph Henderson in American theater about four or five years ago on the Yekaterinburg scene I'm locked in I've got up from Australia and the country that was colonized by the British I'm going to pick up on what you said to about the Royal Court and the fact that the Royal Court a lot of British theaters seem to go into places and I feel make people playwrights feel like they're actually going and saving them or showing them a new way and it's been saying because I think that it's not necessarily the truth like people on what you're saying really kind of agree with I guess writers being in touch with their own history and their own culture I guess the other thing that I kind of wanted to point out but then the fact that in Australia I think we live in the shadow of a lot of particularly British traditions and a measure of our work up to British traditions and often the work isn't as good as what's been done in Australia anyway is the impact of the internet and particularly I guess if you live in an isolated place like Australia I think that the fact that we live in a globalized world now has had a huge impact on writing and the theatre and I'm curious whether that's so in Russia I'm assuming that it's the same everywhere but we have the opportunity to kind of make global collaborations, we have the opportunity to see work, to read work, to access people's manifestos or whatever and I think it's something also that's shifted our audiences and their expectations because if you can get on the internet and be entertained or you can access a whole lot of information it also means that as playwrights we have to actually step up to provide people with something that's more instantly accessible possibly more confronting and so I'm just kind of interested in what people have to think about that Did you understand her? Did you understand her? Did you understand her? Did you understand her? Did you understand her? Did you understand her? Did you understand her? Did you understand her? I wanted to say that I'm very interested in what you just said because I was at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York does a lot of international theatre events and does wonderful international theatre events and the Royal Court was there with their project with Syrian, Moroccan and Lebanese playwrights so I saw some of these readings and I thought my god this is naturalist theatre this is Tennessee Williams what the hell is this all about and then I kept my mouth shut because I don't do anything else but I it's very interesting what you just said because I think that it confirms an anxiety behind it This is Judith Miller by the way I'm sorry to just speak English but for her it is par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport par rapport artistically and intellectually to confront the different points of view on the world. The cooperative work allows them to confront these different aesthetics and understand their place in the literary world through the aesthetics of their development. This is a material of the press and of the present. The other concept is the poetic consultations, where the challenge is to be able to write very quickly with the people we meet, with the places we live, and to multiply, as I said, the points of view and different aesthetics, different mode of representation. They have a multiplicity of things that they do together, even though each one is running from his or her own aesthetic. One of them was this kind of literary ball that we saw, which people create a piece together by creating a storyboard and developing different parts of it and inserting songs. That's what we saw on dance. Part of it also is a kind of documentary theater that they do. And I kind of remember this. Based on newspaper reports and so on, so they'll build things out of that. And then the third one is located in specific spaces, right? So they're interested in exploring specific spaces, and each writer comes to these different projects with their own aesthetic. They're very good. The aesthetics, what it could be before, is that authors can oppose each other with aesthetics. And there, I would say that the work in common, the authors, don't oppose each other anymore. That's what we discuss at the table around our respective work. But their agency, that's it. It's kind of movement from aesthetic to aesthetic. I think developing aesthetic that happens within the group because of this. Now the people give up their own aesthetic, but there's obviously some manipulation, some movement, right? Can I just sort of, well, and then, yeah, I just want a little tiny thing. I think we all have to, in a sense, we all have to resist colonization. Even internally, playwrights in America have to resist the pressure to colonize their own aesthetic to find production. And the major places that produce sometimes exert a kind of aesthetic colonizational pressure. I'm still jet-lagged. Anyway, that makes any sense. But I also realised that totally relating to that English-Australian thing. Maybe, I'm Nathalie Filion, one of the playwrights. And because my play has been translated, I'm also a director. Maybe I've asked your question. I think we French people somehow have, anyway, another tradition. And the way we colonize our wooden sets, it's about playwriting. It's more by through TV or movies, things like that. And in the playwright, we still have, we're still very influential. There's still a big work on language itself, a link to poetry, to literature somehow, or Latin theatre also, which is still, yeah, we come from Latin theatre. And sometimes we forget about it, but you can still feel it, you know, in some writing. I don't feel so much of this colonization in the playwriting, but more in the whole imagination process, you know, all narratives on TV, movies and so on. I would say that. That's also why sometimes it's difficult to export French. But it happens, see, we're here. And I don't think we have the three of us, especially British kind of writing, not at all, not at all. And the way here, so it's fantastic. I just want to respond to your comment about, or your question about the internet and its impact on theatre in the United States. Twitter is having a huge impact. Word of mouth is still the most powerful marketing tool. And so Twitter is a really great way to look. I'm out of play. It's really great to come see it. So theatre is really taking advantage of that. You also see in terms of blogs that blogists aren't becoming theatre critics and people are really playing close attention to that, which is really great. I had a really powerful experience. A few months ago, I went to see water by the school for our first aid, which is recently with a Pulitzer. And it was maybe even in previews. And the play, 70% of the play, takes place online through these chat rooms. And so half of the audience was laughing. They were very young. And half of the audience was clearly upset. They were much older. And so an older lady walked up to me and she said, What is so funny? What is funny about this play? And I tried to explain it, and I realized she didn't understand how a chat room works. And so it was a really great way of actually engaging her and what she understood is she explained to her husband and at act two, this was an admission, they were laughing. And so I thought, you know, there's something obviously that theatre needs to do to introduce this world of play to the audience. But there was a really great moment where I felt like, you know, what I really try to do in my work is unite younger people and older people, people from different backgrounds, people who speak different languages. Theatre has the power to do that. Natalie said a couple of days ago yesterday, theatre is one world and I really believe that. And so what I hope that the internet can do is actually help us start a conversation in our own communities with people who we live next door to who just are actually from a different generation. And I think it does have the opportunity to do that. If I could add something about French theatre, I would say the main difference also, because maybe I'm a little darker, I'll be a little sound a little darker. Because nothing has really changed. I mean, the main landscape is very classical. And the contemporary playwrights, I feel a little ghetto. Things are going a little better, little by little, very slowly. And so in another way, maybe... So they don't need us. I would say I don't feel I'm needing my own country. Really. And so it's so important to be approach, but also when you're not needed, then you don't have to be free. I mean, I feel, because they don't expect anything from me. And it's a paradox, maybe. But these events are going abroad. I mean, for me, I don't know, for you, but then we come back home with a little very sexy area, you know? So thank you so much. Because at home, really, I don't feel needed. Surely you have an audience. I mean, I guess what you're saying about the growth of an audience through a play that's looking at the internet means that you're getting a lot of people in and building a new audience, which, I mean, I'm curious if you're talking about the sort of audiences that you're getting to see theatre in France. And the implication is that you're losing the audiences of a particular type and that you're not coming to see the work or that they're not interested in the work. Is that my understanding, right? No, it's that we have many... How to say? It's a very sophisticated system. And with many, many theatres, national theatres all over the country, where there's money everywhere, I mean, this theatre average. I wouldn't use a metaphor. This is like castles. There are still many castles with many queens. Not many queens, just many kings. And these castles are just beginning to open for playwrights. They'll just house it for a week. Just like that. Now what has slowly changed is that there are some kings and one or two queens who are playwrights who now own the castles, some castles. So that is... It's stupid to choose this metaphor. It's easier. And about it, so then suddenly you can come in the castle and say, oh, wow, that's fantastic. Because then you have all the means to... And there's money, there's money, of course. Also, I would say that in France what is complicated is that there are many kind of subsides, many helps, but they're not linked to each other. And the main difficulty is that you can be helpful writing, for instance, really, you can have money for writing, to be produced, it's something else. And that's the main difference, which I appreciate a lot in Germany or in Great Britain, whatever, you can think about them, you know, the way. It's why they're interested in play. They want to go to the production. And in France very often there are so many readings. You write a very good play and you're invited everywhere, really, really, really, really. And everybody sees the play and it's so well, I didn't want to be produced. And it's all... French paradoxes is not only in the cooking. No, it's French paradoxes almost everywhere. It's a little bit simplificated, but... And I think it's important to talk about the role of directors, because France has been a director's theatre for a really long time. And directors run these subsidized houses. So they get to do what they want to do. And either they have wanted to playwrights that they like to work with, or they take a classic and redo it. And this is starting to stop, right? This is changing, I think. But there are not very many houses, very many theatres, subsidized theatres, that are dedicated to new playwrights, or hardly any. So that's a real problem for young people. Hang on for a second, hang on, hang on, hang on. So, can we pass the mic on like that? We're going to take her comment. I'm going to ask you to hang on to your comment. And what we're going to do after you're done, okay, is I'm going to dismiss everybody at the table and bring other people up to the table. Okay? And we'll carry on from there. I want to say about my experience from my friend, very much friend, friend, friend. Four years ago, I came in some better work from Moscow, and I looked that it's a city museum. It was many, many beautiful theatres, which in each theatre sit one king. So, in theatre, not places for young directors, not only king. And I came in one big theatre with a budget of $30 million in one year, and I came and said, please, give me a chance. I did a very interesting laboratory in the theatre, please, give me one chance. And I come in municipality, city, yes, and I give the grant, my first grant, and received the grant in the first festival laboratory. I performed 19 shows in this theatre. It's very, very classic theatre. It's very famous, very old theatre. And the first days, seven days in this theatre come in very, very young people. It's a show we did very, very creatively. It's a place from Yuri Club. It was the place from Yuri Club with Misha Dorninkov, you know this, Pavel Prishko, Olga Muhina, many, many, many different Russian directors. And after this festival laboratory we understand that... So in the newspapers there were a statement that it was a revolution. So the four years already passed, but still lots of directors in the St. Petersburg theatres pretend that nothing had happened. So in Moscow our festival and what we are doing is more now than in St. Petersburg. But after the festival that we did in that theatre that theatre started being visited by the younger audience. And when I was doing my research about what was happening with the work of young directors in St. Petersburg and in the theatres I found out that during this period only three young directors did their production within three years in St. Petersburg. And during last year already eight young directors did their productions during the year in different theatres around the city. And already four theatres in St. Petersburg are working with the young directors that we brought up and giving them opportunity to stage and to produce their production in the theatres in the city. So are these directors also working with the younger writers as well? Yes, mainly yes. And now when we have our own venue these kings are coming to us. But not everybody. That's a great way to end this table. So thank you, you guys can have a sit down. Gradually when you come up and Raya and Octavio please. Carrie, would you like to say please? And the young, the man next to you, yes. And this young woman from Bulgaria, yes. And let's see, Chris, why don't you sit down too. So we started to talk about what the role of the playwright was like and we sort of morphed into what it is now because it's so present for us and that's really great. So I think what I'd like to pose this question given where we are with time and the caveat being that if you want to address something that was addressed previously you can. But we're going to move on with the question. It's okay, well we'll get back to you. I'm happy to hear the conversation. We'll get back to you. So the question is in the future in the future what would you like to see as the role of the playwright in our theater, in your theater in the theater that you want to participate in or you'd like to see people coming up participating in. What would be the role of the playwright if you could imagine your dream? Introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about it. My name is Ida Danielle. I'm from Sofia, Bulgaria. And shortly maybe I should say what happened in the last 10 years in Bulgaria with the playwrights. It may be similar to Russia in a way because we all had these 20 years of things happening. But maybe the most interesting thing is that the inertia of playwrights from the past when it ended there was a kind of vacuum that nothing could happen. And then some young poets or story writers decided to step into theater which was really an interesting event. But still it was like for once they do it and then they go back to their major interest. And maybe there is only one woman her name is Yana Bodisubo and she came from curating fine arts but she is really doing great work in contemporary playwrights which is I can say mainly influenced by maybe some British but some Spanish and French drama I can say. And now what's very interesting and I think this is the way in the future we can have some kind of place for playwrights is that a lot of friends decide to develop work together either they're poets that maybe are like this French cooperative they try different things and support each other they make performative readings of their poetry switching places they do not read their own poetry but the poetry of their colleagues. So this kind of developing in process which gives chance for the new forms to develop or the new language that is there to come into form because exactly this is the problem that we do not have the support of the kings and they do not understand what we're talking and doing they plainly come to you and they say I don't understand your many surfaces but they never like try to so yeah maybe that's it but I think that the grasping reality together is what I think in the future should hold. Thank you. My name is Yuri Rinov. I was a director in Russia now it seems to me that I'm a director in the US for the last three years. And as director coming from the background of the director's theater I must say actually kind of like the competitiveness that exists there between playwrights and directories I think there is something healthy about that and I think some very interesting results come up from this competitiveness. When I say competitiveness I obviously don't mean that director kills the playwright or playwright dominates over the directoring process I think this balance of friendship and competition between these two professions from my point of view you actually create more use more than takes away and I think one specific thing that we found out while we were working on the program of the contemporary Russian drama here was that the Russian playwrights of the new wave I believe are pretty much ready for the directors to come in and around with their work. And if you look at the plays of Mukhinov, Korchikiv or anybody else from this wave I think there is some kind of openness I think playwrights do realize on the conscious or subconscious level that there will be a next step and they are trying to leave more opportunities for director and directors and designers to work with the playwright and that's what is different with the big chunk of the American playwright here I think there is something healthy about playwright writing a play as a proposal for the future development unlike writing the final resultative product I'm carried for a lot It's sort of in the last decade in the States both sort of thrilling at the rise of the focus on the playwright and also somewhat dispiriting in the sense that most of great theater comes out of people who are total people of the theater not just interested in an aspect of it but anybody softly is Brecht, Mayakovsky I mean not always a director not always also an actress you know that to make theater you have to be of the theater it helps to know how theater is made to be interested in design and architecture in writing and directing in audiences in acting the more immersed you are in the world of it the more the work will actually be of the theater and not a pale imitation of film and television and this country tends to you know Americans are highly specialized so we get MFA's in one thing this sort of obsessive graduate specialization in an area which I'm not sure in the long run is perhaps the most fertile way to make work and I wish we'd seen more playwrights running theaters boards are very suspicious of this and it's a shame because I actually think it would be a great thing for writers to actually see that landscape from that perspective you know I totally understand that writers feel like they don't have a place at the table but everybody feels that way the table is so tiny that we're all hanging on to the lip at the table with this pathetic desperation you know and one of the things that's happening and I see it because we also run a school is that theater's been created in all kinds of different ways device work is happening, I've been working in Canada a lot which is much more porous about directors, writers, playwrights actors switching roles a lot making work that way tends to make for more sort of interesting material you know I would hope that the role of the playwright is always the provocateur you know the chicken in the hen house the fox in the hen house rather and that you know the less interested we are in trying to imitate other media and the more interested we are in trying to exploit what is uniquely theatrical and live about theater the more hope there is I think for the muscularity of the field as a whole the other thing I would say which is very funny for us as Americans the French tradition is exactly opposite right, you know this absolute obsession with classical theater in this country nobody reads anything anymore nobody knows even anything that was written in the 70s nobody remembers that Maria Irene Fornes changed the face of the American theater we've just forgotten she exists we've forgotten Adrienne Kennedy exists I mean Lorca I mean it's unbelievable so we always have this sort of weird arrogance that we've invented met a theatrical theater what happened to Viacoste in 1915 you know whatever it's sort of amazing which is not interested in this country there's no support for classical theater there's no support for acting ensembles and so you know I think we could really fertilize playwriting in this country by actually a wider aperture of where we've come from I'm Marie Robert author of Dramaties who is a comedian and I have a friend in France who is associated with a theater a theater-meditation and excuse me everybody understands so my name is Marion Aubert my name is Marie her name is Marion Aubert she is an actor and a director and she has a company and it's associated to a theater and that's it I didn't follow everything maybe I'll say things that were already said and I apologize but I also wanted to raise another problem I don't know if it's specifically French but compared to contemporary writing we also have a problem with the audience I mean the theater directors the barons we talked about often think I don't remember the name I have the impression that the contemporary theater is not for them and it's the opposite of what you said I said it when I finished I didn't think about it and in France I have the impression that the contemporary theater is often suspected we associate contemporary theater to a completely absconded theater completely hermetic it's not for me and so the same term of contemporary it's in a way the theater that is done with the others with those who are alive today and I come often in the rooms I see that I don't address them but contemporary, that is to say the spectators all have about very often in the generation it's a real problem maybe I'll start with that so I'll end with what Marie-Anne just said that it's very difficult to be doing theater the audience is about my age this is me not my age old fart, 60 year old and she's wondering where people her age are if she's going to have to be retired before she meets an audience which is a worrisome thing but to get back to what she said earlier connects to what Carrie was saying the directors of theater in France, my own fields are speaking on behalf of their public they seem to feel that they know more than the public itself knows what the public wants and they think that contemporary theater is not what they want and not what they can handle because it's too obstruous it's too dramatic and contemporary does not translate it's my own way of translating what we make together because we're thinking together because we're part of the same universe I think that's not that you could probably say the same thing because this particular kind of this is another problem that you wanted to bring up about what's happening in French theater right now in fact, the authors have a place in theater and become visible as well and I think with concepts like the ball in a single way to see that the author is alive that the author I don't remember but in a single way to meet young spectators of the high schoolers the writing is alive and so I can't find my words in any case what I want to say is that to meet the author visible in the city in my opinion it will bring more public to the theater and maybe I'll give them a breath so what Marielle hopes for the future is that the author is going to be more visible and more visible in the life of making theater which is one of the reasons why these literary balls are so important because they bring in a lot younger audiences the kids love this stuff the high school kids like it they get it they get that there's a way that art can be alive at the same time it can involve their energies in a different kind of way there are a lot of female authors in France and in a single way when young people say there's an author it can have this head it can have this body in a single way they say maybe even if I don't need to call myself Victor Hugo to have a beard to be an artist I have the impression that we need to have other representations that's why I'm talking about this visibility and the visibility is also very important in terms of gender issues because there are not very many women writers in France and there are very many women directors and as we've heard earlier there are very many women who run theaters we've been doing it for a long time we've been doing it for a long time and so if women authors are particularly involved one sees their faces one sees their writing one hears their voices and one sees their bodies one can say oh hell I don't have to be Victor Hugo to do theater nobody knows Victor Hugo are they? no I think people we know Victor Hugo we know Victor Hugo I see you let me say hi let me say hi thank you your question is a very difficult question maybe about the future I've been working a lot the last five minutes and I feel very in fact I feel very close to what Carrie says also because we also have not maybe as much ads here but this word of specification for me is just death and I was an actress I'm now playwright and director I teach as you do and I am sure theater is one word moving to one same word so I want to be that very close very close I would just add something about words maybe because I think in the future we can be also or just remain keep on working on words for those who think that words still can speak the word of images of pictures and this specificity maybe to keep and yeah something like that words can still speak hi I'm Octavus Lee some playwright here in San Francisco been here since 1989 and I've been thinking about your question Amy but I've been thinking also about some other things I'll start there I actually don't mind my outsider status my outcast status as a writer I kind of enjoy that I don't want to be a king or a queen I'm happy being the court jester I want to be the holy fool I'm not sure I want to be an artistic director of a theater because I'm already an artistic director of my mad thoughts and that's enough I do want the same visibility that Marino is calling for I think that's really important to kind of have that same status but without without the sort of traditional hierarchies if we could explode those that would be terrific so that we constantly having to redefine them always you know there's someone at the top and someone below that and always the ones at the very bottom of that whole tier are the set builders they have the least importance and I think if there's some way to shift that model so that even the set builders are artists in the room as well so that we all feel that we're participating in the creation of this crazy animal called the play and that our contributions are as important and matter and have an effect on the work I like my plays being porous enough that they can respond to the influences of everyone in the room and I want to see more of that happen in the future I want to see I like my own singular vision but it's a hollow vision if it doesn't respond to if it isn't fired through the prism of everyone else's own ideas it's important to me to have that happen in the room but so that's sort of what I would like to see in the future I'd like to see more of that I'd like to see more artists collaborating from outside the fields of theater I want to bring in filmmakers I want to bring in musicians hip-hop artists I want to bring visual artists, sculptors painters not just scene-builders but real painters and people from I want to bring poets people who are not accustomed to writing for the theater I want to see them working in the theater I just want that cross-pollination to happen more aggressively in the future I'm Pavel Shishin I'm a repertory director for the theater company which is based in Olmsk and Saferia it's a long way from here and I should say that theater in Russia is divided into two large groups that is the theater of Moscow and St. Petersburg and the theater of all other regions so I believe you can speak from the point of view of provincial theater here and I'm not very optimistic about contemporary playwriting in Russia nowadays and I'll give you some figures there are three major playwriting competitions held and early in Russia and there appear about 1500 new plays every year in Russia but you must have noticed that we have been mentioning the same names throughout our conversation so there are far too well much more playwrights a circle of playwrights because once I read 450 plays that entered the list of a playwright competition Eurasia which is held by Nikolai Kulidov which was mentioned here in the actor group and I just couldn't find a play that I would be happy to produce my theater company unfortunately so there were 450 plays I'm not very optimistic about contemporary playwrights sorry and I believe that I'm well at least in province outside Moscow and St. Petersburg there will be to produce to go and produce classics Russian classics and world classics so I think we'll keep to that then and I think but I think there is some optimistic there to that I think there will appear more works based on prose and there has been a very quite number of works based on prose staged in various cities in Siberia and Far East in very small theater companies say in Milosevsk which is about 30,000 people only but has a very good theater company there then it's a prose will appear on stage then I am sure that there will be some more devised works because it's a very new trend in Russian theater we haven't been producing or making works in Russia well in fact I can remember only one theater company which is not Russian but which is from Almaty, from Kazakhstan for my USSR Republic which makes a very good device theater this is art art and shock theater company and they do quite a lot in Russia and I believe that there will appear some companies which will produce this kind of work well it's new and it's very interesting and I know that some works of this kind have been produced in Saint Petersburg and in Moscow that's it I don't think that very many plays by many plays by contemporary playwrights mentioned here not mentioned here will be produced in provincial theater companies unfortunately well we have a very very traditionalist audience the audience knows perfectly well why they want to go to the theater and most of them want to go to the theater to be entertained and what's the next play that's open in the theater in my theater well I'm coming back to open the aliens play by any baker so I should say well we are a very unusual company in fact and but I think way I have chosen any baker I guess it's as Philip said it's kind of jackoff you know and when I was a part of that playwriting program a new American plays for Russia and I was a reader and I read 10 plays out of 26 and when I read any baker's play the aliens I said that is jackoff and so I thought it should be produced in my company well it is not it feels like and yet she is not she is not she feels like well it is very close to us my name is Christopher White and I'm the artistic director of a company here in San Francisco called Mogwopen who creates exclusively devised work and yeah well it's interesting for me because I actually arrived at making devised work through working in new play development and I lived for a couple of years in Dublin, Ireland and created a play development program at a place called Project Arts Center in Dublin and ran that for about six months before and ran out of money and the playwrights there were really hungry to get out of a certain kind of literary rut that they were in coming out of a very sort of heavy Irish tradition of playwriting and looking for ways of breaking out of that and they were really hungry for different ways of collaborating they wanted to get out from behind their desks and be more engaged with the process of making theatre to not be trapped in a sort of purely literary way of thinking about the plays that they wrote and so the program that I started focused a lot on sort of pairing up playwrights with all different kinds of artists from theatre including designers or directors or actors to really find a way for them to get out from behind their desks and be able to collaborate a lot more and this was really juicy to me and so when we ran out of money and eventually I came back here I just wanted to start making more and more collaborative theatre and so now we're at the point where we do end up with a script but it's the artifact of the process rather than the starting point of the process and yeah so all of us sort of have to be we have to be fluent in all different kinds of aspects of theatre and the visual aspects and also the acting and also the writing and it's very rich and at the same time so as I look towards the future I'm interested in exploring different models by which devised work can become also a collaboration with writers as well and I know that Robin Page just recently did a devised piece with Cutting Ball working with Eugenie Chan and and it's something that we with my work and haven't done yet of working directly with a playwright and partly it's I think that there's a certain amount of anxiety on our part that we don't know how to work with a playwright and the playwright doesn't know how to work with us and so I'm really interested to see in the U.S. I mean for example like Playwrights Foundation it would be awesome to see some sort of endeavor that has the development of the play and the devising process going sort of hand in hand finding different ways or different models that that might be fun to add to the conversation actually you actually have the mic I know I'll say there we go stand up and then introduce yourself because we've got my team Hi I'm Michelle Heyner I don't have to speak the whole time standing up do I I feel a little just a little too over so be the seat so this is the your turn to speak chair so I'm Michelle Heyner and I'm here to the more official capacity as co-translated with Emily Jane Coet of UnWest by Natalie Theon and I've had all kinds that I had some specific thoughts earlier before this panel started and then of course hearing from you guys instead of all kinds of other thoughts I think the thing I actually want to speak to is before I want to talk about the internet but but is this sort of role of device theater and collaborative theater and then the role of the playwright in that and this kind of comes from my own particular background in that I actually trained in Paris at a school called Jettropok which is very much about device theater and where device theater becomes absolutely one of the male and it's tremendously empowering in this sense of creating theater makers and creating groups of people who are used to shifting roles and who are all responsible for the work together even as I would say sort of different specializations emerge within that and I do think that device and collaborative and more site specific work and more physical theater work is very much something which certainly has roots deeper in the 20th century but which I think is very exciting and relevant and present today and I know both from my own experience and I think from the companies that are creating work that's more has a little more ah to it that the role of the writer within those collaborative groups is very important I know groups that I've been in where there was the absence of a writer we had some pieces that had all kinds of great things but really lacked some kind of weight to them and I think of Charles Mead who has been brought up and I was talking to him about him yesterday where I think within an book arts company it's very important the presence of that writer and so the thing that I would really like to add though is while I think that in this moment of ah finding theater's place and possibility this particular moment of the 21st century and I think that theater is at the moment of the new renaissance in fact I do because I think that theater offers something in this world of technology that people are actually hungry for because I think that the kids today get that those things that they hope to are just tools that they really get it that it's just tools and the stuff that really matters to them is this and that those things are just stuff I think that they get that and I think that theater reminds them of that but to me it's that my great question in this moment of devise and collaborative generation is yet what will remain 50 years from now 100 years from now 200 years from now and thus I think we have a responsibility to find and to cultivate and to nurture these writers and poets these sonocles the Shakespeare's but of our generation I think that there's something that is carried in the language that is part of the heritage of theater and I think that while I'm very interested in the physical theater world there's something in seeking out and supporting these voices of these great poets that we have also a particular responsibility right now and I think that this colloquium is part of that so sit to me so pass the mic she'll come and sit for me I'm really generally here as trans in with Eric Butler of the McDonald's wonderful play excuse me and there are many many things here to respond to but I've grouped my responses into three two things that make me grumpy and one that gives me hope and the subject for the grumpy things are crushing commercial pressures and an illiterate public so I'll start with the illiterate public and you know what by that I mean three things linguistically, theatrically and culturally we're working with a public who is increasingly less able to read less interested in reading anything that alone plays and new plays theatrically illiterate because many of the professor at UC Santa Cruz and I adore my students but they don't have a wide exposure to theatrical contemporary theatrical cultures and then of course culturally illiterate as the humanities are being less and less valued at the university and our students are getting less and less of a sense of their cultural past their history the possibilities of the future across the world then we have to understand that our theatrical possibilities are shrinking as the humanities, as history as literature, as language is taught less and less crushing commercial pressures which is something I think a lot of what people have said here is based on what we just haven't said it out loud yet there's some theatres in the region who are thinking about going to a two week rehearsal process one week in tech many of you know this obviously under such conditions new work cannot develop how we do devise a piece art is seen as a commercially successful item you guys were talking earlier about directors thinking they know what their public wants I feel like that's always a recipe for disaster because it lowers and lowers and lowers the bar new works should be the engines that drive us as a culture they should ask questions that we didn't know we were interested in they should provide answers that we disagree with and then we fight back new works should be the things that are pushing us forward but instead they're increasingly relegated to tiny little places the little theatre aside the main one that should be the engine that is kind of a caboose of theatrical production we think it's bad in France we don't have many commercial we don't have many governmental funds to put into piloting for new work and if the United States wants to give money to theatrical productions it is probably not to an extraordinarily strange non-linear devised work with a script that is unreadable to somebody outside the theatre right finally nothing I was talking about where's the audience my age in the states the answer is they often can't afford it you know to get prices are exceptional I've been because of course the theatres need to make money there's no other way to stay alive but of course that prices out a lot of our a lot of our youth the thing that makes me happy which is this people who continue to do new work and to translate new work and to produce new work even though there is no incentive to do so or we've been talking this week a bit about a wonderful man in the theatre Paul Schmidt who many of us had the pleasure of knowing and we had a huge impact on me when I met him in graduate school and he was a translator actor a poet a playwright director a dramaturg and he said to us pretty much on the first day of class I decided I was going to be a renaissance man in the theatre no one wanted a renaissance man in the theatre but I decided to be one anyway and that's something I keep so close to my heart maybe nobody wants our works right now but I think without it things look even more dire so the positive thing is then that we're here we're here on 11 am with carnival going all around the dust and we've translated plays that nobody does to translate and we've directed them and we've had no ideas I was thinking today one of the russians was talking earlier about the list of American playwrights that they've translated and they were extraordinary playwrights Susan Morrid Hartz and Mack Wellman and I was so impressed and it gave me the courage to propose to Eric who's going to be surprised for this but one of the most exciting French playwrights aside from the three here is Valera Negrina who is truly an athlete of the word right and an athletic linguistically extraordinary and he has hardly been translated into English at all let alone produced and it's incredibly difficult they don't make sense they're not puncturing they go on and on and on it's extraordinarily difficult but I figured if somebody is going to do it maybe we should do it so that's my positive note I'm Rob Melrose I'm the artistic director of the cutting ball theater and I'm also a translator for the festival well I'm going to start by saying I'm really inspired by this conversation I think this is this will put wind in my sails and thank you Amy and Yvonne for putting this together because I think this is an exciting group of people so I'm really excited about I grew up I started going to theater in the 80s and I lived I lived in Minneapolis where Darlin Wright and Niki Chulay were head of the Guthrie Theater so I was used to directors of the theater Robert Woodruff, Joanna Colitis or Tim Foreman and I was really inspired by it and it was really cool and so I have a great love for it and I love what Yuri said about this kind of healthy competition between directors theater playwrights theater and I love it that in the past 10 years playwrights have been more empowered there's been more money for playwrights and I think that's been really positive and I'm looking forward to the next 10 years where people are talking about playwrights being residents at theaters and having long relationships with theaters because I think the only downside of the past 10 years is with playwrights being empowered but not being parts of theaters I feel like I've seen a lot of new plays that felt like television and you know I feel like that's been a very poor experience and I just have these really great experiences with Jeannie Chan and with Andrew Saito because they they've been really involved with the project of the Cutting Ball Theater they've seen our productions of E&S Go they've seen our productions of Shakespeare they've seen our productions of Susan Laurier Parks and they've been inspired by it and they have a sense of what we're doing and so we're inspiring each other and Jeannie's been our resident playwright for four years and I think that's one of the reasons why she was able we've done plays that she's just written kind of on her own but we've also done her plays and very much in collaboration with the company and Tonga Vault was definitely a healthy competition between a director's theater and a playwright's theater and it was a beautiful a beautiful result and I think we forget sometimes that Shakespeare not only was responding to classical works he wasn't writing just original stuff he was very much involved in a classical version I just got to directing Trostle Cressida which is basically Shakespeare's response to the Iliad and Chaucer but also they were writing for theaters Shakespeare he had a relationship with a low theater so he knew he was a man of the theater and knew what he was writing for he wasn't just off on his own writing stuff he was very much involved in the theater making there's also a theater called La Comboie Française which some of you people have heard of in all year was writing for that theater I'm very excited about the next 10 years which I think will be I'm looking forward to being the best example of director's theater and playwright's theater coming together and I think a big part of that is fun being coming down the pike I don't know if you the Mellon Foundation is putting money into having is this a secret? erase this it's exciting that there's going to be there are people out there who are interested in the idea of playwrights being associated with the theater on a long term basis and we've done it on our shoestring budget and it's yielded very positive results I'm just unbelievably excited about who knows what whoever gets it it doesn't matter it's going to be a great move for the American theater because it's going to be this wonderful relationship which I've experienced the thing I haven't experienced is having the playwright also making a living wage I think having the playwright associated with the theater making a living, being a part of the theater is going to be unbelievably exciting so I hope this becomes a trend and that's what we see in the next 10 years thanks yes the Mellon Foundation is funding I believe I believe it's going to be 8 8 to 10 playwright residencies I have one and yeah I can't say more about it now but I will be able to after June so are there any other is there any other burning the thing that I want to talk about the future at least what I would like to happen in the Russian theater is what is happening about translation and promotion of the Russian theater the broad and collaborations between the Russian playwrights and playwrights from all over the world I personally do not believe in the colonization of the art because notwithstanding the Royal Court and the British Council and other cultural organizations and the Alianz Francaise are doing their cultural projects and are meeting us with other people and other techniques it's only tools which we are used to in our own art our words of our hearts and minds and I do believe in that and I think that the translations I am personally translating the drama at least I'm trying to do that because I'm not a professional philologist but I adore it and I do want see more collaboration between the translators of the drama professional seminars enrichment of our techniques and stuff and understanding the language and the mixture of translators and playwrights because when a translator working directly with a playwright the translation will be better and I really look forward for more project in this field. This has been an incredibly fruitful conversation at the moment it's going to come to an end but we're encouraging you to go on to Twitter and it's a hashtag you play, you play TV or Devois and you can continue the conversation there really beautiful and interesting dialogue that we've had today and yes I do want to plug the Maison and Tvampites because it's exactly what you're talking about and I think that these many ideas coming together within the context of translating across borders and having writers from Russia, writers from the former Yugoslavia writers from Serbia Soviet Bulgaria and Siberia and for us it's like that's really good and from South America and the Americas in general etc being able to connect this kind of visceral this visceral art that we do and to sort of infect the rest of society with it would be a really exciting next 10 years we do need to end unfortunately but we are going to and that is because Judith Miller to my right and the whole little house in here are going to be leading a panel in about half an hour or so in half an hour or less on translation and the translators from the Devois Festival will be speaking Judith will be speaking as well and we hope you return for that so there are food trucks a block away don't get lost come back go to the carnival get a taco or you know something else come back what time is it right now 105 so we are going to start at 130 so 25 minutes please come on back and we will resume thank you very very much