 All right, it was a good group. How many people got up and danced at the end? Yeah, I'm glad Lisa Mount is raising her hand. I think actually both of our facilitators were up there cutting a rug. I wanna thank the Kansas City Rep so much and Eric Rosen for that great evening. And I also wanna mention that we have two people here as part of the convening, Bunny Kopeckin and Laura Hall, who are both Kansas City residents and very involved in the arts and they are on TCG's National Council for the American Theater. So I wanna thank them for their presence. It was so interesting last night. I just loved the way Eric cast the show with a multi-generational cast. For those who weren't there, there were performers who were in the original Broadway cast, performers who were in some of the touring companies that went out in the 60s and 70s. So seeing them side by side on stage with young performers and sharing stories about what it was like to be in here back then and how the young people who were in the show with them experienced here through stories that they heard from their parents and so on. It was just incredibly moving. And it's also, by the way, this multi-generational conversation is one of the things that I absolutely love about TCG convenings because we always have people who are just coming into the field, people who have been at it for decades, really trading stories and learning from each other. So it's one of the great things about what we're able to do with these convenings. I think here also just the revolutionary nature of it was a perfect way for us to kick off this convening. It was a revolutionary musical set in a revolutionary time. And because we talk about this audience engagement and community development work we're doing now as the audience revolution, you have to think about the typography of that title. It's meant to imply that evolutionary change is really just as important as revolution. We have, as you may know, really rich series of blog posts on our TCG Circle. And Carlton Turner wrote in his essay for the audience revolution blog, I'm gonna quote him, a revolution orbits the same dynamics. What changes is positioning? Who's in power? Who's on top? In evolution the entire being, the entire system changes. It's a move not just in positioning but in purpose. The evolutionary practice is one in which we're constantly seeking transformation, not just transition. I think that's just a really great way to think about our revolution. So I hope you'll read that post. And also, Cara Dodd, are you here? Cara Dodd's Vitch? There she is, Cara Dodd's Vitch, the amazing Cara Dodd, yes, is curating additional blogs on the TCG Circle. So if you would like to contribute in some way, please talk to her. I think she would love to have additional, yes, she's nodding. She'd love to have additional contributions. I think Carlton's thoughts are also a wonderful warm-up to our first plenary session today, the Ethics of Engagement. And to launch us into that conversation and give us some more context for today, I would like to bring Lisa Mount to the stage. Cool. Thank you, Teresa. Morning, morning. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Oh, let's try that in. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Now I feel like a facilitator, because I made you do, it's great. So I am gonna give a quick rundown of the day and then I will throw you to the wolves of good intentions that might have gone awry or maybe came out just exactly as you thought and that is the Ethics of Engagement, isn't it? So over the course of the day, we're going to have little info bursts, little five-minute presentations from Kansas City folks. Here we are at the Paris of the Plains and we want our own personal tour guides for it. Our second plenary session after the Ethics of Engagement will focus on research and it will feature TCG's own Keb Mo, Kevin Moore, Kevin E. Moore, to be distinguished from the fabulous Cleveland, Kevin Moore, and he'll have a terrific array of perspectives on research from around the country, as well as three case studies, Arkansas Rep, Long Wharf, and here, not here, here, but here, you know, New York, here, here, here, yeah. Our lunch is gonna happen just as breakfast did with the buffets set out out here and tables in the room. It's going to be a quick lunch. If everything runs on time this morning, it'll be a 45-minute lunch. If things get slow, it'll be a 25-minute lunch. So five-minute presenters, those of you with timeframes, please be aware it's other people's lunch you're eating into if you run long. So you don't have to go room shopping. They're right there for you. That might be one of those times when you're coming up with the fabulous banjo lyrics. I want to point out two that we've gotten so far from Brickalage. Mark my word. We'll make cohort a verb before we're done and I have to find the person to whom to give credit for this one. Cohorting, here's a who. In the afternoon, after lunch, we will have three breakout sessions, two knowledge sharing sessions and one prototyping session. And I'm gonna come back before lunch and break that down for you further so that it'll be fresh in your mind. But the basics of it is the two knowledge sharing sessions repeat. So you can pick two out of the seven and they'll be the same. They can go to one and then you can go to another and it'll be different, but what's happening along there will be the same. And then the prototyping sessions are organized around your role or your job title and those will only happen once. So remember that thing I said yesterday about it's okay to feel overwhelmed? After the prototyping session, we come back into this room and we're gonna close out the day with a plenary with Pastor Mike Walrend. I think it's great to have a man of faith among us since we are, in truth, faith-based enterprises. We believe that people will come to our theaters. And I suspect from the little that I've seen of Pastor Mike on YouTube, he will be equal parts inspiration and challenge. In the Deep South, we say that a pastor's job is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. So we are done at 6 p.m. in this space today. It's not quite a 10 out of 12, but it's pretty damn close. And you're on your own tonight if you're at a loss for things to do, look for those folks who are here from Kansas City and in the front page of your notebooks in the little stuffy pocket, there are all sorts of things provided to us with ideas about where to go and what to do. A couple of folks have asked me about logistics for tomorrow. So let me give you the heads up on that so that you can set your mind at rest. Tomorrow, if you're staying at the Sheraton, you get to transit the miles of the convention center and get you and your luggage to the Westin, right? So we will have breakfast at the Westin. If you are leaving Friday evening, bring your luggage with you. We will have a locked luggage room that you can store your luggage in for the course of the day. We'll eat breakfast, we'll pile onto buses, we will get out and see Kansas City and then we'll come back for lunch and all the rest of it. But do check out of the hotel before breakfast and just get out and move over to the Westin. And then if you're leaving via air travel and you have done your due diligence and sent your schedule to Hannah or filled in the Google form, you'll get an email tonight about what your shuttle arrangements will be to the airport. So basically, bring thy luggage to the Westin, park it there, we promise we'll take care of it and then we'll shuttle you out of there. Okay, I think that covers all the logistics I'm supposed to cover. I wanna continue to encourage you to write upon the walls. We've still got the pens and the pieces of paper out there. And now, oh, yes ma'am, find Hannah. Find Hannah over the course of the day. Yeah, yeah, so she's the fabulous Hannah Fenlon. So she's your contact for airport shuttles. Great, so we're about to move into our first plenary session, right? We're gonna get all ethical up in here, y'all. So we've asked the amazing Michael Rode to be the facilitator and moderator for it. He has assembled a group of people whose experience is so vast, I hope they will reveal at least one or two of their dark ethical lapses in their past while we do this. So if you would please join me in welcoming Doug Borewick, Martha Lavey, Seema Suico, and Shay Wafer, as well as Michael Rode. There we go. And yeah, yeah, and I have a clicker and I have a timer, yes, I have a timer. And Doug and Seema and Martha and Shay are gonna hang out here, so they don't have to sit here and turn around. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Wow, I did not get to be here yesterday. I was one of the people who super late travel, so it's nice to be in the room with everyone. So TCG invited me to be a part of this conversation that they had named the ethics of engagement. So over the past couple months, we've been having conversations about what this means. And one of the things that I sort of came to was, okay, how do we talk about what we do in relation to what we value and believe as individuals, as organizations, and as a field? This helped me kind of think about what the goal is for our time together this morning, which is brief. And I'm gonna talk in a couple minutes about the format we're gonna use to try to hear from a lot of different people. But before that, I'm gonna maybe put a couple things out there as starting places, and I'm also gonna try to get a sense of where we in the room kind of sit, stand in relation to some stuff. So these are sort of the three main questions we came to for this time together. Why do we engage? What sort of decisions do we make on a daily basis in the process of doing engagement work, which of course means many things to many people. And what ethical dimensions, seen and unseen, intersect with the decisions we make around this work, which of course means many things to many people. Three main goals, so those are the questions. Some goals, hear from different people with different experiences and perspectives. Surface ideas, examples, questions, and provocations that may be useful as we move through this convening's conversations, yeah? Good so far, okay? Third one, consider the distinction between difference of opinion and clashing values. Maybe we have both, which makes for interesting dialogue. What do we mean when we use the term ethics? I talked to different friends in the past couple of weeks about this word ethics, which means a lot of different things. So here's three sort of dictionary versions, which don't have to be what we stick to, and the parentheses are mine. The other words are from the interweb. A system of moral principles, the ethics of a culture, the not-for-profit theater field, question mark. The rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of actions or a particular group culture, medical ethics, Christian ethics, engagement ethics, question mark. Moral principles as of an individual per ethics forbade betrayal of a community partner. Parentheses, mine. Okay, and when we talk about engagement, so yeah, so we're gonna say great, we know what ethics are, great, done. That's what ethics are. For today, this will be a starting point for the conversation. I know Morgan in the front here is gonna agree with everything that appears on these slides, and we'll go of course, of course, of course, and we'll have no dissenting opinions whatsoever, which is gonna be fun. When we talk about engagement for a moment in the room, what impulses drive us to engage? And this is what's been interesting and important to me over the last couple years in this conversation and in some of the work I do outside of this space. So for example, if you would put your hand up each time you feel like a statement that I'm about to read strongly represents the impulse that leads you and or your organization to engagement work. Doesn't have to be the only one, but put your hand up for ones that feel like driving impulses, not just that seem agreeable to you. For instance, we engage because we're saying, let's get more people in here. Hand up if that is a part, an impulse. And sort of look around as we do this, if you would. Okay, let's get different people in here. That's a lot of hands. Let's get people more deeply connected to the work we produce here, okay? Let's get out of here and make work for people in other spaces, okay? Let's get out of here and make work with people in other spaces, okay? Let's make our community a healthier, more equitable place, not just through the plays we produce, but through other tactics as well, okay? Let's be a theater that makes great art and impacts our community. I know, I know everybody, but in relation to this one, let's be a community resource that uses theater to impact our community. If I ask you to think about those two things as one, a more primary impulse than the other, can I go backwards for a moment? And I'm not saying that they're mutually exclusive. I'm not saying that. I'm just interested in this moment in asking you to think about which is the more primary impulse for you in this moment. You're not held to it. So again, if this is the primary impulse, let's be a theater that makes great art and impacts our community. Hands are up. Let's be a community resource that uses theater to impact our community. Just about even. Let's make change. If that is a driving impulse behind how you think about the engagement work you or your organization do. Okay? How am I doing? I am on time, good. All right. So here's a different question. Again, hands up. In what context do you make decisions in your daily work? In other words, are you someone who hands up if you make the art? And that's the sort of context within which you are most often making decisions. Yeah? You develop strategies, write text, or create images used to persuade, invite people to attend things. Put your hands up as many times as you want, right? You might do all of these things for everything you do. Katie, I think you probably do all of these things, right? Yeah, right. All right. Hands up if you initiate partnerships in the community. Oh, and we have music for that one. That's nice. Somebody really likes that. That's nice. All right. I think that was Morgan, actually. Which is awesome. All right, and you maintain partnerships in the community, which are related but not the same thing or the same people necessarily, right? Hands up if you set ticket prices. I know that my hand gets to go up sometimes for this one and sometimes not for that one, and that is complicated for me. You lead work in community settings. Hands up if that is a context in which you make decisions. Okay? You raise money. Hi, Whit. I didn't see you. You design education programs. Okay? You manage people. Wow. Almost everyone here. Okay? Okay, a reminder of the three goals. Hear from different people. Surface ideas, examples, questions, and provocations. Consider the distinction between difference of opinions and clashing values. Cast for what we're about to do. We have panelists. Four folks, Martha, Sema, Doug, and Shay, who we've sort of asked to kind of help start us off and then be responders. We have cameos, nine folks spread throughout the general room who are gonna offer us a response to a very specific prompt that I'll share when we get there. And then of course we have you because there'll be points when I'll ask, invite you to speak with each other as well as offer things to the whole room. The whole thing is timed. We are 30 seconds ahead of time. That's good. All right, so could I invite Martha, Sema, Doug, and Shay to come up? I'd love to appreciate them. Let's thank them. All right, so we've had some conversation and basically what I have asked each of them to do is help start us off by taking two minutes or less but not more to share something that they find interesting and or challenging about engagement and whatever that means to them in the not-for-profit theater field. So they're each gonna take two minutes or less to sort of share, maybe it's an idea, maybe it's a story, a proposal, whatever they want, I'll time them and that'll sort of help kick off the conversation. It doesn't mean everything we say has to be in response to what we hear now but this is just to start to hear what's in the room and where our conversation might begin. We have an order. Doug has kindly agreed to go first and Doug, let's see if his mic is working. You wanna do a test? Great, and I don't wanna waste any of you two minutes and Doug, thanks, here you go. I'd love to thank you for being here but I'm terrorized by Michael in the two minutes. The fact that I spent, I spent 30 years or almost 30 years as a college professor, the fact that I'm going to begin by ignoring Michael's initial assignment to us is full of irony that I understand but I wanna begin with a couple of definitions because I think we in the field need to have some clarity about some things before we even begin to talk about ethics themselves. These are my own definitions. I don't define them as gospel. I think they more or less go along with what TCG has said but three terms, audience development, audience engagement and community engagement are all three wonderful things. They are not the same thing and I think we lose something by not acknowledging that. So, audience development is a marketing strategy designed to increase something immediately, ticket sales or donations. Audience engagement and community engagement, the word engagement, the metaphor that really is helpful is understanding relationship and thinking of if you've got a question about engagement, about relationship, it's what would I be doing if I were trying to develop and nurture a friendship with someone? Audience engagement itself is also a marketing strategy designed for deepening relationships with current stakeholders and expanding reach over time. Sales and donations will come out of that eventually. Community engagement is a mission strategy. It's designed to create and maintain relationships with individuals in communities and oftentimes with those that we don't already have. The desired end results are deepened relationships and expanded reach for the organization. 20 seconds. And I told you this was gonna be fun. And it's about mutual benefit, not charity. Ethical principles, justice and equity and mutuality and respect, the places that that gets played out, governance, management, programming and the pursuit of quality, not for the sake of the art but because people, our communities deserve it. Time. Thanks Doug. Thanks. See that made it seem like I'm scary. That was intense. Shay, you ready? Thanks so much. Mic check for Shay. Great. Thanks team panel. Okay Shay, two minutes starts now. Okay, here we go. So, at first I wasn't really sure about how I was gonna utilize my two minutes but then last night over dinner I was having conversation with a couple of colleagues and they were telling me stories about the manifestation of stress from their jobs. And so that's what I wanna talk about a little bit about the importance of an organization's responsibility for taking care of the people who do the work, the people who are on the front line, the audience engagement specialists. As a manager of an organization with the responsibility of implementing the artistic vision of a company, I think it's essential that the organization assume responsibility for taking care of people who do the engagement work. The person on the front line of the organization, the person who's collaborating with the artist and ultimately the person who's responsible for the community that they're engaging. Organization on self-care is very important and even critical when the individual responsible for the engagement work is a person of color and a predominantly white organization or a person who's not a representative or looks like the person, looks like the community that they're responsible for engaging. These people become the face of the organization and oftentimes they're victims of constant acts of micro aggressive behavior and overt behavior that negatively impacts them spiritually, emotionally and physically. Of course, we all know of the rewards of the work. We know the joys, we know the highs, we know the successes. But we have to consider the ethics of ensuring that our colleagues have a safe place to be open and honest about their work and experiences without feeling that their work is being judged unimportant or taken for granted. The work of engaging communities is often met with suspicion and speculation. It can take months or even years to break through barriers and break down barriers of participation in the community. And as an engagement specialist, they then become the target. In that community, they become the advocate for the community within the organization and it's a delicate balancing act of executing the goals of the organization while managing the needs of the community. Time. Damn it. It'll be a separate panel that explores the ethics of being a facilitator and stopping people while they're speaking. That's not this panel, it's different. SEMA is going third. How's your mic? Working, great. Excellent, two minutes, start now. Okay, we use a process that we call consensus organizing for theater at Pasadena Playhouse. It's a type of community organizing that we apply to theater and at its core, it's really about mutual self-interest. Some of the ethical or philosophical underpinnings of this process include that it begins with the art and it's housed in the artistic department. We are not the experts. We put ourselves in the audience. We're transparent about our agenda and our self-interest and we ask whoever we're meeting with to also dig into what they really want, what their self-interests are. The individual representing the theater must have artistic power at our organization and or agency or access around that artistic power. In one year of doing this process thus far, some of the results are $79,000 in ticket sales from new audiences, partnerships with 39 organizations and 33.3% of those organizations repeating within the season thus far. And of course it's leveraged some local, regional and national funding. But the challenges, all that sounds really great and fantastic, one of the challenges we're really grappling with is as we make this progress, it has been reported to me that some board members and by some maybe one or two and some donors and again two or three have reportedly said things to people in our organization about we don't like this diversity direction. And statements that as I perceive them could seem very prejudiced. They're not said directly to me, they're reported, they're hearsay. So we are in a process of figuring out a method by which to unpack a lot of that. I'm done, peace out. Peace out, drop the mic. Nice job, Samar. Martha, you ready? Yes, I guess I would like to speak to the uniqueness of having an artistic ensemble who forms a really big section of the voice of Steppenwolf Theater about 10 years ago or I don't know, maybe more than that. I articulated this idea of the public square, that one of the core values is citizenship and this is born of the idea that theater and democracy as Oscar Eustis has eloquently stated, we're born at the same moment, at the same place and that's for a reason, which to me is really a driving imperative of theater, to cultivate a conversation with the community. There's also an imperative at Steppenwolf and a joyful one of being in response to the artists who form the ensemble and sometimes I find that those, this attention to the audience and speaking to an audience in a particular way can be, there can be a bit of tension between that and what the artists want to do and choose to do and for whom their goal is simply to express themselves, refine their artistic talents and so forth and work with one another and my colleague Aaron Carter is here who's the director of new play development at Steppenwolf and I think that he would attest to the fact that there are conversations within the artistic office where those two things can feel in tension and so I think that a lot of the ethical, the ethical work that we do at Steppenwolf is how to bring along an artistic ensemble into a kind of joyful union with its audiences actually and to continue to work very happily in our communities and our organizations so that these two are partners, the artists and the audience and also- 20 seconds. When asking artists to help with engagement work, are they compensated? What happens to their time? Same for staff, what are the ethics of asking other people to be doing, to be our representatives in community? Thanks Martha. Yeah, yeah. I like that phrase that she used the tension in finding a joyful union between artists and audience. That's kind of nice. So here's what we're gonna do, before we go on to the group of cameos, we're gonna stick with our two minutes but now I'd like to just make two minutes for you to turn to a person or a couple people around you and just give you space to sort of, with a lot we're sort of putting at you quickly. What's landing? What's interesting? What have you not heard at all? And you're like, why aren't we talking about this yet? Or what is sort of sticking with you? So two minutes for that and then the first cameo group, you're gonna start right after these two minutes. Okay, two minutes start now. Guys, thank you so much. It's been two minutes. 20 seconds. And I'm gonna ask if I can interrupt you and pull focus back this way. I'll ask you, hi Pete, I'll ask if you'll help me. Pete's gonna help me. Everybody's coming back. Attention is coming this way. Attention is coming this way. Oh my gosh. Thanks Lisa. In the back, you can put my volume up a little bit. I so apologize for whistling into a microphone. Hey, so here's what's gonna happen next. Again, we've got nine folks and we're gonna hear from the first three of them right now and I've asked each of them and they've got 90 seconds each and I've asked, so there are ethics right there in terms of choice of time, yeah? But they've got 90 seconds and I've asked each of them to share sort of like a brief story and a question that they wanna put in the space related to their sense of what engagement means to them and how ethics intersects with that. So we're gonna hear three in a row and then we're gonna come back and let two or three of these folks respond a little bit to the ideas they're hearing before we come back out here. So that's how we're gonna go forward. Sarah, you ready? Okay, so here comes cameo group one, first person, Sarah Zatz, you get to that microphone and you're ready, you tell me, looks like there is some writing in her hand, this is exciting. I timed it, thank you, Michael. And you wanna put the mic down, so there you go. Short people, I'm gonna hold it. Okay, time starts now. Thank you, Michael. So we are an organization that does community-engaged work with non-actors who become the performers sharing their own stories on stage. In recent years we have worked increasingly with individuals who have experienced trauma and personal and institutional violence. We've worked hard to establish best practices for creating trust and agency in the gathering, shaping and sharing of these personal stories on stage. The challenge that made me change the way I thought about doing this kind of work came when we created a show a couple years ago with adult survivors of child sexual abuse. As the performance approach I became increasingly concerned not about the wellbeing of the performers that was and had been a concern from the beginning of the process, but about the audience coming to the show when it was statistically guaranteed that a high number of people in the room, just like in this room or any room, would themselves be survivors of violence and or the loved ones of survivors of violence. So the ethical question I have is, how do we as theater makers thoughtfully create and share the work that engages with participants and audiences artistically without inadvertently recreating harm and how do we do that in a way that goes beyond simple quote trigger warnings. In our case, we had therapists available at the workshops of the development process of the show and also in every performance of the show. So that was one step, but it's certainly not the only step. And my second question is, because I'm doing two, when organizations that are doing this kind of work are also training other artists and or social service organizations to replicate the work as we at Pingchang and Company have done with theater that addresses sexual violence, how do you ensure that those out there modeling your methodology will come to the process and art making with the same care and intention that you bring to the work when you are no longer involved in their art making beyond the training program itself? Time. Thanks, Sarah. Awesome. Hey, so. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. Cameo too, we have Tim Jennings. Tim, there you are. Thanks, Tim. Hi, and you ready? I could be. Here we go. So Children's Theater Company has been deeply involved in the conversation of taking Peter Pan the musical and rethinking it because we see an inherent racism and misogyny in the piece that needs to be dealt with. We entered into a long conversation with our community, especially the Native American community in the Twin Cities and nationally to try and open up a dialogue about the piece and rethink how that was going to happen and work with the rights holders to change that. Knowing that we were in the position of a power of space where we were asking for input, the question, we knew ultimately we were going to be making a decision about how we were going to go forward with this piece and that it was ultimately going to be our responsibility. The question that I have for the ensemble, I suppose, would be what is the ethics around actually taking the advice from the community? Because you come to this with a bias of where you think you're going and then you hear a lot of things you don't expect. And so the question of that real relationship with a community engagement about where their issues are also problematized and come with a different bias, how much do you actually have to take that advice? Thank you so much, Tim. Great example and question. And now we've got, and Madeline, we weren't on the phone and I want to say your last name correctly. Say it? Say it, yeah, just say it. Say it, all right. All right, Madeline, say it. You ready? Yeah, I'm ready. Okay. Okay. So I'm going to start with the questions that when I run out of time, I'm not in as much trouble. But the basic question is, is it worth selling tickets if you're hurting people? I mean, currently in New York City, and usually there are much more prevalent examples of red face on stage than of actual authentic native peoples, right? At this exact moment in New York City, at least two that I know of, mainstream theaters are producing images of red face. There are zero authentic native representations on stage in New York City at this exact moment. Those are the ones that I know of when it comes to red face. I know that there are no authentic representations at this moment. And so there is this question of, where is the parallel discourse? Because the question that's constantly brought up is like, well, why did you do this? And then the response is that it is satire. Can it in fact be satire if there is nothing that they are satirizing? And then is it just something that you think is funny? And then is there not a moral obligation to question why you think it's funny? And the fact that that is grounded in ancient propaganda and a dehumanization process that was necessary at a different time that is not now. And so the question, again, regarding that is, if this community that you are hurting has the highest rates of being sexually assaulted and the highest rates of suicide, do you want to perpetuate that environment of hopelessness when it is in your hands to not do so? Thanks, Madeline. Thanks. If I were Lisa, the point I would make is say it would be a good ending to that statement. Yeah, it's nice. Okay, so I'm gonna switch gears. And I mean, the questions that I heard from there, which included how do we not recreate harm, you know, you should put on your glasses when you're facilitating and you've taken notes. It's a good thing. Also, what are the ethics of taking audience input when you're interested in a real relationship? And is it worth selling tickets if you're hurting people? And of course, there were lots of thoughts that nuanced those questions. You don't have to respond to any of those questions specifically, but it's sort of what kind of response you might want to offer to any of the conversations that they just started. And we'll hear from two or three of you if you have thoughts you want to share in this moment. Would any of you like to start? Shay, I feel like you've got something. Great, okay, so two minutes to sort of share some thoughts. Okay, so that was all so deep. So one of the things that has always kept me up at night in regards to community engagement work is how do you enter a community and how do you exit a community? And I think that two of the questions are directly related to that. The one about the well-being of the artist and taking the advice of the community. And I guess I'm gonna be a little hard-nosed about taking advice of the community. If you want to engage that community, the first rule is you gotta go in and you have to listen. You can't go in with expectations of what the outcome is gonna be because then your feelings are gonna be hurt and you're not gonna benefit from the reciprocity of the relationship. You're not gonna benefit from it. If you go and say, and this is how we wanna come out of it. I have been involved with, I worked at Cornerstone Theater for seven years. And it was the biggest learning and mind-expanding experience of my professional career because we went in many times with preconceived outcomes that were turned on their head, turned totally upside down. And we came out with something much more beautiful and much more engaging and a better piece of art than we had anticipated. And I firmly believe that the first rule of thumb is go in and listen and be prepared to hear something that is radically different than what you could possibly be imagining. It is absolutely your responsibility to listen and take advice of that community because if not, then why are you there? Then just do the play and sell tickets and let them come or not come. 20 seconds, but you don't need them. I'm gonna stop there. You're good. And share. I've got just one real quick example. I don't think you'll need to time this. Vancouver Opera spent several years working on a First Nations production of Mozart's Magic Flute. Magic Flute ends with the Queen of the Night being banished. The native elders did not like that because in native culture everything is about union. So Vancouver Opera commissioned a rewriting of the libretto so that Zoroastra and the Queen of the Night went off together at the end. Thanks, Doug. Exiting the community is so hard. Sarah, yeah, Pingchong. Yeah, worked with you a couple of times. That's the one, I don't have an answer for it. I don't know how you do it right, you know. I know how you do it wrong. Well, I don't even know how you do it wrong. Someone like Pingchong, where you guys have been in existence for so many years and you've worked with so many communities, how do you maintain relationships with all those communities after 30, 40 years of working? I don't know how you exit. What I have seen work and be successful is when there are self-defining and self-evolving cohorts that develop as a result of the community engagement process of a particular play. I've seen that work and I've seen organizations then provide that cohort with resources and tools to continue the work after Pingchong or after whatever the organization is, leaves. That one still keeps me up. How do you leave? Because you open up these wounds, you have these stories, you bring all of these issues to the forefront, and then you leave. And then people are left behind. And I don't know the answer. I mean, I don't have any advice on that one other than it is a huge concern. How do you exit in community? Martha or Seema, do you wanna add anything? There's time for one. Martha, do you wanna share a thought? The only is, Shay, you talk about exiting a community. So even though if your work is not as intensive and as immersive as the work that you're describing, let's say you cultivate a, for a particular show, partnership with a community, there's an exchange there. And then that community feels unheard, for instance, when the next several production. I mean, I think this is very common. I heard someone talking about it yesterday. Well, you didn't come back for four years until the next time you had a show that featured XXX features. And I think that that, because what that's up against is the resources of the artistic institution itself. I mean, how much of a reach, how pervasive can we be engaged in these communities? So I think what you're describing as a kind of lateral connection to make is valuable. So it's not all sustained through the arts organization itself because in the end of all, a place like Steppenwolf is making plays. It's making plays that it hopes speaks with great elegance, nuance, and meaning to our community. And there are communities, but in the end of all, what we're serving is an artistic mission. So it's very challenging, I think, yeah. I'm gonna stop us right there and move on. I also wanna know, as more folks come up, which is about to happen, that we can think about the conversation as moving forward. I don't want it to feel like it sort of has to start over each round. So as the next three folks share, if a thought comes to you from this, when it's next back to you, of course, include that. And we'll just see sort of what ideas are pushing us forward. The same goes as we come back out to you in a little bit. What I'd like to do now is ask cameo group two to be ready and it'll start with Brianna. And Brianna, this group had the same prompt as the first group and you feel ready? I think so. Awesome. I timed it. I hope I can do it. This is exciting. I'm ready. Time starts now. So at the theater company in this current season, we decided not to do a Shakespeare for various reasons. And that's a big deal because we almost always do a Shakespeare and that would have an impact on our funding through donors and it would also impact the amount of students that we could service through our student matinee programs. And so we started conversations about how do we appease those donors who always donate to the Shakespeare program and how do we get more student matinees in throughout the season because we need that student matinee number to be a certain number at the end of the year for that annual report. And it was all about a number. And so as we've started doing some more cross-functional conversations about other ideas and programs and things that we wanna do to expand the theater, there's one phrase that almost always comes up in every single meeting and that is, will that be appealing to a donor or to a funder? And so as we continue to discuss whether we're aware of it or not, we slowly start to reconfigure that original idea and purpose so that it fits within a box so we know what donor will want to fund it or we know it'll fit into the parameters of an actual grant. And so the question is, is this the business of theater that we've created? I mean, how do we say no? It's when we start doing that, we change the original intention of why we wanted to create the program in the first place. And so how do we say no to this dazzling money figure when we know it's actually either not gonna serve our organization or serve the community in the original intent? Brianna, right on, 130, thank you. Yeah. Thanks. So great. Yeah, Brianna, that's awesome. I think... I mean, are you good? Should I start off? 90, you good? Yes, please. I think I'm in a similar situation. Sam Robertson, artistic director of Congo Square, and I'm very new at the position. So I'm doing a lot of learning right now and navigating the system, the process, the funders and all of that. And you get into this conversation about audience engagement, audience development, community engagement, but I find myself really wrapped around the idea of audience education. And as a theater of color who does a specific kind of work, how do we, or what are the ethics and the policies around trying to educate an audience that might not relate to, connect to, understand our stories, to understand that these stories are important and that it's about cultural education or community education or educating an audience to kind of see the validity in the stories that are being told on stages like ours and other small culturally specific theaters in the city. So what, how do we begin to work together to teach people to not only see what we see, what they see on our stages, but to go and see that diverse work in other spaces and create that community of theater? Thank you for a great question, Sam. Thank you. Courtney, you good? All right. Okay, so I kind of pinpointed just one event we do each year as an example. At Two River Theater every year we have an event called Dia de la Familia which brings in about 100 to 150 Latino families around the theater. And to promote this event we have bilingual marketing materials. Once the patrons come in we have Spanish speaking volunteers at our box office and our lobby. All of our signage is bilingual, our play bill stuffers are bilingual. The show is actually translated live into Spanish through assistive listening devices. And a big goal of event like this and others like it we do throughout the year is to welcome the local Latino families, Spanish speaking parents and grandparents. A lot of times the kids already speak English to the theater. We want them to feel comfortable in our space, see us as a community resource and also to come back for the other work we do. And I think probably a lot of us are in the same boat but what I struggle with is when these events aren't going on where we have the institutional buy-in and the resources. If these patrons do come back they're coming into a completely different setup and a completely different experience. So my question is how can we continue to make those who attend this annual event and others like it feel genuinely welcome to our theater at all times, not just during specific events where we're planning for a larger turnout from a specific population. Given our resources and small percentage of certain communities that are coming out doesn't make sense to carry on the DIA model and everything we do. And if not is building an event-based audience in certain communities really enough. Thank you so much Courtney. Great, great. Hey so instead of coming up here what we're gonna do is we're gonna go here first and then we're gonna come up here. So that means we go to you. So two minutes again just with the folks you were with before or you can mix it up. And just a reminder, we just heard from these three cameos. Before that we heard from some folks up here who were responding to the voices before and what's on your mind right now? What's sticking with you as important or I'm glad this came up or I still haven't heard such and such. Two minutes start now. And 20 seconds and I'm gonna get I'm gonna ask for everybody's attention back if I may. Coming back, bringing this way. That's not pleasant. Thanks. So we're gonna take just a couple minutes and come back up here and have some responses thoughts from up here before we go back out. And Seema, yeah? Sure, sure. Michael said we'd start with you Seema and I said well shucks. You know I think the thing that I'm really struck by with all the questions is that there's such profound questions and I suspect the people who ask the questions, asking the question is the first step in the solution and I suspect many of you already have solutions you're testing and so really what I wanna encourage is all of us to go up to the individuals who ask the questions to dig in deeper about how they're tackling each of what they're working on because you have solutions. That's why you asked the question and framed it the way you did. But I will maybe tackle the last thing that Courtney mentioned about is it enough or how do we engage with these communities beyond the Dia de la Familia and my response to that and I suspect you're already doing this Courtney is ask them, engage in conversation where you can be real transparent about what your needs are, self-interests are as an organization, as an individual at the organization and what your resources are and then really asking them what are their interest needs and if there is alignment and you find mutual self-interest then that's where you organize. So that's all I have to say about that. Thank you Seema. When in addition to Courtney's question, Sam's question of how do we connect folks and audiences with stories that they don't think are important to them and make a sense of connection and importance to them that one's sticking with me as well so I'm just gonna keep that alive in the room. Who's got a thought they wanna share? Doug, you have a mic, do you wanna share something? This gets back to the funding question. The universe of people and organizations that are interested in funding the arts is relatively very small and so we have a tendency to look at this as a zero-sum game. I submit to you Rocco Landisman's work at the NEA gaining access to hundreds of millions of dollars that had never been available for the arts before by saying the arts can advance your agenda is let's talk about how. So there was money from HUD, there's money from the Department of Defense, from the Department of Education that never would have been available before. And there are no ethical conundrums in working with the Department of Defense at all. So it's a good reminder. And Shay? Yeah, so a couple of thoughts. One in terms of how do you connect people to the work of Sam, the question you were posing. I think you have to be in for the long haul and you're gonna convert one person at a time. But I also think there's value in the messaging of the work, how you talk about the project, the images that you use, the voice that you use. People wanna see themselves. I mean, this is like basic one-on-one stuff. Everybody knows this, but it's real and it's the old-fashioned way. They wanna see themselves, they wanna make sure the work is accessible. They wanna make sure that they're welcome and how you talk about it. The culture of the environment when they walk into the space is important. If someone comes in late, don't look at your watch as they walk through the door. And don't tell them you're late. Don't tell them the show started 20 minutes ago. People know when they're late. They don't need to hear that. Just get them to their seats. But those are barriers. Those are things that will feel like you're being judged or feel like you're not smart enough. But I think it's really one person at a time. And regarding how to maintain those relationships with like particularly the Latino community, are you partnering with other Latino organizations in your community? And maybe it's the maintenance of the relationships through those partnerships. And eventually, the more they see your name and your involvement involved in work that's important to them, maybe that audience will grow as a result. But it's, I think you gotta be in it for the long haul. It can't just be for one project. And it's gonna take one person at a time. Thank you, Shay. Martha, I could move on unless you have something you really wanna offer now. You good? All right, I'm gonna move it. We have the last group of cameos. The last three had a different prompt, which was not necessarily to prepare a story and a question, but to listen to this conversation we've been having and to either offer a reflection on it or to say, here's what I haven't heard that feels important. So we're gonna hear from these last three folks and then come out to you before we come back up here. So I believe that that makes Roberta first, yeah? And hi, Roberta. And so her 90 seconds when she gets up there, gets started, thanks for listening and thanks for sharing something right now. Here you go. Well, actually I have a whole bunch of things that I'm not hearing, but so much that I am hearing, but there's so much that's coming around. But there's an issue that I think we come upon whether it's because of our institutions not speaking amongst ourselves within our organizations or within others. So love the cohort thing. But this idea that we can become paralyzed by trying to be all things to all people. And so how do we overcome that with all these things that we're talking about, all these things that scare us, all these things that, oh my gosh, what's the solution to this problem or that problem? But that paralysis can stop everything. How do we go past that? Thanks, Roberta. A woman from California yields her time to Lydia. Hey, Lydia, you ready? Okay. Welcome and thanks for listening and responding. Thank you. So I just wanna talk for a second about, we're in this business and we're artists and I've often heard that we have huge egos, right? And I'm a woman who does not have children. I probably won't. But there is this thing that happens that's about tomorrow when people do have children that you often hear. What's going to be there for them? What are we creating for them? And I think that there's something really important about this idea of our ego meets tomorrow when we're thinking about work and audience engagement, right? So yes, we're doing it because we have the show or we have the season or the thing that we wanna create but what is there that we're leaving behind for tomorrow? For those people who are gonna come up behind us, for the people who are children today and coming to the shows and being in our arts education programs, what exactly do we want them to have and therefore what are we creating for them? Thank you. Thanks, Lydia. And that gets us to Rebecca. Becca's making her way. Okay, Rebecca, thank you and time starts now. So I think I wanna talk about the complexity of the phrase social justice in our engagement work in a couple of different ways. I mean, one is I think that for me and my staff, we have a personal relationship to that phrase and that goal that's somewhat different than our organizational stance being in a theater that doesn't have social justice or social change at the center of our mission. So that comes up in all kinds of different ways but especially around this kind of role of the community engagement staff as being advocates for our partners, our community partners in the organization came up around the question and when Ferguson happened, what was appropriate to post, what our community partners might be looking for us to put on Facebook in solidarity with a lot of the work they were doing on the ground, what our subscribers might be looking for us to post on our Facebook page, not the same thing. And I think also coming up in some recent responses we've had around the difference between partnering with service-based organizations like a homeless shelter versus advocacy organizations and some sentiment from like Seema mentioned a couple board members that they're fine as long as the organization is just helping people but not feeling politically aligned with organizations that are doing advocacy work and so that becomes very complicated as we try to model a kind of engagement that's not sort of that charity-based or kind of missionary-based model. So social justice, what it means inside the organization in a variety of ways. Thanks so much, Rebecca. Hey, so I'm gonna come back up here and make space for a few thoughts here and then we're gonna go back into small groups out here and then open it up and allow for some thoughts from here and that'll seed us forward. How we doing? Folks with it? We good? Okay, it feels really interesting up here. So many different questions. I meant to say at the beginning of this session obviously that we're raising questions not seeking answers, not that anybody in here would think we were seeking answers but the questions are so rich that they sort of each one wants a longer conversation that resolves with here's what to do and think about that. We're not getting there now but the hope is that's what continues to happen over the next 24 hours. Someone up here wanna take it? I have a question of Rebecca. Would you, would it be true that the leadership of the theater also feels the kind of social mission that you're speaking of you and your colleagues feeling? Is it a shared vision? What's the mission of the theater? I think it's an evolving question. I think what we've been exploring kind of around this is about sort of priorities. Like the priorities between Michael phrased it really well in terms of like is great art, the kind of center of the mission and community impact is sort of a subsidiary mission or is it a sense of the community impact being something that happens mainly through the performance of theater rather than through other activities. So I think there's some tension there and we have a leadership transition going on as well which has raised a whole nother level of that. Because I think Michael early on when you parse that difference is what maybe gets to the nugget of what I was describing at Steppenwolf. Yeah, the artist would feel and I think the history of the theater would reveal that it comes from this artistic impulse and we have witnessed that it is actually a transformative force. I think my intention, my mission was to make that conversation more lucid, more open, more inclusive. You create greater points of access to be more intentional and thoughtful about framing a conversation, using conversation as the model and the idea of an exchange. But in the end of all, we're making plays and we're making them with the conviction that that has the potential to be personally and that it has the potential to be personally transformative and to have community impact. I do think that this conversation starts, I mean, as I look around this room, I'm thinking about the amazing thing of having, for instance, Martha and the work that happens at Steppenwolf in the room, Katie, I'm thinking about the work at Theater of the Oppressed New York City, Will sitting right behind you in terms of working in regional theaters and a ton in community settings, I believe, and that if all these things exist and we're in a conversation together, do we sort of look at that as we are a field that does all these things or do we say, well, we have very different missions so our conversation needs to include bridges across those different missions when we have conversations. And I'm not articulating that as that's the solution, but even in this room right now, the distinction in how you just framed the work of Steppenwolf is quite different from the work of other people in the room and quite same as some people in the room, and that seems to be at the heart of it. Do other folks up here have a thought about that, Sema? I even wonder if that thing is a part of what's at the heart of some of the tension in the work you've been doing for the last year at Pasadena Playhouse and if you wanna speak to that at all, you don't have to. We can go back to Shay or Doug. Isn't it true why Teresa, for instance, has been so insistent that there is not a theater that's representative and that can be described as the American theater. This is the American theater. I mean, this is what it looks like. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, go ahead, Sema. Maybe as you were, both of you were framing that context, what occurred to me is how valuable it is with the differing missions that we have to hear the strategies of organizations with missions that are very different from our own to hear what those strategies are and to ask ourselves, challenge ourselves, what happens if I incorporate it? Could I even incorporate that strategy and what would need to happen organizationally? Would we want to? So that's the value I see in all of this. Just really quickly, and this gets to the question about paralysis. There's way too much that needs to be done than even all of us together in this room can do. So what's critical is identifying strategy, the sort of unifying principles that guide your actions and saying, we're gonna work on these one or two things. There is so much else that it's valuable to work on. We're not going to work on those. You know, that's the gift of no. And do I stand on authentic ground to have that piece of the mission? Well, and that I think is really interesting, that word authenticity. And of course we could parse what it means, but in relation to mission and funding and programs and hiring and access. So what I want to do is sort of put it back out here to you and small groups. So when we come out of this, we're gonna take a few minutes for folks to come up. If you have, doesn't have to be questions for the folks up here, questions for the room, thoughts for the room. I will though do the sort of 30 to 60 seconds for each person that comes up, just so we don't end up sort of having seven minutes with one voice as we get towards the end of our session, which is something that drives me personally a little crazy. So here we go, small groups, two or three minutes right now just to continue the conversation. How the social justice question was landing with both of you, what Rebecca Novak would say about social justice. 20 seconds. Our attention is coming back up here. Our attention is coming back up here without the whistle. Maybe it'll be a whistle, a live whistle. Three, two, one. You'd think, I do so much of it, but that's the one thing that I never sort of easily do. Yeah, all right, Lisa said if I kiss her, she'll give me a good tactic there. That's a good deal. All right, hey, so I wanna make space for some thoughts from out here. Yeah, before we come back up here and we're doing okay on time. So if you have a thought, that you'd like to share, which could be in the form of, could you, would it be okay if I ask you to, oh, do we have a runner with the mic or? Yes, great, let's get to a mic there. We're meeting in the back with the mic. This is exciting and again, I will ask your permission as we start. Is it okay, is it okay if I do the timing thing with you? Totally, I'm not gonna be up here that long. All right, here we go. My name is Dale Orlando Smith. Hi, Dale. Thank you. And what I was listening to was the fact that I, one of the, I'm known for, best known for a play called Yellow Man that was done 13 years ago and I do a lot of solo work. What is scary to me is, and what we haven't spoken about is, at what point do you play into the very bias you're trying to get out of? When I wrote Yellow Man, I had some people, Yellow Man, for those of you who don't know what that is, High Yellow is a nasty term for light-skinned black people. The majority of people were very, very, they were cool with it. I did have some people say, how dare you write us, i.e. black people in this light? I am a writer, not the writer. I am writing two, not four. I want my individualism to add to a collective. But when you sever my voice or anybody else's voice, you're playing into the very bias you're trying to get out of. So the individual vision of the artist has to be also reckoned with as well because, again, you will have no theater. Lack of integration means retrogression. Retrogression means extinction. And that's the scary part when we make certain kinds of schisms. So that's my point. Thank you, Dale. Thanks. Who else would like to, I saw a couple of hands right here. Either of you wants to just come to the center? Yeah. And we, oh, great, great, great. In the back right there. And then you can make your way over while we're talking. Here we go. In the, oh, yes. Hi, I'm Christine Bruno. I'm a little short. Sorry guys, I'm not gonna walk up to the mic. Hi, Christine. First of all, I wanna say I'm so encouraged by all the questions I've heard so far and that the sort of breadth of the deepness of all the questions and the breadth of diversity that people are talking about. But I just want to remind everyone that diversity does not just mean color. It also means disability. And gender, you know, identification and age, you know. And so I just wanna encourage us as we go over the next two days and have these conversations to really, when we're talking about diversity, whether or not a disability community is important to our specific community or a theater. I work for an advocacy organization in New York and I'm also an artist with a disability. So that particularly is what's important to me. But all of these questions are important to me. All of diversity is important to me. And I would just encourage us when we're thinking about diversity to think about all diversity because that's gonna help us sort of decide how we wanna have these conversations in the future and how we wanna not only engage the diverse artists that exist in our country but also the diverse audiences that exist in our country. Thank you, Christine. Including the audience of disability which is America's largest minority at 20%. So, thanks. Thank you so much, Christine. Hey, I wanna note that Jack and Raymond are actually leading a session at 1 p.m. today that sort of, I believe, takes up the conversation that you just brought up. So I wanna make sure that that's in the space. I know that there was some, yes, have you got the mic or should we get you a mic? Great. We'll go here and then right to you. Go ahead. Hi, I'm Sarah. I work at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. And one thing that I'm really struggling with and Seema, you kind of brought this up is I work in the marketing department. So I'm in charge of public relations, getting the collateral out and also community engagement. And it's really, I think it's really difficult for me to create community engagement that's transformative rather than transactional because I have all of these other deadlines to sell tickets. And so this, I mean, I'm curious in talking to anyone about this, but moving that position from marketing to artistic, I think might be a good step for our organization to engage different communities in longer relationships. I think you just also gave us one of many sort of vocabularies or shorthands that I feel are coming up this morning, transformation and or slash versus transaction is a really interesting concept. Thank you. We had a mic right here and then we'll come right over here. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Neering. I work at Longworth Theater in the Artistic Department and actually what I wanted to talk about is pretty much the same thing. This idea of this work in the community living in multiple departments and how do we make it a part of all of the work we do from the artists, from representing those voices to asking people in the community what they need while also meeting transactional goals. How do you marry those ideas and have those departments work together because they feel like so often it's serving multiple goals and being people are stretched thin. I think everybody in the theater does about five different jobs. So figuring out how to make it a unified goal throughout the institution and how to move forward and develop relationships on every level. How is that a part of everyone's journey? Thank you. I'm coming right across. Thanks. Hi, I'm Annie Hamburger and I'm the president of On Guard Arts and I'd like to remind everyone, I think community isn't just about place. It's also about ideas. We have a show called Bass Track Live that's gone to 25 cities around the country. Good show. And thank you. And the success stories are, we really listen to vets when we develop this show because I'm not a vet and we really heard what they had to say and because of what they had to say we changed certain terminologies and ideas within our show. I mean, we didn't change the art of it but we changed the consciousness of it. So that's one thing. And I would say the other success stories as we went around the country were partnerships with public art so that we had actually statements. One of the most amazing things was at UCLA we had a little house that an architecture firm built where the students could come up and leave their comments about how they felt about war and that helped the students get into the theater. So those kind of partnerships with organizations of other disciplines I think can be really, really valuable. Thanks, Annie. Yeah, I've got some hands over there and then here. So why don't we go there and then right here in the front next to Jonathan, yeah. Yeah, okay. And we've got just a couple more comments. Here we go. Hi, good morning everyone. I'm Becky Aviles from the Cleveland Public Theater I'm part of the ensemble of the first Latino group in Cleveland, Ohio for theater the theatrical public of Cleveland. The way I started with the theater I wanted to share with all of you as you struggle trying to bring in more audiences. My first experience with the theater in Cleveland was by being in the audience. How did this happen? The Latino community was not very connected with the American public theater in Cleveland. However, the theater did open their doors for different events to the Latino community. People started becoming familiar with the location and their projects. Then they started coming to the shows. Our executive director Raymond had this great idea of trying to bring in not only artists but people from the community that did not have any experience in the theater before and they opened the doors to us, we felt welcome. That's how we became involved. We had the opportunity to share our stories with the staff and make an original play directed by Raymond, our executive director, and we were able to bring people from all over the place. People are driving an hour to come and see our plays. We're covering the whole Northeast Ohio area not just the city of Cleveland. And I see how you all are trying to engage. It takes time, it takes effort making all the connections. And I also had the opportunity, sorry I'm taking so long. Okay, you got 15 more seconds, that's exciting. Okay, I also had the opportunity to also learn from other pieces like Fire on the Water. I learned a lot about how in Cleveland the pollution and the lake and everything caught on fire. By being in Cleveland only for 15 years, I didn't know about the history. I got to learn the struggle, and that was very important to me to feel connected as an individual with the theater. I'm gonna say thank you. Thanks for that comment. I wanna come right here, yeah? And you have the mic, great. And after this there'll be, I think, we'll be one more from this area and then we'll go on. You guys can battle it out right now if you would. Hi, my name is Shadek Kaat. I'm the CEO of the National Black Theater, which is in Harlem. My question is actually dealing with culturally specific theaters, and what I'm hearing in the room, I have an impulse to feel very much for our theater the opposite. So for us we start from a transformational space, and where we need support is how does that transactional number permeate more into our mission-driven work? And also the question around the board and the board's emphasis or funder's emphasis as we're creating, you know that there's a number that you guys need to meet, and how do you take risks in your art that might alienate those numbers? We do the opposite. Our mission-driven work really starts with community engagement. And what we know is because we serve a specific cultural mission that cultivating individual donors becomes harder because we don't do so much commercial work. We deal with emerging playwrights. We deal with social justice issues. We have to be nimble enough to listen authentically to our community. So my question is, from a cultural art standpoint, how do we translate what it is that we do, which is starts with transformation, which does start with community engagement, and make that feel important and relevant to people who have broader concerns of what art and theater is. Thank you. We're gonna go with one more, oh, yes, a double. I'm very thrilled about this. And then I'm gonna come up here and we'll have sort of closing thoughts from each person. We want it to be innovative in this style. Yes, all right, so that doesn't give you double the time, though, you do know that. Right, I will speak double the speed. I'm Victor Mayog. I'm artistic director of 2G, which is an Asian-American theater company in New York City. Hi, everybody. Yeah, I'm Katie Rubin from Theater, the President of OEC, and I've worked with Victor at like 10 places, so we can stand together. Yeah, so just to the question of how do we help people out? Sometimes we wanna help people out. We wanna, it begins to create a class system of we're helping them, as opposed to this question of advocacy. So I just wanna remind everybody about the power of gatekeepers, right? You want people to really be part of that partnership, but that means you have to be amenable to different forms, different shapes, different dramaturgies, or else it becomes a colonial idea. You have to fit this form to extend the conversation to be in this space to get this funding. Katie. Yeah, Victor and I were talking about not liking the word help, so to that. I guess my question is, TONYC does maybe kind of some reverse community engagement where our actors are homeless actors, youth actors with experience of incarceration, et cetera, and then we go and do some performances both for peers and for theater-going New Yorkers. And then they come and we're trying to get them to leave feeling like they're in solidarity with us and not like they're helping. So how do we, all of our troops, engage all those people in thinking about art and community in a different way so that they can stay active and take action outside the theater, but not in that charitable way? And I was really responding to your language that you, Asima and Doug, both have, so thank you for that about what you're doing. Thanks, Katie, Victor. Good double. Thank you. Hey, gratitude for those comments and questions, and I wanna make sure that there's space as we wrap up for each of the folks who've joined us up here in the role of panelists to sort of share some kind of final thoughts as they've been listening. So who wants to go first? Who's got a mic in hand? No one has a mic in hand. Here, Martha's hiding a mic. There we go, Asima, you wanna start us? One thing that just crossed my mind, and I forgive me, I didn't get your first name, but from the National Black Theater in Harlem, it sounded like, or what I think I heard you say is right now a lot of the funding is about how do we get these large, dominant organizations to engage with community? And it sounds like you're asking, what about those organizations that are already doing this work and how do we get funders to help scale them up? Is that, am I hearing that right? Is that a part of it? I rock on with that. Okay, thanks, Asima. Shea, final thoughts from you? I'm enthused, but I'm also tired by this conversation. Just like, you know, 2015, we're still having it. But I guess we're gonna have it for a long time, you know, we're in America. Racists of, yeah, we're here, yeah. Anyway, but I will say this, you can't be all things to all people. You have to be mission specific. It has to be part of your vision. It has to be part of your values. And if you are gonna engage community, I think it's more valuable if you narrow your definition of that and go deep. Focus it and go deep. Martha? Yeah, and I would also say, you know, to the discouragement we sometimes feel, you say we're in America, we're human. So it's sysophician. And that's gotta be the pleasure, do you know? I mean, I think we have to disabuse ourselves in the notion that we shall be the transformation done. It's no, it's every single day. And the beauty of it is that we have at the center the theatrical act, right? And we do it new every night. And there's this weird like futility. I say this as an actor of going out there every night and you're like, really? And yet every night it ends up being kind of excited and exciting and new. And that's the nature of our work. And I think when we think about, you know, what happens between human beings and what we're talking about our relationships, it requires that same mindfulness and that same commitment to, yes, every day it's you and me again. And, Doug? Well, I've written two books on this and have a blog and you don't wanna get me started. That's why you've got 90 seconds. Yeah, I told Michael my next blog post is if I'd had more than two minutes. I told him I can't wait to read it. A couple of observations. This work, if it's going to work, has to be of mutual benefit both to the arts organization and to the community with which you're working. If you are thinking of it as charity, it's not engagement. It is paternalistic, it is colonial. The operative prepositions are with rather than for. My personal definition of community in this work is a group of people who have something in common and you get to choose what community you're gonna work with. But the most important thing is relationship maintenance. If you're remembering that friendships are the metaphor, you don't want to be all over someone and then they never hear from you again. We don't want to be one night stands with organizations. So relationship maintenance can be done by identifying community ambassadors who can after the event help maintain the relationship. I sometimes also talk about developing a board of engagers. These ambassadors that you've worked with in the past who can help you maintain the work as we go forward. Thank you, Doug. Hey, so I want to just from listening and being here, something I've heard and not heard, something I just want to sort of propose to continue in the conversation is the power dynamics around all these issues. We're talking about them in lots of different ways, I know, but just sort of naming power and privilege and systems and even the question earlier about vision creep was how I defined it when funders sort of creep programs or visions towards something someone else wants and what money does to this equation. And yeah, I sometimes find myself in these conversations, fortunately not when I'm here, but if I'm listening, like is everything I want to have been said said or am I frustrated that something I want to have had said was not said. So I hope if things have not been said, which of course not everything could have been said, that over the next day folks will enthusiastically and provocatively keep saying to each other and in sessions. I also wanted to offer in the spirit of an ongoing conversation these two books, Michelle Hensley's All the Lights On, from 10,000 Things in Twin Cities. This book just came out like a month or two ago and Jan Cohen cruises engaging performance from a couple of years ago. These are two really wonderful books that sort of continue a conversation about ethics and engagement from different perspectives and from different experiences. So I wanted to offer that as a continuation rather than a close. Thanks so much for your willingness to be in the structure and can we thank these folks up here and all of our cameos as well. And thank you, Michael Rode, for being such a great convener of this panel. And thank you, TCG, for being such great hosts. One more time, big round of applause for Michael and Shay and Sima and Martha and Doug and all of the incredibly smart people in the room who are working toward mutuality and respect but acknowledging the fact that we live in a landscape described by our colonialism, by our patriarchy, by our paternalism. So we fight against that, we fight with that. When we do work with and about, it's a different thing than when we do work for and to but we're all in that dynamic together and I wanna honor the struggle that we share in the midst of that. So before we get that very well-deserved coffee break, there's one more closely timed five minute piece of programming, right? And that is to welcome the first of our Kansas City representatives to give us a little thought burst around what's happening here in Kansas City. So I hope you will join me in welcoming Tyrone Akin, who is the executive director of the Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey. Come on, Tyrone. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you. I have a lot that I want to impart and I love the conversation you're having. It is because it is something that we are very much engaged in what we're doing at Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey and what makes us so exciting for me and I have had the pleasure of working at Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey for the past 21 years, 10 of which or 11 of which were as the lead artistic person and then the last 10 as the executive director. Part of that really deals with the vision and it really is a vision that is a diverse community united to inspire and change lives. And the unique thing about our organization is that we do not have sort of an artistic product. So we don't have a company. We don't have some other kind of thing that impedes our ability to do exactly what we want to do with that vision. But we have also a mission and that mission is very important to how we've developed and why we've developed in the way that we have and that there's something that we're wanting to do to share with arts organizations as well as other nonprofits. And that really is we started out presenting Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Ailey II. And the NEA had massive cuts to its touring subsidy in 1982 when Ronald Reagan came into office. At that time, Alvin Ailey went to look for a second home. So why Kansas City? Partly because of the jazz route that he fell in love with, but also because of the people and the leadership. And the leadership had something in mind in forming the organization in 1984. And that was to bring people together. So right from the beginning, diversity became a central part of our mission and it is. So you talked about mission, you talked about mission creep. For us, that is a part of our mission and it means that day in and day out at the board level, at the staff level, at the volunteer level, at our committee level, we are engaged in trying to have parity between the majority and minority communities as we make decisions. Now is that easy? No, I tell you it is not because you're bringing people who have divergent ideas about the world that they live in and how those ideas should impact their communities, but it is rewarding. It's rewarding work because people grapple with real issues. We are rooted in the 18th and Vine Jazz District and we're there because Mr. Ailey came here before the district developed to get a haircut. And stopping in the district, some kids ran up to the car and he was like, you know, I'm really interested in this place and it has history in terms of the jazz and I want to make some ballets. Mr. Ailey's last ballet was a ballet called Obus McShann and it's in tribute to Jay McShann who is a stride piano player here from Kansas City. And so we root it there because it's in tribute to him but also because the district is rich in history. And what brought me to Kansas City was in 1991, I had an opportunity to teach at something called Ailey Camp and it is a nationally replicated award-winning camp that's replicated in nine cities across the United States and it transformed the way that I engage young people in the arts because the camp tries to address the needs of the whole child. So it's not just about the art but whether or not you're having trouble getting to the site, whether or not you're having a problem with the person next to you, whether or not you're understanding and can read the information that you're being given, whether or not you have the correct attire to be accepted by your peers. All of those things matter and when we can address those things we can really teach. So that's one of the things that really went off for me and just like whoa and it changed the way that I engaged young people because that became meaningful for me when I could see those light bulbs go off in them. The real thing that I wanted to talk about though today that we're doing that we're so excited about after 30 years is this idea of the Symposium Project and it's really with the help of Michael Kaiser and my board of directors, we visioned where we wanted to be and it was this idea of wanting to have a national conversation, a conversation about race and place and diversity and how we come together and what those challenges are and have an ongoing dialogue. So as things come up like Ferguson or not come up that there is an ongoing way to engage our community and having discussions that will lead to greater resolve around how we not only address the issues that impact our community but also how the arts are an integral part in allowing the community to address those issues. So I wanna say I've timed this, I'm at five minutes and 12 seconds. Thank you so much. Yes we can work within time limits. Beautiful, exactly. So working within time limits, in mere moments we will take a coffee break, there's refreshments along the back wall and in the halls. In your hands you have some of the tools for this work. We've designed these workbooks in the binders to help you get through this. Surrounded by us are tools for communicating. What you're thinking, there's a lot of good buzz here. Couple of quick housekeeping things. Skip Greer, the TCG folks need you at the back tech table. Suzanne Callahan, I need to see you. All right, can you do it? More timing back in your seats at 11 a.m. Do this.