 Hello and welcome. I want to welcome our folks who are here in our room, in our circle here in Kingston. I want to acknowledge that we are on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee nations. I also want to acknowledge the claim of the Huron-Wendat to these lands, a traditional claim as well. I'm really happy to be hosting Mia Amir and Lisa Ravensberg in here, as well as this cohort of amazing artists from all over. I'm going to leave Mia to do most of the introductions, but I just want to acknowledge or say that this room, all of our chairs are on wheels, except for your Cynthia. But that's okay, you can move if you want. People may be coming and going into this space, and so we'll adjust the room to open up the circle to include them, and also we can tighten up if folks have to go, and coming and going is okay. So Mia, I'm going to pass the mic over to you, and thank you for rearranging the technology. Great. I am really feeling called to just vaguely reorganize our plan, I'm so sorry, but I just want us to say who we are and where we're coming from today. Oh, I can look here. Yeah, sorry. So I just really want to introduce our entire cohort before we get started. We'll do our proper other check-in next, but if we could just say our names and where we're calling from, that would be great. Oh, so my name is Mia Susan Amir, and I'm calling here from the Fulva Festival. I'm Lisa Cook Ravensberg and I'm doing the same. This is Rue George Warren, calling in from the mountains of North Carolina stateside, where I'm currently in a grocery store parking lot, which is the only place I could get reception. So I'm sorry I can't be there and see you all, but excited for this. Hi, I'm Debbie Patterson, and I'm calling in from Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is the traditional land of the Anishinaabe, Dene, the Cree, the Oji Cree and the Dakota Peoples, and it is also the homeland of the Métis Nation. Hi, my name is Jessica Schacht. I'm calling in from the traditional territory of the Couch and Nation, also known as Duncan on Vancouver Island, BC. This is Grant. I'm calling Grant Miller. I use they them pronouns. I'm calling from the traditional territory of the Multnomah, Clackamas, Kalapuya, and many other unnamed bands. There are a lot of tribes around here, which is also the territory of the Grand Ronde, the Confederated tribes of the Grand Ronde are also in this area. Hi, I'm Lindsay, and I'm calling in from so-called Edmonton, which is actually a really intensely beautiful gathering place of a lot of First Nations, Blackfoot, Cree, Papa's Chase, Dene, Iroquois, Inuit, Nekotisu, Ojibwe, Soto, Anishinaabe, and Métis Nations as well. And so we are some of the members of the unsettling dramaturgy colloquium and Rue and I are co-coordinators of this project and we're thrilled for this to be the public launch of our work. We've been working quietly over the last six months, developing relationships and starting to understand the shape of what we want to make together and our collective shape. And I'm really thrilled that Lisa is able to join us as somebody who's adjacent to this project and I'm really excited for our conversation today. So, Rue and I wanted to tell you a little bit about unsettling dramaturgy before we launch into the conversation. I'm wondering if you'd like to start us off. Rue? Absolutely. Yeah. So unsettling dramaturgy is an ongoing project, bringing together crypts and instruments from across so-called Canada and the United States. Working in lots of different areas including theater, dance, and experimental performance. We're using digital platforms where we gather to build relationships, to explore and document the critical convergences and divergences in our experiences and work. So, the project proposes a continuation of the thriving legacies of leadership and innovation that shape Indigenous and crypt dramaturgies, but in a whole new way by bringing together artists from communities that have been historically excluded from mainstream performance ecologies and which have been further siloed into spaces of making that have systematically prevented critical cross-community collaboration. We're dismantling these silos to advance emerging conversations, exploring the conflicts of leadership and representation in creation and production, as relates to Indigenous sovereignty and deaf, mad, and disability culture in the arts. We're generating a platform for self-reliance, and we're working together to create a platform for self-reliance. It may be so different from the U.S. as you see it there. It bears important to share that this project is not aimed to collapse CRIP and Indigenous dramaturgies and experiences. The exclusions that our communities face emerge from very specific historical, cultural, and political contexts. Further, the ableism, sanism, and autism that death-disabled and mad artists face emerge from colonial ways of assigning value and human dignity. We use the language of CRIP to include those who identify as mad, sick, and disabled, as well as those who are deemed disabled by society and or medical institutions, whether or not they themselves accept the term. For example, those for whom deafness is a cultural identity, not a medical condition. We use the word CRIP as a political intervention to turn attention onto and to disrupt as our collaborator Carmen Papalia, who's not here today, writes, the disabling conditions that limit a person and or community's agency and potential to thrive. And we use the term Indigenous with an acknowledgement of the many complex ways the community, family, belonging, polity, and heritage interact with systems of state recognition. The words CRIP and Indigenous are both used as shorthand relief and are not intended to generalize or reduce the vast multiplicity of our identities, experiences, and affiliations. So that's a bit about our project or the kind of like urge that lives underneath it. We wanted to give you a little outline so you know what's going to happen next. So we've got like two hours together and the invitation is for you to bear witness to a conversation that is about to take place between the one, two, three, four, five, six, six, six, some of us. And before that, we're going to do some introductions of ourselves and our practice. We're going to invite you to have an opportunity to introduce yourself to one other person in the room. Then we're going to converse. And then we're going to do a practice session where you all will exchange with each other with some parameters and then you'll have a collective exchange which we will witness and then we'll close. Does that make sense? Any questions? Right on. Yeah, totally. So through this format, we're letting you in on a conversation that we are having with and for each other, with and for Crip and Indigenous dramaturgs. We invite you to participate in the first part of this event, as I said, as witnesses. And with that understanding. And this is our radical act of centering our practices, voices, and experiences to undermine the ways in which we are often asked to perform these conversations to educate others. We're countering the extractive nature that we often confront in our work. So we encourage you to take notes in the Slack channel that Adrienne had set up. And this will assist the latter parts of our event. And this is a place for you all to just like document reflections, impressions, sensations, words, anything that's coming up for you as you are witnessing the conversation. Yeah? Cool? Okay. So we are going to introduce ourselves now, panelists. We're going to introduce ourselves by sharing our names, pronouns, a visual description. We skipped something really important. I'm just going to finish what I'm saying. Okay. Visual description, who we've already shared where we're calling in from, any access needs that we have, and a little bit about our practice. And we're each going to do that in two minutes or less. Right on. Who would like to go first? I can start. So again, this is Rue calling in from a parking lot on Cherokee land in the mountains of North Carolina. I use he, him, or they, them. And I am about six foot one, white skin, Catawba person. That's where I'm located most of my time is on the Catawba reservation in South Carolina. I've got short curly hair, blue eyes, and a beard. And I usually have a pretty big smile on my face. I already told you where I'm from and from, I'm from Reservation land, but currently on Cherokee land in terms of access needs. My access needs for today is that when people are speaking, if they can identify themselves verbally, so that I know who's speaking. And then for Mia in the room, if there's things happening in the room, if that can just be narrated or conveyed verbally, just so that I know what's going on in there, I'd really appreciate it. And then as far as my practice, my background is in operatic performance, but I've moved pretty rapidly into the area of theater and experimental performance. A lot of my practice is also community based, working back in my tribal community on language revitalization and food sovereignty and seeing how performance and drama turkey can come into this world that we've been inhabiting for millennia. So how about, thank you so much and I'm excited for this conversation. Debbie, why don't you introduce yourself? Sure. Hi. I'm Debbie Patterson. I use she, her pronouns. I have shoulder length brown hair. I'm wearing dollar store reading glasses and a white sweater. I'm sitting in my super awesome purple tie light wheelchair at the moment. And my practice is primarily theater. And I'm just going to share an experience from yesterday. I was invited to give the keynote address at the mayor's luncheon for the arts in Winnipeg. So there were like a couple of hundred people there, business leaders, the mayor, all the members of city council, and then all the artists or representatives from all the arts organizations in Winnipeg. And I talked about disability justice, reconciliation and climate change as being the primary things I'm working on right now and challenged the primacy of capitalism in our world and how I called for the end of capitalism basically in this speech and was shocked at how many people came up to me afterwards and said, you said everything I've been thinking about lately, which was amazing to me and not just the artists telling me this. This was business leaders. This was politicians telling me that they all share this vision that we need to disrupt capitalism and start using the tools that artists use to measure our success as the yardstick for what has value in our world. So that was super, super hopeful. And I just wanted to share that. My name is Lisa Cook Ravensberg and the other name I've been given is she walks in a good way. I'm sitting beside Mia in a skirt and white blouse with mustardy yellow dots, I have very long hair that goes down my back, black, with a few white hairs. Oh my good Lord, it's begun. I have brown eyes, I have my glasses that are on my head sometimes and on my face other times. I have a moon face. I'm sitting in the room with everyone here at the theater. I'm a theater artist and a mama. I'm here doing a show for Fulda and unfortunately I will need to leave early because I have a show to do with my boy, you know, Dan who's here with me called Citation. My needs are, I don't think I have very many needs except to be able to give space I think just to not, to give, allow for space between people talking for me so that I'm not, I don't get, I don't want to miss what somebody's trying to say and we're not in the same space so we can't take visual cues from each other. And thank you for inviting me. The work that I tend to do these days because I'm a grad student here at Queens, I'm in cultural studies, Dylan tells me, my supervisor, that I'm the only indigenous theater artist in the country that has this degree when I'm done, which is alarming to me. I don't feel like that's something that I'm, that we're proud of or that Queens should be proud of. I feel like it's kind of embarrassing for Queens but I'm honored to be in this position and I'm honored to share the work here as a theater artist and an indigenous theater artist with my fellow theater artist Sarah Garten Stanley and Liz Fry and I'm theoretically defending a thesis at the end of the summer, so it all goes well, that will happen. So the work that I tend to do these days is mostly I think around acknowledging occupation, I feel like, and also trying to distill everything down. I feel like it's around the work, the performative work of ceremony and the transformative power of a relational praxis. That to me is embedded in the cultural teachings that I've been raised with, but also as in my mom is English and Irish and I'm Anishinaabe and Kree, I'm Oji Kree and so I'm a bridge that has been walking and leaving a trail of bridge behind me so I feel like I'm living on the bridge and trying to understand what the currents are doing and responding to that in relationship to who happens to be with me on the bridge and beside me. So yeah, I tend to work interdisciplinary and I'm also just an actor as well and a director and I do a lot of things, but yeah, I think that's kind of it. Did I miss anything? Grant, would you go next? My name again is Grant Miller, they then pronouns. I have black hair with a little bit of grey threads woven in, white, wearing big chunky headphones on my ears with a sort of grid pattern on a button up and a grey undershirt. I'm about five but one sitting against a white background with a painting behind me. I have hands that drape like willow trees and I think that's my description. So again, I'm from the traditional lands of the Multnomah, Clachmus, Kathlemed, Chinook, Kalapuya people was other unnamed bands. I access needs, which is a colonized name Portland, Oregon in the U.S. My access needs include, I might turn off my camera every once in a while just to take care of an access need, but I'm still engaged with the conversation. My allergies are acting up so I'm a little cloudy in the head. I might ask folks to repeat themselves. And I don't know that this access need can really, I'm not quite sure what can be done about this, but for me, there's a little bit of a mystery in looking at a room of people who are across the space from this camera. And so just kind of wondering who's here. Just impacts my access in a way that I'm still kind of working with and sitting with here. So, yeah, and like I see that there's like shifting around happening because I'm guessing new people are coming into the room or something like that. And someone's waving their arms. And so like these sort of cues and signals I think are also kind of useful for the people who are present there just because there's a relationality that I'm still trying to get a sense of. And praxis is the next thing on the list of self-introduction. Art praxis, art and social justice praxis. So my work is primarily performance-based. I self-identify as an artist, queer, non-binary, disabled. And my primary work right now is with a project called Grotto Worlds, which I just got a grant for, yay, which is a collaborative effort with myself, my partner, and then two other collaborators. And for this project we're incorporating components of virtual reality, incorporating like aspects of trauma, nervous system regulation, in having conversations about social justice and equity. And we're also trying to create sort of performance bases or performance opportunities in which audience members are invited to share and participate in a sense, but also do so in a way that disassembles a lot of what's kind of assumed or standard in most theater. And so I think some people might look at what we're doing and question, like, is that exactly theater? Which is part of the hope, because I think there's a lot in theater that wants to be rethought, reimagined, reinvented, particularly from a disability standpoint. And other praxis just include reorienting to my body in any given moment, and then trying to be in dialogue with other people about where our bodies are and how we're relating to the space in a given moment. I feel like there's a lot of being taught that what's happening within our bodies is in conflict with our surroundings, because our surroundings expect our bodies to be all the same. And so I think a big part of my praxis is just trying to disrupt that in most given moments. Check. Jessica, would you introduce yourself? Sure. Hi. My name is Jessica Schacht. I use she, her pronouns. And I have dark brown hair, which is swept up away from my face, dark brown eyes, tan skin. And I'm wearing a bright blue dress and a pair of cedar bark earrings with a pair of turquoise black and white moccasins on them. I am in my TV room slash guest room at home, which has got blue walls. There are some yellow blankets and paintings in the corner. And I'm in a north facing room, so part of my face is in shadow despite my best efforts to arrange the lighting. I am... Yes. I'm a Métis mixed Canadian settler ancestry born on the lands of the Lekwungen speaking people, now known as the Esquimalt and Sonny's Nations, also known as Victoria B.C., and now live as an enabetic guest on the traditional territory of the Cowichin Nation, part of the Hoekumun Treaty Group, which is in stage four principle negotiations, also known as Duncan B.C. In terms of access needs, I might need to get up and go but just leave briefly, but I'll try to do that at appropriate times such as when the audience is interacting in their own engagements. And in terms of my praxis, my focus is on dramaturgy, writing, and directing, and my work centers around exploring identity and relationships through cultural, environmental, and personal experiences that shape us. I aim to focus on a process over product-based practices and focus on holding space and trying to ensure agency for the people in the room. Yeah. Thank you. Lindsay, would you introduce yourself? Hello. Yeah, I'm Lindsay. My pronouns are she and her. And you guys, just in terms of a visual description, I'm a weight, queer, fat femme with bright red curly hair, and I'm wearing black sparkly cat-eye glasses and a green dress. And yeah, I'm a TV6 settler from the gathering space that is now so-called Edmonton. In terms of access needs, my brain is like really mushy right now and yeah, I don't even really know what day it is. I made it on time to the Skype call, so that's a win. Yeah, I'm in the midst of a lot of grief and loss and some slow healing work, so yeah, that means I'm a little bit here and a little bit not here. In terms of what I need, I'll probably just need to take breaks at points. I may need to ask after repetition and I may just lose my thought in the middle of my sentence, so yeah, that's a thing. In terms of praxis, I am I would identify as a mad artist and mad being a kind of umbrella term for many different complex relationships to social and political understandings of mental, quote-unquote mentalness and psychiatric systems and institutions. And so my work is mostly in dance and performance. I, for the past 13 years, have been a co-founder and co-director of the integrated dance and disability art organization in Edmonton called Cripsy. Yeah, and I wouldn't have necessarily identified myself as a drama turd before, although in conversation I think the kinds of critical questioning practices and reflective practices that I think make good grip art and good mad art are I think practices that are mobilized in dramaturg work, so that's cool. Yeah, and I don't know, I do other stuff, but I can't think of it right now, so. Hi. Great, and my name's Mia, Susan Amir, and my pronouns are she and her. A visual description, I am a light-skinned human with short dark hair with a lot of gray. I think everybody else is not being as honest. Just joking. I'm wearing a purple Adidas jacket with aqua colored stripes down the arms and black jeans, and under my jacket I'm wearing a black tank top that in white and red reads access is love. And yeah. I was born in Israel-occupied Palestine. I live as an uninvited settler on the unceded and occupied territories of the Musqueam, School Home-ish and Slewa-toothed peoples, colonially known as Vancouver-British Columbia. I'm a queer, mad Jew of mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardic ascent. That's who I'm from. My access needs are that I have some chronic conditions that sometimes impact my cognition, which might not seem obvious on the outside but is very palpable on the inside, and sometimes it means my thoughts don't form at a pace that I feel comfortable with. So if I lose my train of thought, I just ask that you allow me to finish my thought at my own pace. I'm also going to be like bouncing around because I think that's how my body processes information and stimulation, and sometimes I just need to move. So I'll probably be bouncing a little bit. I work in the context of community and cultural practice as a creator, transdisciplinary creator. I work as a dramaturg, director, writer, cultural organizer, advocate in my community, and I do a lot of work around disability justice these days. And the intersections that disability justice offers to other forms of other opportunities to interrupt the ways in which power harms us at all levels of our experience. And so a lot of my work is oriented towards that. I'm also really tired of talking about disability justice, and I'm really interested in just being an artist and being able to make work and consider all of my work, grip mad work, because it comes out of the context of my body and my life and my relationships. I don't know what else to say. I'm multiply involved in many different arts making spaces and feel really lucky to have those relationships. And I'm in a state of constant emergence in large part because of the ways in which the professional arts community is structured, meaning that it's very hard for artists with disabilities often to enter into professional practice because of the expectations around how we advance and how we show up and how time is measured. I feel like maybe I'm not, am I making sense? Yeah, okay, right on. I have the benefit of being able to ask people here if I'm making sense and they get to nod or disagree. So yeah, that's kind of the context of my work. This project came out of my body, mind, out of a deep longing for some critical intersecting conversations that I didn't see happening out of a deep longing for an extended community of makers that I didn't have in large part in my community where I'm based. And so I have been really honored to have so many incredible artists from across so-called Canada and so-called the United States respond to the call with interest in being either directly involved in the core conversations or adjacent to it and unsettling dramaturgy is now like a co-created space where we're really trying to create the definition of what we're doing together. Yeah. Yeah? Okay, right on. So we had a slide card now. So all y'all get an opportunity in this room now like let's keep it to three minutes each person gets a minute and a half to introduce yourself with your we'll do the next one. Name your pronouns. You can offer, you can practice doing a visual description. Where, who and whose land you're from. One thing that brought you to this panel and an access need that you might have. And maybe feel comfortable introduce yourself to somebody that you haven't had so much of an opportunity to connect with over the course of the last few days. Yeah? So we'll just do this for three minutes. I'll let you know when minute 1.5 is up. Now we're going to open our discussion with each other. Oh, we can drop the slide if possible. So we had like a hundred really awesome questions that we had listed for us to respond to. Which we have whittled down and we won't necessarily directly respond to any of them but because Lisa does need to leave I wanted to offer space to her first to and the question that we were thinking about talking about was what does Crip and or Indigenous dramaturgy mean to you. So in this conversation we're not trying to define these practices in any kind of static way. We're speaking from our embodied lived experiences of what they are. Somebody has joined. Great. So with that I'm going to hand it over to Lisa and then whoever feels so moved to follow, please do. And again those of you who are in the room feel free to be making notes on Slack if that's useful for you as a way of kind of documenting your memories and your sensations of what is coming up through this conversation. Again, I'm apologizing because I was really looking forward to hearing everybody. There aren't very many Indigenous dramaturgs on this land so I don't often get to share these conversations with others. It's a huge question. I don't have any definitive answer and really all I feel like I can offer is a beginning place to begin from. So I think for me part of part of the practice of Indigenous dramaturgy as we were just talking about that there's a constant presencing of inherent conflict. And that being bodies and things like time and things like space and that the continuum is not a linear construct actually. That time is actually a spatial construct. And we can unpack that that statement alone for a very long time. So I feel like for me as a dramaturg and as a maker of work and as a performer and as a mother and as now the knowledge-keeper for my family and my father passed recently that that the nuances of how we do what we do in relationship to what we are to ourselves and to each other and how we are with ourselves and to the land in relationship to each other drive my practice because ultimately we're talking about spirit for me. And so things like we were just talking about even just a construct like this that we're all in together right now that we're in a we're operating inside a praxis that privileges relationship but it's inside a colonial construct of time which is a very hierarchical linear vehicle and it's also constructed in a very specific colonial construct which is that there are people with knowledge so there are knowers and there are un-knowers which is actually false it's a false construct from my teachings anyway and so for me I have this anxiety because I can't honor the relationships that I'm building right now because I have to leave because my child will be waiting for me in ten minutes and I have to honor that relationship and do a show which is another kind of relationship you know to the space and to story and to ceremony and so so I feel like Indigenous drama trilogy is not about assigning value to those but actually acknowledgement that the for me the cultural practice of acknowledgement of acknowledgement of names so I feel like in lots of ways for me the drama trilogy is about naming if I'm going to super simplify it and being able to name what was what is in a way that we're creating prophecy for what will be that we in this moment are creating prophecy for my child when he has grandchildren we're all doing that so we all get that opportunity to contribute to that story that my great-grandchildren so I operate and I'm also Anishinaabe Kway so I have teachings that also demanded me to consider seven generations behind me and seven generations ahead so I am only one generation that carries responsibility and carries acknowledgement of what I'm only here because of what was done before me because of who survived so I'd like to offer that for me again just as an offering to the room some work questions that I am working with right now there's five of them I have unfortunately I have an image because they were on the Agnes art gallery they were on the wall at one point I don't know if they're still there I haven't even gone to look so I have an image of them so I'll put them on Slack yes, okay and the only other thing I want to add before that I will, yeah I totally will the only other thing I want to add about that was we were just talking about that inside that indigenous methodology and practice is that I was just saying like if this was a room full of indigenous people we wouldn't want this screen I just, I mean I'm sure not to say that we don't like screens that's not what I'm saying at all but my experience of my colleagues and of my community is that our relationship our bodies, our spirits, our voices or what is the centering, the privileging the, yeah the centering of all that we are we cannot be unless we are in relationship and if you've got people in the room versus a screen and you want us to be in contact and building we're going to do it just by default if there's a room, I'm looking at the brown people that's my default that's who I'm looking for I'm talking to who might be my cousins my relations so screens are challenging in that way right, it's a very colonial screens, two dimensionality hello colonialism, right so it's my friend Adria for instance she was, I love this she was angry that I wasn't filming my show because it's an audio tour she said why can you not use the magic of colonialism to capture and conquer time why can you not do that and I said because I cannot but those to me are very I love it, it made me laugh for a long time still making me laugh but I think for her it's not a big way and so for us that is what's satisfying being able to look and this is satisfying but I can't touch you I can't smell you I can't I know, I'm trying but for me as an indigenous dramaturg I'm always trying to move as closer to that, whatever that means and however that might look so these are five questions how do our words perform the future how does memory listen to lineage how can unlearning become protocol where does reciprocity reimagine us and the last question I'm working with these days is how do we acknowledge reclamation so I'll post these on Slack I'm sorry I have to go maybe I'll see somebody at my show if you come to the show Adrian will be there because she's amazing and makes my show possible the irony is I'm in a digital arts festival I've not even slacked ever before so I know almost nothing about the medium that we're working in but please say hi to me if you come to the show please just say hi I would love that afterwards and I'm going to say thank you to everyone I'm sorry that I have to be jet and thank you Ru and thank you for having me thank you Marcy, Lisa thanks for sharing so anyone else want to pick up the question after that five questions that were just said at the tail end there Lisa was that her name? their name how do our words perform the future how does memory listen to lineage how can unlearning become protocol where does reciprocity reimagine us and how do we acknowledge reclamation it brings up so much and there's just one that I want to pull in at this moment which is that there's a lot of thought in disability justice and disability circles around dreaming of accessible futures from Leah Lakshmi Yep Samasada who is a disabled activist located down in the Oakland Berkeley area and they talk about how like there's so many cultural narratives that imagine disabled people no longer existing whether it be through sort of eugenic ideologies that say we need to do genetic testing so the disabled people no longer exist or we need to institutionalize disabled people so that we can have a future where they're bred out of existence and these legacies are familiar to many of us and what she proposes is dreaming of disability futures dreaming accessible futures dreaming of futures where disability is always existing and that it's not it's not sort of this stigmatized feature that belongs to individual bodies but is a part of like a collective reality in which biodiversity is important where the biodiversity is what's the word I'm looking for the word isn't evidence the word isn't element that biodiversity is a factor of healthy ecosystems and that having a multiplicity of different types of biologies is really important for some of the most thriving ecosystems and so how do we perform the future as that first question that Lisa named just felt so connected to like spaces that imagine ourselves here and spaces that imagine ourselves in the future that doing so is a radical act that says that our bodies as they are in this moment deserve to be here and that we don't have to show up to be perfect or right or appropriate for the context of colonial capitalism there's some snaps in the room Grant do you want to talk about how you see that flourishing inside of your dramaturgical practice can you hear me okay sure yeah so I'll pull on this thread I am a part of a performance collaborative called the curiosity paradox with my partner Jonathan Jonathan paradox Lee we live together and our third sort of housemate is our garden named Lenore and Lenore has been featured in one of our our first VR pieces and continues to be called the sweep and the premise of the sweep is that we used sort of our friends alleyway that she uses for her garbage cans as our performance space and so we put a camera a VR 360 camera in her garbage alleyway and did a performance around it and then invited audience members to sit in the exact same location where the camera had been and put on the headset while we continue to do a performance around them and so there's this aspect of sort of folding time kind of backwards into what we had done in that space and we said that this performance was for the neighborhood crows as well so there's a little bit of like opening this piece for the nonhuman audience members in the space but with this we also included audio description as an aesthetic component that wasn't optional so for those who aren't familiar audio description is a way to give access to visual content for a given piece of art and so we collaborated with an audio describer whose name is Cheryl Green to create an audio description for this so how this relates to this question of future where disability exists is that we really endeavored to locate this performance in a space that was accessible to create these visual content pieces that were also accessible for people who didn't have access to visual content and visual information so there's a little bit of this like using some of the like the tools that we know exist around access and just making sure that those are aesthetically integrated into the work that we're doing and in working with VR there's also this element of kind of working into futures where our bodies are present both in this kind of digital life and also in the physical space that the audience is also inhabiting and so that to me just that feels a little bit like that thread of how are we performing the future we're imagining very particularly our bodies in relationship with an audience member and that audience member does not necessarily look like the eugenically defined normative body Rue I know that you had some thoughts that you wanted to share just because we're communicating on another medium that no one else can see Yes How well thanks Brent and thanks to Lisa also for opening up this conversation I'm thinking so I'm coming mostly from the practitioner side of theater and so talking about dramaturgy is pretty new to me and it's been really informative to be working with all these incredible thinkers and makers on unsettling dramaturgy and so one thing that I think a lot about is in my past performances I'm thinking specifically about my piece histories which is a retelling of Kataba history and my own personal history and then my other piece which is called the Indigenous Corps of Discovery where I go into museums and talk about the invisibilized histories that are there for example, the Smithsonian's presidential portrait gallery bringing to the forefront their policies against Indigenous people that is hidden in that gallery and the main audience for most of that work was not Indigenous people I have even said that when people have asked about it a lot of these stories that I'm telling are stories that a lot of Indigenous people know but as I've been doing this work and as I've been meeting with more Indigenous dramaturges and theatre makers I've been thinking a lot more about what Indigenous dramaturgy would mean for us specifically and more generally and I think that the very first thing that Indigenous dramaturgy calls for is actually the proliferation of hundreds and thousands of community-specific dramaturgy I'm thinking more and more about what it means to be Kataba specifically not just an Indigenous theatre maker but a Kataba theatre maker and how I can re-center my own community as the audience for my work how can I stop making work whose goal is simply to educate settlers and instead make it about creating stories, recreating stories being a good ancestor giving people faith to perform and to the audience and to see themselves in the work that's on stage I also am thinking about bringing Cripp and also Indigenous dramaturgy this question together is really amazing and me and I talked a lot about this with some collaborators specifically about not collapsing Indigenous dramaturgy and Cripp's dramaturgy but also making sure that we're not trying to put them into separate silos that are talking to each other from afar because many Indigenous people do experience ableism and anti-Cripp bigotry and vice versa so what does actual Indigenous Cripp dramaturgy look like? What does Kataba Cripp and I think that this specificity for community also extends to specificity for land there's a connection between museum spaces and theater spaces in that they both hope to make space without place that's where we get the idea of the white wall gallery or the black box theater is trying to create a space that any piece could sit inside of but what is the name when we start making pieces that are specific to the land? What is it to make a specific a piece that's specific to the place that you all are in place for the place where I am currently? How can we bring in our human and other human relations that are actually in the place that we're occupying and committing to? Those are some of my thoughts coming up. Debbie, I'm wondering if you want to pick up the conversation here. Sure. What strikes me most is Lisa's comment about the screen and how for me Cripp dramaturgy, which is the one I can speak to with some authority is all about the body and for theater for me, theater has always been about our bodies in space together and breathing the same air as each other and using the actual muscles of our body to vibrate the air that vibrates the eardrums of the people in the room that there's that actual physical connection is what theater is all about for me and so within that that paradigm, there's no place for the digital world in what I think of as theater or no place for this kind of connection in what I think of as theater and maybe I'm just a let-ite I don't know but that's the thing I keep I don't know, I keep budding my head up against how does what is the role of the magic of this digital technology in the work I want to do and I just keep coming back to this embodied practice that is central for me and I also recognize the role of digital connection for Crip bodies that can be occupying the same space at the same time and I know that that's valuable but I can't help but feel like it's it's not the work I want to be doing with my body in this world yeah that's all I've got Jessica or Lindsay I'm wondering if either of you have some thoughts either in response or new thoughts to introduce into the conversation hi, this is Jessica um, yeah it is an interesting you know way that those conversations fit together and I guess one thing that it makes me think of is that something that I try to include within my practice is this idea of extending the edge and I think that that is where for me digital technology and media can play a role so for example on a show I worked on last year Camlupa we created a podcast that lived alongside the production that helped us to sort of talk through the process that we were going through as we went through it and part of that hope was that we would be able to reach people who wouldn't be able to see the actual show but still could be included as a part of what we were doing so yeah I think that was an example of a way to extend that edge and certainly taking the time and being in relation to the space the territory that we started on and the territories that we moved to were really important to grounding that show and taking the time to arrive and get to know each other but in addition to we were able to extend that edge of what the performance was and I guess that also for me when I think about indigenous dramaturgy I think about seeking ways to indigenize practice and primarily I think that means the how can unlearning become protocol question really resonated with me because I think that that is a lot of what I seek is how to unlearn or learn new tools or reimagine ways to recognize practice to be able to find the internal dramaturgies that exist within a work and not about fitting it into the box of what we expect a work to be or to look like so what is important to the artist what is integral to that piece that maybe a colonial structure would say nope get rid of that that it's like no this is here to honor something and it's really important that it be a part of this work and I think that just speaks to the idea of being able to bring your full self to the process and not being an empty vessel that is to be filled up with something else thank you that resonates with me a lot Jessica the bringing your full self there's a couple of things for me that are floating around that I'm not going to tie together because I don't think I can but like this and this and this so Lisa talked about the problems with linearity and that for me is a mad maker and as a carp artist is something that I'm really trying to hold as a practice that might make more space for non-linear thought and incoherence and that questions or challenges to what reality is and how we experience time as non-linear is pretty central to my mad engagements in the world and then also this green thing being really complicated I feel very deeply in relation to too because I do think there's a lot of ways where there's few of us doing like deeply Crip work and queer Crip work which asks different things of the work that we make and so the possibility of being engaged in this kind of conversation because we can actually get at each other across space and time is like so important to combating isolation that I think I experienced but I think a lot of makers on the margins I hear express as well so there's like a way of combating isolation at the same time depending on where I'm at like the idea of like a room full of people plus six people from different places and like the surveillance aspects of media and like things being recorded and I don't know who's writing what and all of these things just like really amplify paranoia and like how do we think about engaging in these kind of digital spaces in terms of performance but also in terms of making and connecting in ways that like also mean that there's certain things that are apparent transparent and things that are really like secret or and the ways that digital media and stuff is used for surveillance is like a big question for me yeah and then I think Jessica what you just said about bringing more of yourself and the idea of like not having to be an empty vessel also really resonates for me and like what the value of Crip and Math practices in the sense of it's precisely like bringing our shit into the room that is like the sites of generativity and possibility for creation that we often get told like leave your shit out at the door and like that does not work for me nor does it enable the possibility of really building from our experiences and so I think there's something really beautiful about like refusing that but then it also makes me think about like some of the work I've been doing around trying to think what radical like antiepressive trauma-informed practices in rehearsal spaces and processes and I think that that has a lot to do with like how dramaters hold space and how we understand like because of colonization and colonialism and because of ableism and sanism like we need to be attending to trauma in our our making in our rehearsal spaces in our performance spaces in our conversations and then like how do we do that in a way that's not pathologizing because most trauma-based literature makes people who are experiencing the trauma the problem so how do we like radically antipathologize that those considerations and at the same time still recognize like trauma is in the room and we can do things together to make that like the space more receptive and responsive to those needs so that's some of my questions I'm going to share just a couple of thoughts and then we're going to reorganize the space and you all will engage in your own conversations so I'll just quickly close out a little bit and unfortunately we only got to one of our immediate questions but I hope that this has been generative so far it certainly has been for me I think there's so much moving through me right now so much resonance with what's been shared by everybody else and I think one of the things that I want to talk about is the notion of alternative time signatures in the process of relationship and creation and you know it's really interesting we took the time to actually try to start to introduce ourselves to each other in the context of today and that ate or occupied I don't know probably half an hour or 40 minutes of that time and what is assigned value when we engage in convenings like this what is the dramaturgical value assigned to the work of establishing relationship and I think because we're working inside of colonial constructs of time that don't honor I think the foundational work of establishing right relationship it makes it really hard to see that act that dramaturgical act of introducing ourselves as a primary priority but for me it's essential so how do we adjust the timelines of our generative creative practice to really acknowledge the time that it takes to arrive to one another from the various locations barriers and distances that sit between us and so for me a Crip approach to dramaturgy is always asking the question what sits between us and how do I get to you how do we get to each other in the same way that when I am working with an artist in the role of dramaturg my whole attention is tuned towards what's inside of this work that is longing for exposure for expression and what is in the way of that exposure and expression and what are the conditions and sometimes those conditions are very practical it's like the studio is too cold for a body to relax in space in order for the nervous system to be able to function in such a way that we have access to the totality of creative energy that is coursing through us so it's about asking the questions of all of the context that shape our making and time holds such centrality in that what are we willing to make time for and for me I am willing to make the time to know who I am with at least in this small unfortunately in an ideal context we would have all introduced ourselves and not along a two minute timeline but on a timeline that actually allowed us to sort our thoughts out sort our bodies out and be able to present the thing that we wanted to present today and that to me is a creeping of a dramaturgical way of encountering one another what else did I want to say I really am I work a lot on the internet in a creative in my creative practice I'm working largely with people who are not geographically based where I am and this question this question when Ru you brought it up so beautifully when you talked about how museums are created to make space without place is that what you said Ru yeah right on okay and how do I so how do we make place how do we activate the various localities that we're in simultaneously when we're across such distances and this is a conundrum that I'm really facing like how do I bring place into my interface with the internet and the people who are on the other side of the screen with whom I am trying to fuse my somatic body with in order to generate work how and how do I remain in my body when I'm relating to a medium that prioritizes my head which is to say my brain which is to say a really cartesian approach to understandings of what where where thought comes from we actually have neural centers in our brains and in our chests in our stomachs so like how do we attend to that in the context of working through this kind of medium and I think one of the strategies has been about addressing time am I making time to actively breathe with my collaborators across space to find a way to find a sensation that's in my body and to convey that to not prioritize verbal interaction in a medium that prioritizes that kind of interaction the interaction of language and I think these are all the kinds of dramaturgies that I'm trying to I haven't arrived to a practice that is working but these are questions that I'm wrestling with and I don't feel like I'm saying actually anything different from what my brilliant collaborators have said I'm really lucky to go at the end because I got the benefit of all your good thinking so I think those are the thoughts that I would want to introduce into this conversation for now and if it can we move it, can we move to the next thing you guys yeah should we move yeah okay right on so if you're tuning in have we set up a google doc did we do that there's a great folder great so if you're watching this live stream you'll see a google doc that's overlaid over the live stream picture and you can participate there if you're in the room here's what happens next people are going to get about 10 minutes time can we bring the next card up actually so here's an invitation for you we're really about trying to activate practice through the context of this very short panel we invite you to conduct a conversation that responds in any way to the conversation you've just witnessed the six of us have we invite you to experiment with taking a dramaturgical approach to this conversation that embodies some element of what you just witnessed felt learned this is an invitation to CRIP or unsettle ways of exchange and being in relationship 10 minutes is not a long time to do that work but I wonder if even in 10 minutes an intervention can be made and then you may want to take note of the key ideas, concepts, feelings questions, curiosities, conundrums that come up in oh come up in during come up during your conversation you can feel free to document these in Slack and the idea is that we'll have a bit of time for you all to work in smaller configurations and then we'll come back together and you all will have a conversation and we will witness you yeah, is that cool? so the people in the room say it's cool I hope the people online think it's cool and I think we think it's cool great so let's come back at let's say 223 yeah? 20-3 Eastern Standard Time great, see you in 12 minutes, 13 minutes oh sorry one other thing I wanted to say if there are CRIP or Indigenous identified folks in this room please feel free to either not participate or to find your folks and participate with them in the context that feels right for you if you log on to the live stream if you can, you'll see people are very engaged they're very engaged sure, yeah we'll also explain a great conversation between the audience so we'll be witnessing them so if you want to keep directing the camera toys the audience, I think that's great okay so I've just brought them back and we'll be passing the mic between various audience members and I'm wondering if we got any engagement on the Google Doc cool so this is going to be just kind of an informal, organic responsive moment for the folks in the room to reflect on their conversations things that came up for them and this is an opportunity for us to witness does that feel cool great, so maybe we want to try to make a circle again of some sort and so this is an opportunity for you all to engage with each other on questions, reflections that came up inside of your conversation and you will need to use the microphone in order to speak so that the people who are tuning into the live stream can also listen in and I will give the microphone now to whomever feels the urge to say something and if you have butterflies in your stomach a mentor once taught me it's your turn or not great this is just access, I am slightly deaf so I'd ask people to speak loudly and clearly hi I'm Ange, I'm observing and I know Debbie has been my dramaturg she's awesome I'm working with Mia and Rue and Hugh who's also in the room they're all also awesome and I I sat back to observe that was because of me not because of anyone else in the room so thank you for having me in your circle now and I'm excited to hear what people have to say and just to add if you can please say your name before you speak we haven't been practicing that perfectly but now there's been a reminder from our crew that we would like that so that would be great, thank you I'm going to begin not because I want to begin but to begin my name is Adrian thank you Angela I want to respond to the conversation that I just had with Cynthia Jax, Charles and Hugh and what I observed which was hard to observe while I was conversing I observed I observed my own critique and that I was making a critique of conference conference processes where there isn't time given to introduction and that I've observed that in practice before and how powerful it was to have two hours where every person just introduces themselves and so I was critiquing our own gathering here and I observed now looking back that we just and we talked about how why don't we do that because we just want to dive into the conversation but we ourselves just dove into the conversation so despite an offer inside of our small circles that like shall we introduce ourselves and I myself even said yes I think that's a good idea and then I myself said I just wanted so that's like that's how deep it is the I don't know if it's impatience or what that I don't know that's the next stage of assessment or analysis but that's I want to share that as dynamic and action that I observed inside of our group that is my final thought this is Chantal and just to piggyback on what you just said we did exactly the same thing except we didn't talk about introducing ourselves at the beginning at the end we just realized that we didn't do it we just jumped into the conversation and then suddenly he's like oh hi my name is so I think there was an excitement about starting to talk right away and maybe I don't know if like it was I don't want to put the value judgment on it but you know we just followed that excitement and then we kind of stood back and introduced ourselves I don't know how different it would have been if we had gone the other way around but given the conversation that's been going on it was it was funny to realize that hello my name is Jasmine just a visual description again I've got kind of just below shoulder length hair and I'm wearing a bright blue kind of poncho but I think also in thinking about we talked a little bit about conference settings and how verbalizing is kind of prioritized and kind of visual learning through text and how that's so prevalent and I really loved looking over at your group and seeing you move and you know just in that moment seeing you move you know thinking about yeah how our bodies are able to respond to each other in this space and so I loved that you know we didn't do our introductions but I think we were kind of excited to meet each other through our exchange and that felt right and I don't want to speak for anyone else but I've loved just diving in in that way but I think I also want to acknowledge a name that in the time that we have allotted for these kinds of conversations that there isn't often time for processing as a collective group and time for silence and what that can afford us as well that sometimes there's like a fear of silence or there's a certain like awkwardness but especially when we're diving really deep into these really complex sophisticated things that um yeah but there isn't always time for us to process hello I'm Jax um something that came up for our team that I'm still sitting with is this question of why do we feel the urge to do so much like and like here Mia you talked about only we only went through one question and yet I'm sure the experience was active in a way that we didn't experience in other panels and so I'm still sitting with that question like I don't know why do we do so much like there are hundreds of offices here doing hundreds of things um I just don't know this is Hugh Jax I'd like to just follow that up with something that Adrian said that has that is going to stick with me for a long time because it really resonated with me and it will resonate with people that I know uh which is that um uh when you're feeling overwhelmed and can't find a way through to the end of whatever your list may be is to write three things down that you have to get done that day and do one of them and do it successfully at least that's the way I interpreted what you said and that sticks with me because sometimes it's overwhelming to try and get everything done and uh yeah thank you I'm from San Angela and Hugh was looking at me when he said that because I have a habit of putting myself quite literally into the hospital uh literally um because I do too much I uh uh not to make this about me but just a little history I uh I worked in a very normative way uh had an injury did not work for many years and uh it's because conversations that are happening like this in the last couple of years and leadership of people like Debbie um that I have been able to find my way back into practice and that's amazing and I do need to work on the time thing a lot because now when something an opportunity comes my way it doesn't matter if I have 800 other things on the go I am going to say yes because I went for such a long period of time where there was nothing but nose whether those were self-imposed nose or nose that were coming at me um and so anyway long way of saying um more of these conversations are going to teach us all how to work in a much healthier way and I really do look forward to a time when I can say no confidently because I know that that's not going to be the last ask hi everyone I'm Jamie really interested in this question of like is virtual space inherently space without place um we do a lot of work in virtual space um or like could it be that it's multiplying place what could it look like to bring place into that space um I mean in some ways I think these are animating questions of something like the fold up festival but really just um chewing on that um and chewing on what it also like how to bridge the space beautiful um thing that I can't remember who said it but finding the space uh to bridging the space between you and me and how what does that look like what could that look like what can it look like in in a sort of virtual frame um as we were sitting here in silence and I was feeling varying degrees of discomfort slash like loving lingering in that I was reminded of uh like a Quaker practice um and I'm not Quaker but I went to some Quaker schools of sitting in silence and only speaking when you're really called to or in their sort of spiritual terms when like the inner light speaks and how that's a really nice space to be in sometimes that I think also makes a different kind of room um for speak up even though I'm in the mic do you need me to repeat anything okay I'll just hold it closer to me yeah you can't hear me despite the mic okay sorry I'll repeat myself as we were um sitting in silence with what I felt like was varying degrees of discomfort and enjoyment I was reminded of the Quaker sitting in silence and really waiting until um you're called to speak by the inner light or just like really needing to say something um and as we've been thinking about how to maybe unsettle or disrupt these practices of academia of colonialism of particular organizations of uptime and space and privileging of text and um over body and varying things I actually think that many of the ways to disrupt that we already know as people who make performance who play for a living who are in our bodies um and yeah and I wanted to think the people I was in a circle with for witnessing me dancing and then all dancing together and like it only took that long actually for me to feel like oh no we're all connected so I want to honor that time it's now three o'clock eastern standard time which is when we said we would close um I am happy to stay and continue having this conversation I can't offer that um on the part of my colleagues um but if if anyone has kind of a burning last comment that you'd like to invoke us out with I welcome you to take the mic from me otherwise I will close us out someone want to say something good yeah this is jacks again um I just want to say that one of the biggest teachers for me here this time that I've been in this place um has been the lake the body of water that we've been sitting in front of and um every morning I've been looking at it and it just has so much to teach us teach me um and I encourage you all to remember that we are in a place and so I just want to give gratitude to to that body of water that's nearest thank you so on behalf of unsettling dramaturge I want to thank everyone who is in the space with us and who's online for joining us for this first public launch of our our work in the world and um offer immense gratitude for everyone's good heart and good words and willingness to sit in discomfort and in um curiosity and in ease together and um I hope that these conversations uh and these practices begin to infuse more and more how we come into engagement and relationship with each other through the work we're making so thank you thank you all you all stay online for a minute yeah great