 Hey folks, thanks a lot. Thanks for coming on up. We're starting a little bit late up. That's okay for everybody Thanks for coming in from out of the cold This is the under the radar professional symposium number 11 We have some people have been here almost every time every time every time We've got our forgot our gold stars Are there some folks with that have our fresh here have not been to an under the radar good? That's right. Welcome. Look, I'm mark Russell and this is me and walk Notice we're in a different room and it's a smaller room and that changed our thinking about this a bit and You may have noticed you had to apply We're getting more and more bureaucratic over here at there. They're teaching me things at the public I can't I can't sneak people in anymore. It's sick, but yeah All right, so, um, maybe you have some things Yeah So, thank you all for being here. I know it's no small thing for everybody to come From wherever you have come and through the cold To reconsider what we're doing, you know, I always think January is a you know crazy time to be in New York Because of all the work. We're really a time for all of you guys and us to gather so for example What we're trying to do this year as mark was saying in terms of the Symposium is really to figure out what we're doing and what we can do to make better work and to work better And so for example what under the radar has done this year is to figure out how we can make this work from New York and Switzerland so but I think we're very excited for you to see the festival and One of the things I really wanted to point out was a new program that we have we're testing It's not officially launched. I guess but it's the device theater Working groups incoming series Which is our festival within the festival So just to give you a little context about the program. We have basically invited eight up-and-coming New York Companies and artists or what we want to call next generation people that you probably or perhaps has not have not Come to contact before so really we have been convening them for over the last half a year and inviting them for Conversations at the public with us and with each other to really figure out how they make that work both aesthetically and Practically and the combination of it really is this incoming Platform a festival within the festival. So when you see it, these are works in process These are artists who are in various stages of development of that particular piece So please see it with those eyes, but we're very very excited So much energy into the program and what we're doing for under the radar and so The Demand has actually in the response from you guys in the public have really been really fantastic. So if you can't see it I'm sorry But watch out for these names really watch out for these names. So we actually also really want to thank the organizations Who really have supported under the radar? From its beginning formative years with the doors to a charitable trust and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, which really Lifted this festival and sort of just Let it take off and to the extraordinary Also to the extraordinary support this year from the Howard Gilman Foundation the Ford Foundation and the Roberts Rowland Clark Foundation Thank you so much for your support So that is the official. Thank you section and now I would like to Say we also could not do this without the deep support of the institution where we are here our home the public theater And we are now a core program of the public With big plans for the future and so I would like to introduce you to our executive director of the public Patrick Willingham Patrick has transformed the public in the Three three years that you've been here and it has been a great pleasure working with him. So, please welcome This is my last line This is truly one of our favorite times of the year around here at the public and I was at the opening night celebration last night and looking around at all of the faces and all the youngins drinking it up After a few of the shows had opened and I was just really struck as I am every single year by the Composition of the people who are drawn to this work You know we hear so much about the graying of our audiences and as I look around there I see some gray hairs like my own But I also see so many young and vibrant people who are so very very interested in this work For those of you who are here last year I mentioned my husband who said these are my people. He's a little bit younger than I am and I was like, yeah, that's right That's right It's true, right and so as I as I was there last night I was just struck by that again and and just the relevance of this Sort of work that you know we hear the public and elsewhere have been calling device theater We know that's not a great label for it But it's the one that we've for the moment chosen to affix to it and as I as I spoke last year We were just introducing our device theater initiative and the device theater working groups of me and was talking about Was a key element of that initiative really bringing in a group of younger artists and Doing what we can as an institutional theater to help them develop and I'm really excited to share with you guys Another initiative that we've undertaken in the past year that we're really sort of right in the Beginning quarter to one-third of we're part of the emcee arts innovation lab supported by Doris Duke, thank you Ben and Part what we're doing with the innovation lab emcee arts as a consulting group They've been working for the past seven or eight years helping organizations become More innovative and helping them to develop practices that really build that innovation muscle Which we're seeing you know throughout the entire corporate world throughout the entire startup world that idea of innovation How do we work better? How do we work smarter? how do we change the way that we're working and we really felt looking at the device theater landscape that this was a completely new way of working that Institutional theaters had not necessarily known exactly how to To mesh with so the exploration we're doing the challenge that we're exploring with the emcee innovation lab is how can we? better work with better understand better learn from better grow with these These new and fresh ways of developing work and we're hoping that we not only learn things for the public theater But that we also learn things that we can share with the entirety of the field It just feels like there's there are so many opportunities and you know back to my my beginning comment of looking at the Audiences who are attracted to this work and looking at the audiences base that we need to continue to build as an Institutional theater think there's just there's just a really holy union I think that can happen there and I'm very excited that we're able to engage in that process and get just very grateful To emcee arts and Doris Duke with that. I'm just really happy you guys are here I hope you have a blast at the festival. I hope the symposium brings you everything you need the selected few who are in the room Stay warm and we'll see you around the theater And now I'd like to introduce a Mario Garcia Durham from arts presenters associate of performing arts presenters UTR was a project of ours presents for many years Many of you might know Mario from this time of your ripuena the national endowment for the arts and now of course arts presenters He has been a strong presenter of new theater and has been really Great in trying to bring all of the crazy festivals in New York together the before the past two years So welcome him Mark and Patrick Yeah, what what me and just mentioned is really great. I think I mentioned last year that we started working together with all of the Amazing festivals and convenings that take place here in January We really tried to spread the word in a very consolidated and strategic way and I think with the stories coming out of the papers The focus of journalists were starting to to get that story across because it really is an amazing time here in January for all of these performing arts professionals and curators from around the world to come and share and see new work I Wanted to also say that you know Patrick mentioned about the grain Audiences and I I really think there needs to be another category the had hairs I Start referring to that but I wanted to also say that arts presenters is so proud to be be part of this Sandra Gibson somewhere in the audience here. I want to give kudos to Sandra. She actually We Wanted to let you know just quickly that tomorrow. We have our speed dating session there at the Hilton We have every year. It's from 9 until noon at the T-tree and on and I'll close by just saying In these days of the wonderful blissful joys of technology and all that it brings Which I kind of do across to I'm so happy To be here at an event that focuses on Artists as humans creating work and offering all that we can and this crazy age of technology So I'm so so happy to be here and to support this work. So thank you all Thank You Mario, thank you so much So when Mayan and I were trying to decide Who would be an appropriate keynote speaker for this year's symposium? She said hey take a look at this video of Christy Edmonds It was a video of her remarks at the Institute for cultural practice in performance at Wesleyan University at ICPP and It's on their website. You can see the video I Known of Christy's eloquence. I consider the most articulate later in contemporary performance today But this video blew me away It with its understated but deep Investigation of our field and what it means to be a presenter curator at this moment in our history We both decided that that was the key to shaking up our symposium this year Our experiences with a project we call the director's circle Let us to believe that now is a good time to re-engage the people that come to UTR There's so much knowledge in this room each of you could do a keynote speech So we have come up with the breakout format that we are going to try today and it will be It's a risk. It's you know go with us be gentle But it's also on you. You have to make this symposium work for you. I want you to meet new people and Exchange ideas and let's see what we can get going here Christy is a great leader in our field She is a curator writer educator and crucially a performance visual art Artist filmmaker and dance maker in her own right Which is key because she's an incredible Add the kit for artists in our world always finding new strategies to support the creativity and move forward You can read about Christy in your symposium packet, but do not do that now Prepare to listen You need to know that she was the founder of the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon She later completely remade that organization from a venue-centered Entity to one more fluid and focused on The time-based arts festival a festival that has come to become one of the most important contemporary performance festivals in this country Christy left pica for Melbourne, Australia where she ran the Melbourne International Festival for the Arts in an unprecedented four years She was instrumental in designing the artistic program for the Park Avenue Armory and curated some of the defining early performances there giving this city My city finally a place where works of great scale could be seen She is now the executive and artistic director of the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA UCLA cap Again taking a presenting organization program and bringing it into the 21st century with a radical reimagining Many of you have sat around panel tables with Christy and senior speaker interview We have asked her to speak today because Christy Has a particular call to arms that resonates with me and with Megan and Should resonate with the field today. I Hope that you can inspire and reaffirm in you The reason that we all take on this work She has done that for me time and time and time again, please welcome You know, I'm not really sure if there's any particular kinds of themes that Or threads that under the radar are working on but I definitely know That looking out into this group of people Why I'm shaking is not the cold. It's that I'm encountering a kind of grace There's a grace of your work and your endeavor and when I stand in front of you. I feel this overwhelm of appreciation I'm supposed to be doing this thing right now where I talk about from where I stand shaking at my little podium here And I think it's really about trying to how do I elicit something from myself that actually is about us And in trying to do that in thinking around a lot of things It's also about a bit of a we're here to take a kind of stock in theater in performance in international exchange in the work of these ephemeral forms of kind of human history and human heritage that we have a role in holding creating space for and deeply delving into extremely well I'm part of a sea of all of you that does that I'm part of the privilege of being able to work with artists With an acute attentiveness to what they're seeking to do as do all of us And what I think with under the radar and the kind of symposiums in the next few days and what you all do here it's kind of less about a stock take about the conditions that we face and more about how Together we face them And I don't want to dwell on that facing that kind of bracing of a time of exponential change But really about the privilege of what means to be able to work deeply and gently and with wit and with integrity of purpose around How culture through theater and through live performance moves and keeps Our society awake to the world differently Recently, I've had a number of different kind of fragments and I'm going to go through some of them But it's a pretty interesting thing because knitting together fragments is also part of paying attention And I've found increasingly that in my own work and in my own practice The subtle and small are increasingly the things that I'm trying to weave across the way in which I listen to artists and listen to audiences I know we spend a lot of time focusing on Strategies and what I think actually is that we're focusing a lot on the tactics of how We tackle what we face and less about the actual active strategy of purpose the purpose of why in Performance no matter if it's dance. No matter if it's jazz. No matter if it's different forms of music No matter if it's theater. I find us as a field increasingly asked to talk about the what what is it? what will it be and One of the things that I've been thinking about is that it's actually more pertinent and relevant for us now To give a little less to the what of it and a huge amount to the why of it and make that visible to people And make that offered and shared Theater for me is an interesting. I'm a visual artist I didn't and I worked in film and this thing Mark mentioned about dance I choreographed one dance once on a ballet I gotta strike that from wherever But one of the things that's interesting for me about theater is that is a little bit of a life portrait And I'm gonna share it with you because I think it's part of what still happens My mother was born on an Indian reservation the Okanagan Indian reservation in Washington State I was born not far from there in a very small Lake tourist town Lake Shalant Because of a series of random accidents as somebody who came from a small community and a very specific kind of cultural community We're also a family that on one side was working the land as apple pickers and on the other hand We're working in engineering and bridge building my grandfather It was my grandfather that through his bridge bridge building lifted my family out of Being kind of migrant apple picking people But when I was taught to pick apples I was taught to do it with a certain kind of care and as a young person climbing in those trees The way in which you approach the apple and how you leave it It's what you you have to take the apple, but you have to leave the spur You can't be careless in all these and there was something about that that I continue to think about when I curate And people ask me a lot like how do I go about it or what do it? And I always feel that it's both the act of the picking of an apple But what you leave in place so that the other ones continue to grow and how to make space for those things Because of a random set of bizarre sort of accidents We ended up moving to Minneapolis and this is when I first encountered theater again Wouldn't necessarily I never my family wouldn't my father for example No way on earth was he going to take us to theater in fact if my mother who was the person who would generate these Experiences for my sister and myself If she wasn't at the forefront of doing it There would be no way that would happen when my father was forced to attend these various theatrical events on occasion Like the Chanhassen children's theater or you know things like this It was like watching somebody be an excruciating pain If I had an encounter with theater, which thankfully the public schools allowed pop to be possible at that time in history At that long ago graying now time in history And I would try and share the story that I encounter or the thing that I had seen or this This this thing that happened in front of me from my seat With my dad he would say you know when you finish this story I can help you with your math I can help you with your math homework So what I guess I mean is that it was a random set of accidents and a choice that my mother had made to make sure that I had access to theater as Again, I'm a visual artist And I moved in those directions even though I had theater in my background And it wasn't until I went into college and I was a film student I finished in Berlin West Berlin at the time that I encountered a different kind of theater It wasn't the theater that That fell in convention. It was the theater that happened in unusual ways We're calling kind of devised theater or high provocation of contemporary theater And while I was a visual artist and while I was a filmmaker What happened to me in these spaces that that were in kind of underground locations or at the Shawburner Is that there was something that made me feel more connected to being awake and alive To myself and possibility and listening that set me into a path that involved live performance And probably forecasted that I would become a curator and Through all of this I began To possess a fascination and compassion for how art is made and what it does How we figure How we form and then share it with one another and what it is to be conscious and to live to have lived and An attendance started to rise in terms of like how we see How we imagined and treated our times and our place and our cultures and our birth And our songlines and our verbal utterances and our heritage And I'm always trying to see what's there and I often think that the act of concentrated attentiveness to what's there is a kind of Prayer in the arts So I do think that in many cases my work and our work is an act of attention and it's disciplined in it's searching And it's disciplined in its support of meaning and meaningfulness When we get together we talk about strategies And to me I think my strategy now is to be an acutely attentive listener to certain possibilities I'm gonna go through a few little fragments that are disconnected and disassociated But I think they matter and I just feel like sharing them and I don't know what I'm doing anyway, so One an older that's patron at a theater Show that I had presented recently He's an older gentleman in Los Angeles, and he doesn't often come to things and he used to come to things a lot And this of course has my board in a kind of vexation And I asked him about it and he said I Know that the work means this piece of theater. I know that the work was very good My problem is that I do not know how to be settled With it. I don't know how to be settled at it. I Can't seem to settle at all There's nothing in it that I can lean back on I Cannot rest against myself In this theater. I don't mean that it's unsettling exactly. I mean that I cannot feel relief And then he said Do you think this is the condition of what younger artists are experiencing all the time? Or am I succumbing to my own maturing and complacency interests Or the only thing that I gravitate towards is if it's possible that I will feel the sublime Not the unsettled What will it look like in the future? And what can I do? Which I think is worth sharing The other day I just flew back from Australia and in coming through customs my six-year-old son his name is a Ashby As we are re-entering my wife his mother Was getting fingerprinted in the scanner glass thing there Which of course is a US citizen? I don't have to be but she as a green card holder does have to be and our six-year-old turns to me quietly while this is going on for an explanation about what Exactly his mother is doing with her hands on that glass thing and after my highly simplified answer He said I don't want them to take my fingerprints for me They're mine sort of they're sort of like a private thing at the end of my hand What to do You're the theater makers My ten-year-old son after being home in America again for a couple of days He said to me. I think that I fart more when I'm in America than when I do when I'm in Australia Do you think that's possible? So why why would I fart more in America than when I'm in Australia? I Principles of uncertainty do matter They matter a lot I've been wondering a lot lately as well where the central office of rulemaking is I Wonder what their desks are looking like and if they have a window And if they do have one what on earth are they looking out at? Recently I taught a course at UCLA called Art of Social Action. I took over for Peter Sellers, which was you know, daunting In the process of doing it I asked the students in their journals to talk about the thing that they felt and this is now the millennium the Millennials, right? I asked them what they felt the most kind of sense of pressure around and they're becoming And 63% of them I'm using a percentage because increasingly I have to As if it matters 63 not 62.25 65 63% Of the students in one way or another in the context of what they journaled about It said but they felt that was most at risk for them was their curiosity They felt a lament about it But because it isn't going to help them efficiently progress through their extremely costly degrees Curiosity was a kind of luxury that they couldn't afford and they knew it That's a fragment that we have to tend to in the other day in Los Angeles, California At the Hammer Art Museum an exhibition was closing by the artist the visual artist the great visual artist Jim Hodges It's an exhibition that toured it was at the Walker and it was just at the hammer and it's called give more than you take So on all of the marketing materials on all of the banners and all of the billboards on everything that was there Jim's aptly titled exhibition retrospective. It's called give more than you take and Of course, I was only in LA for a couple of days before being here in the bracing cold I thought my face was gonna fall off this morning. I thought it had fallen off. In fact, as my face fall I Watched one of the on the way to the airport one of the billboards that I've been loving seeing across that city of extraordinary extraction and transaction and beauty and wonder and palm trees I Watch the words give more than you take come off as they put the new brand of coach baggage And I thought How long will we remember to give more than we take? 11% of my time now. I realize Actively you know leadership Writing letters of recommendation Writing and providing evidence now. I'm in an academic institution And in that case if you even encounter a librarian or did anything with them because of your title You might be asked when they go up for a promotion to write on their behalf It's it's a kind of interesting thing and I bring it up because there's a kind of way in which Writing these letters of recommendation and a testing to them when we used to write these letters We wrote from the position of both knowledge and care That the individual was being surrounded by our testify of their capacities and their potential And now it's kind of more like as long as I have for the recipient or the seeker of these letters As long as I have at least three letters that state That this person a exists and be as reasonably good. You could kind of cut and paste the whole thing It's a pursuit of us needing a kind of evidence before we take an action an evidence a Box-ticking a file cabinet full of stuff before we take an action And this to me is kind of the crux If ten or eleven percent of my time is to provide evidence so that someone else can make the right decision. I Wonder what that means. I think in our field and in our profession for a variety of different reasons We're asked to think about the managerial aplomb of the role the executive decision the entrepreneurial decision the monetary instrument the creation of new strategies for creating a dynamic where the willingness to pay for culture Will be marked with our capacity as a successful leader or not But management is not what we will remember in our path It is what we chose to leave from which often requires the gut I now believe that our most relevant strategy unto itself For theater and for art for culture is to leave high Intentional evidence of care that has got to be at the core of our endeavor Where integrity of purpose is made visible and its impact can act as a gift of our labor to others Not our entitlement But our gift of our labor To the highest possible purpose of what I'd said earlier Fascination and compassion for how art is made and what it does How we figure and find form and share with one another what it is To be conscious and to live and to have a teniveness and how we see and how we imagined And treated our times our place our cultures our earth our song lines our words Our artists our heritage That's our strategy Thank you. And so a little bit of housekeeping So after this After this you're going to go to coffee where you can do Your catch-up say hi and all those things and 11 o'clock is the breakout session And it will be happening all around the building and across the street at 440 Lafayette if you could look at your badge This is a new thing at the back. You should have an assignment of where you're supposed to go and Who is