 Okay, we're going to start now, yeah? Okay. So, thank you all for joining us. This is the second public launch of Unsettling Dramaturgy. The first happened last week at the Festival of Live Digital Art in Kingston, Ontario, and we're really excited to be here with this truncating time and these technical difficulties to share with you the work that we've been up to. Many of us in this room and many of those watching via live stream are visitors to the lands we're on today. The land we're calling in from is Columbia College, and it owes its vitality to generations who have come before. Some were brought forcibly to this land. Some came here in search of ownership or simply a better life, and some have lived and stewarded this land for countless generations from time immemorial. In a spirit of making erased histories visible, we begin today by acknowledging that we are on the ancestral and illegally occupied territories of the Three Fires Confederacy, the Ojibwe, O'Dowen, and the Polta Womi, who are not relics of the past, but rather continue to steward this land today with care, vitality, and tradition. Their relations are numerous throughout Turtle Island, and they continue to grow. We'll pay respects to their elders, past, and present and to their future generations. Please take a moment to consider the many legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and settlement that bring us together here today. And please join us in uncovering such truths at any and all public events. I want to thank Tara Moses, who is on the call today for sharing that language with us and for helping us to open in a good way. My name is Mia Susan Amir. I'm the convener of Unsettling Dramaturgy. Unsettling Dramaturgy started out of a series of conversations that happened at the LNDA conference in 2017. And then bubbled inside of me for quite some time, and then we were lucky. I was lucky to be awarded a Bly creative fellowship to support this now ongoing project in a moment where I get to introduce ourselves. But Rick and I, Rick, who is the co-coordinator of this project, will now introduce Unsettling Dramaturgy to you all in the briefest of ways. And then we'll explain how we're going to share our time together today. Does that sound cool? Yeah, right on. Rick, do you want to start? Absolutely. So Unsettling Dramaturgy is an ongoing project bringing together CRIP and Indigenous Dramaturgy from across so-called Canada and the United States who work in theater, dance, and experimental performance. We're using digital platforms to gather to build relationships to explore and document the critical convergences and divergences in our experiences and work to amplify CRIP and Indigenous aesthetics, ethics, practices, and leadership in our local, national, and international performance ecologies where you replace the conversations from inclusion to centering from reconciliation to Unsettling and depolymization. My turn? Okay, I can't see. Yes, your turn. You're behind us on the screen. This project proposes a continuation of the thriving legacies of leadership that shape Indigenous and CRIP 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. So we're dismantling those silos to advance emerging conversations exploring the conflicts of leadership and representation in creation and production as relate to Indigenous sovereignty and deaf, maddened disability culture in the arts. We're generating a platform for self-determined encounter in exchange where our local bodies of knowledge can be activated. On to you. It is important to share that this project is not aimed to collapse CRIP and Indigenous dramaturgies' experiences. The exclusions that our communities face emerge from very specific historical, cultural, and political contexts. Further, the ableism, same as an autism, the deaf, disabled, and maddened states emerge from colonial ways of signing value and human dignity. We use 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 that term. For example, those from the deafness is a cultural identity, not a medical condition. We use the word CRIP as a political intervention to turn attention on to and to disrupt as our collaborator, Carmen Papalian, who's not joining us today, writes, the disabling conditions that limit a person and or community's agency and potential to thrive. And we're using the term Indigenous within the management of the Canadian complex ways that community, family, belonging, polity, and heritage interact with systems of state recognition. So the words CRIP and Indigenous are both used with shorthand and not intended to generalize or reduce our vast multiplicity of identities, experiences, and affiliations. So what we've been up to for the last six or so months, we and I have been scheming, dreaming, talking, imagining structures, engaging in conversations with folks who we know and who are recommended to us because we know that there is no way that we would know everyone that we should know and we still don't know everyone that we should know who should be in the conversation with us. And at this point we've had three convenings. They all happen on Zoom, as is happening right now. And we've been working to really lead into relationship building and finding out what the basic threads of relationship are that are important to us if we're going to co-create and co-dream and co-theorize and co-enact together. And so that's what our convenings have really looked like to date. I'm happy to share some of the access practices that we've built to support the participation of all of our co-create, which not everybody is represented here today. There's about 12 folks from across Canada, so-called Canada in the United States who are participating thus far. And HowlAround and Spider-Wing show, which is kind of the Canadian sister organization to HowlAround, are both partnering with us and will be working with us as we, when we're ready and on our terms, are interested in sharing our discoveries, our learnings, and the documentation from this project. So that's what we've been up to. Does this make sense so far? Right on. Okay, cool. You want to tell them about the panel? Yeah, so, on today's panel, we wanted to demonstrate for you a little bit of what our practice looks like. So, through this format, we're letting you in on the conversation that we're having with and for each other, for and with Crippin's and his promiturs. We invite you to participate as witnesses with that understanding. 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. This event will be live streamed with closed captions as well. There are no closed captions, actually. I just lied. It's in the script, it was my fault. But it will be transcribed after. Okay, post. Do you want to edit that live now? Great. We're going to go talk together. No, go ahead, Mia. Go ahead. Okay, so I was going to say now we wanted to do our panelist self-introduction. So, we're going to take about 15 minutes for that so you can hear a little bit about us and where we're coming from and our access needs and a little bit of our practice. So, maybe it makes the most sense for the people in the room to start off. Would you all be willing to start off? I can start. I can start. Okay. And so, again, just to remind us, this is how we conduct ourselves with each other. And we're letting you know that today. And then we're going to give you a chance to conduct yourselves a tiny bit with each other. It won't be very extensive because we only have 40 minutes now. We'll do our best. So, my name is Mia Susan Amir. I use she, her, her pronouns. Today, I have shorted somewhat disheveled hair. I'm a white-skinned individual. I'm wearing a purple kind of hoodie but the hood kind of extends itself in a kind of unwieldy way. And I'm wearing my hoodie and my really cute jumper. And where I am, well, I am, as I mentioned, I'm here at Columbia College and I was born in Israel-occupied Palestine. I'm a Jew of mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardic ascent. And I live most of the time on the unceded and occupied territories of the Muscovies, Gholmish, and Slay-O-Tooth peoples, colonialy known as Vancouver, British Columbia. My access needs, despite appearances or maybe not, I'm not doing very well today. My health is poopy. So, that means a bunch of things. Maybe I'll step up and I'll hand it over to Rick to hold it up. But what it probably means is that it might take me some time to catch and form my thoughts. And so, patients with that will be appreciated and not completing my sentences for me as something I will appreciate. In terms of my praxis, I work at the intersection of creative and community practice. I'm a dramaturg, director, maker of transdisciplinary works. I'm really interested in how we democratize narrative production starting from the site of sensation. And I'm multiply affiliated with a bunch of different and exciting projects and organizations and I'm really excited to be positioned as such. And a lot of my work is taking place not in Vancouver, but cross-continentally. And so, I've been leading into these digital venues a lot. And as a disabled artist, it's been really interesting to be able to have that flexibility of form to be able to work kind of in my own terms and my own ways often from home. So, yeah, that's that's some of the stuff I'm up to. So, which my pronouns are she, her, hers. White female with little longer than chin-length brown hair. Black sweater and gray shirt. And so, I am on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish people particularly specifically the Dolomites peoples. My access needs end of the day for me so I'm really kind of dragging on the end now. So, hopefully I won't be slower than usual but feeling a little fuzzy right now. As far as my practice I've been focusing lately on the work that matters to me most. Like centering the disabled perspective in theater that includes like working with this group and writing some articles and starting rehearsals enjoying our production that focuses on disabled people. So, I'm really enjoying having this time to center my identity and I'm also really enjoying working with these loving generous people. Tara, would you mind going next? Sure thing. Here's Jay, everyone. Hello. My name is Tara Moses. My pronouns are she, her, hers. I have very long, very straight, very dark hair almost black around dark brown slash black. I have a medium brown skin tone, although I'm being washed out right now by apartment lighting, as we all know is great. I have on a black off the shoulder top that has some pink and purple floral detailing on it. Based in live in the in Osage, Kato and Spokan Nation in Oklahoma. So that is the Tulsa, Oklahoma area. I'm from Simulaton, Oklahoma. It is in a Simulaton, and I also have shared and mixed ancestry in the Spokane Nation, Mesolitero, Apache and Oklahoma Cherokee. I'm gross to my access needs. If everyone would not mind speaking up and being very clear so that I can hear and be great and appreciative. And then from my access, I am a director, a playwright and an artistic director. Being a native artist, I find myself thrust into the dramaturgical role often. In recent years, I've also been identified as a dramaturg. So what I do is a lot of native artistry, a lot of native theater, I've been interested in doing decolonized to Shakespeare which is possible. So I've been doing that. I recently came up with the production of Payment that was set in pre-Columbia, Mexico. During the Indies where it goes. And so as a very different meaning it works very well with that play. And not just with classical work like Shakespeare or a lot of brief tragedies as well, but furthermore how can we do decolonized storytelling into contemporary theater that may not necessarily be written by a native artist or the intentionality to be decolonized. And so that's really my I would say very best of taste because I need to become an expert on kids. That's where I thrive, that's where I work. And what I'm really passionate about and furthermore I'm really passionate about accessibility in the full meaning of the word. So accessibility for those with all levels of abilities as well as those with economic accessibility caregiver accessibility. So helping those who have young children or other family members or other individuals who they do care after in-house theater thinking or accommodating in the rest of the personal room the actual buildings etc. Yes, and I'm also a consultant with Grandwater Arts which focuses on climate justice that's centered around Indigenous folks and other people of color as well as equity diversity and decolonization. I'm on a lot of other committees and things, but I think that's all for now. Thank you. Thank you, Tara. General, will you go next? Thank you. Jill Carter, Anishinaabek Ashkenazi Toronto Lagalanto Chiki Winnie Nudum Chikikon Pi O'chipan My name is Jill Carter. I am a mixed-blood Anishinaabe that's eastern woodlands specifically Adawa one of the three fires confederacy mixed-blood Ashkenazi and Anishinaabe women. I was born and raised here in Takenanto, the place where the trees grow out of the water Toronto grandfather my traditional lands are my late grandfather I went to come to the island Toronto is a gathering place it has been so for 13,500 years it is a gathering place and a place of trade and commerce today because it was always this it wasn't it wasn't made this way when Europe stepped upon its shores we are blessed with three key waterways that connect the lake of the woods in the far north to Lake Ontario in the south which then takes us out to the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Atlantic Ocean and a connector of indigenous nations from north to south for thousands of years it has been stewarded by multiple nations the Wanda the Wanda Shawnee people of the Longhouse specifically the Seneca Nation of the Longhouse people and more basically the Nishisage Anishinaabe so the Anishinaabe from the river of many miles I am very grateful to be on these lands today to be speaking to you from Kampananto and I am very grateful to meet you all through the airways fiber cables or whatever across these lands I also I work I am a theater maker an Anishinaabe theater maker who is also now in the later U.S. and educator I am assistant professor of the University of Toronto and I am center for theater drama performance studies in the transitional year program and in indigenous studies at U of T I am my my pronouns are she and her my leptin and jean jacket my hair is because I am dancing I have dark hair pull down and pick the cloth you know what that was my computer speaking to me and when I pulled it worked he asked me to tell me I programmed him to be scary so that I will get back to work so pulled back and I am sprinty I am a medium dark skin orange lipstick what I look like and my pronouns are she and her my praxis as I said I am an educator I am an educator and I am a theater maker specifically a performer a director and a dramaturg to support the development of new indigenous works and to disseminate artistic objectives, process and outcomes through community driven research projects when I began as doing my masters and my PhD in 2001 there was no indigenous scholarship to speak of on indigenous theater but there was no scholarship so I began to try to forge my own way through it and work from the little I know about my own culture and the much I began to learn by working with theater makers like spider-woman theater Mui Mui Hiko Mui Mui Mui Mui Mui Mui Mui Mui Mui Mui Mui Mui Mui Mui Mui people that I enjoy working with with now enough people who necessarily make theater to educate settler audiences who make theater, they make theater and I make theater for our communities, for our people with very specific goals in mind. Many of these often are just our healing, our goals around healing. And in a sense, theater has healed me, Indigenous theater, I regard it as a ceremony in a public space and I enjoy working that way towards those transformations. And I think that's probably all I should say right now. Do you have any access needs today? I don't think so, I may stand up even if I do this, it's because I'm still recovering from the back injury, thank you very much. Tanaka everyone, Nia Roo, Yann Islaure, Yann Ketabere. Hi, my name is Roo George Warren or my legal name is Deleslin, so you'll see both. I'm a citizen of Ketabere Indian Nation, the only federal recognized tribe in South Carolina. My pronouns are he, him, or they, them. Visual description, I have white skin, I have brownish shirts, gym shorts, which is the magic of being able to do live streams that you can dress how you want to. I've got short, curly, brown hair and blue eyes and a beard. I, like I said, I'm Ketabere and I am the most privileged of having grown up on my people's traditional land and I currently live on our reservation, which is just fantastic. Access needs, my access needs today are that there's a lot of, I get very easily distracted and there's a lot of sounds like there's a fly that's just doing the most over here. There's some rest cats outside my door wanting me to feed them, my cats wanting me to feed them. So if I look distracted, I probably am, so just patience would be appreciated. And then in terms of praxis, so I come at theater kind of sideways. My training is in operatic performance and musical, interstitial musical composition, but after graduating from my program, I realized I didn't like the strictures on it so I moved pretty rapidly into performance, art and experimental work. Today, I continue doing those kinds of works usually by traveling to other places, but I also spend the majority of my time working on community organizing, particularly around Ketaba food sovereignty and Ketaba language revitalization and thinking about how performance and theater practice and dramaturgy can actually come into these community movements to inform or bolster the work that we're doing there. For example, today I just spent maybe 10 hours coding a website for our language project, so I'm also just seeing numbers and brackets of the disease running in front of my eyes, but I think that's all that I'm supposed to write now, so I thank you. Nia, do you wanna offer the activity for the folks in the room? I was gonna ask, do you think we should do it? We have almost no time left. I know. We'll give us 10 more minutes because 10 minutes got shaved from the top of our time, and if you have to leave, that's totally cool, but if I could just get some indicator from most of you, like a hand or a, yeah, right on. Okay, cool, let's do it. They gave us 10 more minutes. How nice of them. So gracious. Okay, so we wanted to offer the way we introduce ourselves to you, so here's the instruction, here's an invitation. Find a person, maybe somebody that you don't know, but that you feel comfortable introducing yourself to in this room, and you'll share, and unfortunately we don't have a slide because tech difficulties, but your name, your pronouns, and you can share what you want of this. This is not, you can opt in and out. A visible description of yourself today right now in this moment. Where, who, and who's land you're from? So where, who, and who's land you're from? One thing that brought you to this panel and any access needs that you might have. Accesses for everyone, and so sometimes folks walk into a room and they're like, ah, I don't have any access needs because it's a really new thing for us to get to check in about what we need in order to be able to be as present as we want to be in a space. And often we're performing all kinds of labor that happens outside of space, we're invisibly inside of space to be able to be present. So if there's something that you wanna share with your partner about your access needs today or some labor that you've performed in order to get here that would be useful to be visibleized for you, please do share that. Should I repeat those? You're all good. You're good, yeah. Do you wanna write on the white board for reference? You're good. Thank you so much for that offer. Okay, so you'll have four minutes. Two times per person to get real, to get close. So if you haven't had a chance to switch yet, I'm sorry to impose over the right levels, but you know, you can switch when you see where you're ready. From the audience. When we both had a chance to introduce ourselves and get close in that way, I don't know, Pat, of possibility that perhaps at the end of this, because we were only given one hour to convene together and it would have been much more ideal for us to have two hours to do some other things, but if at the end of this session, you wanna check in with your buddy who you just met today and reflect on one thing that you're taking away from this panel, because we're not gonna have a chance for questions where we're gonna center the voices of the cool group members. So I just wanna encourage that it could be a possibility because these conversations can often be really big. And so just as a word of grounding and starting to embody some of the information and awakening or understanding or ideas or new words that we receive or hear that that could be a possibility. I did wanna ask, does anyone have any access needs in the room that you'd like us to know about in order to orient this conversation in such a way that you can be as present as you want to be today? No pressure. Yeah. I guess I just, and this is maybe the opposite of what you're getting at, it felt sort of trivializing for me to say that I have access needs because things seem pretty well designed for me to get around on. So I don't know, I just, I don't know. Doesn't feel right. Is it possible to read out for a minute? So, what was your name? Waylon. Waylon said that it felt a bit trivializing to talk about their access needs because things were designed in such a way that your access needs were being met. Great, okay. So that's true for some of us. Some of us our access needs are being met sometimes. Accesses are like a constantly fluctuating thing, just like we in our bodies are constantly fluctuating. So it's something that can change in this dynamic and in a different process where we have more time together, it's something we would continue to check in about. It's not as soon as a static state. You were this way at 4 p.m. Why are you not that way at 6? Yeah, that's not the assumption. Anybody else? Any access needs that will help you be present for the remainder of your time together. Great, it is helpful for me to repeat in the microphone what was said in the room. I can take in all the information, the names and the references. And so I have to continue both consuming calories and burning them somehow. It's like that's why I'm standing right now because after hours of exciting conversation, I feel like breaking down. I'm gonna do a disservice and repeating. But in conference environments like this, there we're consuming a lot of intellectual information and that there's a need to continue to consume and exert calories in order to digest. Or... It's like I need the calories to feed my brain. To feed the brain. And obviously if I eat too much, then it just... If I eat too much, it results in an excess. And so there's a feeling of about to break down this because of excess. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Thank you. So in this space, please feel free to move about, stand up, sit down, it doesn't matter if you're in the front. If you want to lie on the ground, that's cool. Do what you need to do. If you want to leave, great. If you want to come back, also great. So for the remainder of our short time together, we have wanted to have a conversation. And we have three, well, 10, but three. Awesome, we have huge questions that we wanted to address. And I'm wondering, maybe I could just read all of the questions out. And then whatever we say is the best thing that we need to say right now, yeah? Yes. Okay, does that work for all of you? Yes. So these are the questions. And you can write these down because they might be cool questions for you at some point in your life, or I can email them. If you want an email, come after I'll email them to you. That might be easier. So what does crib and or indigenous dramaturgy mean to you? We're really not trying to create static definitions of our practices through our work together. So we're really moving into our embodied experiences of what our work looks and feels like and it's specificity. So that's what we want to share from this. What does it mean to us? How do you, and when I'm saying you, it's directed towards us, not you right now, but maybe you too. How do you experience dealing with address, the tension that exists between the desire and need to unsettle mainstream approaches to dramaturgy and the desire and need to simply center communities in the context of your dramaturgical practice? So this tension of needing to be in these more mainstream spaces and then really just wanting to center our own communities experiences, aesthetics, and ways. And then the third, fourth, fifth, sixth questions are, how do we create cross-community relational solidarity between indigenous and crib communities of artistic practice? How do we unsettle access? How do we amplify access with an indigenous practice? So these are some of the questions that have come up through the course of our encounter with each other and they're not questions that we have landed on answers to, they're like alive, they're super alive. I think they're alive, are they alive? Yeah, they're alive. Okay, just as we are. And so those are the questions that we will somehow in some part respond to each of us. But that's what we'll do for the next 20 minutes, which means we each have four minutes, 20, 20 minutes, so 4.333 or something. Great, so can all of those move to start? I wanted to just get voice to the fact that Jill and Tara and I were, we had about 10 to 15 minutes before this started where it was just the three of us on the call and we were having a really, really, really interesting conversation around indigenous theater, state side and also in so-called Canada, talking about where the past trends are and what the current situation is. And one question that came from that that I was, that I'm really interested in is, and I hope they're okay with me sharing this as Tara was saying, you know, there's kind of this moment happening around indigenous theater, where it's becoming trendy, but in a very specific way. And that kind of gets to a little bit of this question around the desire need to unsettle mainstream approaches to dramaturgy, but also like what happens when that, when that work or when those perspectives start to become trendy or hyper visible and what happens to those people who are kind of put at the center of that hyper visibility and what happens to the people who are put outside that center of hyper visibility. So I think in the U.S. where I heard from Tara, there's like just one or two theater makers who are really getting a lot of the work right now. And while it's great that we're having a lot more indigenous theater happening on big stages, what happens when these two people, for example, represent the entirety of 570 plus indigenous nations in the U.S. You know, what happens to us who are those people, like our perspective is not being put forth on the stage or in dramaturgical work, but also what happens to those people who are being put at the center of being asked to be accountable to the companies that they're working with, being accountable to their tribal nations and also being accountable to the other tribal nations and other indigenous makers on these lands. So I just think it's really interesting to think about hyper visibility because at least in the Southeast, indigenous people were thinking a lot about invisibility and erasure because that is such a strong dynamic. So what happens when it kind of flips to the other side and hyper visibility becomes the primary dynamic, which apparently is kind of happening in theater right now. So that's just a thought that I was having from that really interesting conversation I got to have with Jill and Tara beforehand. Yeah, and so I'll jump in from there. I have my four minute timer ready going on the side. I was a speech advisor in high school, so you know that I was talking to you. Thank you, Rue, for starting out with that and talking a little bit about our conversation. Because we like thinking about these questions that we have in our conversations in general, and just my practice individually. This for me individually is a native artist. I don't just work in Oklahoma. This year I actually did it from coast to coast, which is really exciting. Doing native theater, this is going to be very first for me. I've never done a full year of just native theater and here we are doing it. So that's wonderful, yes, Eric is part of it. But that comes with a lot of challenges. I just left a process and it was not good. Whatever the step right before traumatic is, is that's what it was. He's doing a very difficult work about a very young native woman who was sexually assaulted, who was kidnapped, and then was murdered. And we don't know what her names are today. Spoiler, I guess you can find out anyway, but we don't have this. Also, we're real name, but we took that. In addition, if you want a new play about that, you need a playwright, you need an actress, you need designers, it's great, how old and non-native theater company. And so what happens there is that since there is, as I've said before, it's getting kind of like cool and trendy to do new theater now. It's like, are we in a stage or an enchantment festival, play at its horizons, for the center stage. They are pretty senior to work. It's just that it opens the door, especially for native women, that fetidization of native women. And so specifically with Bacodas, who is of Disney, she's been hyper-sexualized and that is also translated to native women today living on this continent. Their sexual assault rates needing the highest of any other group who are the smallest population in the United States, specifically. And with that is, is that I was in a situation where I had artistic leadership wanting to thrust their, I did, like they're really fetish of what my popcorn should be. And it got really, really, really quickly. And so when we talk about doing out with that tension between like wanting to do new theater, to give it visibility, to go to non-native theater companies and produce native work, is that it's always within the structure of settler colonialism. Always within that structure of manifest destiny that everything on this land, women included, belong to, quote, unquote, me. And it's problematic because I want to continue to be hired and as a director, it was being hired by another theater company, of course. I have to report to the artistic director. So I want to continue to make a living. We need to compromise in certain ways. But it's like, where is that line between having collaborative conversations about the artistry and reiterating settler colonialism, this fetishization and over-centralization in native women, especially as we're convinced of this huge movement around the same murder in indigenous women. It's always tricky. And so if I'm thinking about like, what would indigenous dramaturgy mean to me? It would mean a full trust on that body, those who are not indigenous, to give over the time the resources, the access, the opportunity. And let's do our thing. Because here's the thing, in my experience with non, okay, for a time, I'm almost at my worst class, it is. So the thing with native theater and non-native audiences in my experience is that non-native audiences really get energized by native theater because native theater is a ceremony, it is a spiritual. It fits on these super deep, visceral, multi-level places in audiences. And so it's understanding that doing something new it does not always mean it's going to be a financial risk. It's sort of why women in that space. Especially as we were in a capitalistic society in a capitalistic field, it was just the nature of nonprofits. It's having the worry about where the money's coming from and all that jazz. But yeah, so it's a tricky balance between all of those things. And the last thing that I will leave is is that whenever, just a pro tip from my last experience, when I'm an indigenous artist, spends hours and hours and hours among so many buckets of emotional labor and rehashing intergenerational trauma to write dramaturgical packets, to write cultural sensitivity guides, really use them and really read them. And also knowing that every indigenous person, just like every disabled person, every ex-person, whatever you want to say, because I'll speak for their entire community, they are not like an expert of their communities, but also acknowledging that that they can offer their individual perspective from where they live in their intersections and that we will debate that forward. So hello again, I'm Chail. Okay, so I'll tell you the story. I see, as I mentioned, I work at the University of Toronto and a very central organization at Cole Place Center at the University of Toronto is a place called Heart House. It's a gathering house, it has houses and theater. It's a great old gothic structure with a block tower and a war memorial to war dent. The Royal Tea has passed through there, yada, yada, yada. There are fancy dining halls there. There are meeting rooms and dialogue and arts going on and stuff. It's been a structure for on a campus and it's a native university that has existed on these lands for almost 200 years. This university is actually older than Canada itself. So here's this place called Heart House Theater. Heart House Theater, which people think of a lot as a candidate of student productions, is brought out as a workshop, some of the national stars of theater history and playwrights. So people like William Shatner came through and inspired my computer, Heart House Theater, and I do it my time around I play on the theater. It's not going anywhere, I'm pressing it now. This has been a colonial bastion of storytelling and culture making, not only for this university, but for Toronto and then across the nation for some years. It's reaching its 100th birthday this year, this coming year, and it was about to produce for its 100th birthday because a very well-known killer of Canadian leader wanted to direct a play. Some of you may recognize this from the description. A play by a settler, Canadian playwright about a young native girl and her boyfriend to their reserve and cannot survive in the city. And they're of course fated to die horribly in the streets of the mean city because the Canadian society and all levels has failed them and less Canada can give them what they need. They cannot survive. So this is a story that came out in 1967. Anyone recognize my hint? The Ecstasy of Reading Job by George Rieke. So Lee Miracle, who is a well-known Stolo writer here, I didn't even know this was happening. Lee Miracle apparently heard about this, slipped out and said, what the heck do you think you're doing? You want to start your 100th birthday and your path to reconciliation by making this your native offering. So they very quickly retreated from that project and they began to consult with native people around the campus about what they'd like to do. So I went and I spoke to them. And they said, well, I can give you a list of playwrights as long as your arm and a list of playwrights and you can produce one of these playwrights or you could commission one of these playwrights to write you a whole new play for your 100th birthday and your new found declaration to reconcile and open, you know, decolonize the stones upon which your ivy grows. And then I said, or instead of having one little show to tick off your indigenous box, instead of having one little show where people can come and watch us on stage and then say, well, we saw this and tick off the box, you could call people on this campus into a project where they have to reveal themselves, where they have to enter into conversation with young indigenous people and work out this thing called relationship building. And what are they going to do and reveal themselves in a creative and artful process? Basically, through the process of story moving, I told them we should hire Miriam McAlphys, vital woman theater, have her come up and do this show. Well, they didn't quite have the money to do that so they asked me, second math, third math, fourth math. And now I've agreed to do it. I've agreed to do it because I think it's important to intervene on that the eye is on us. The eye is not on us. The eye should not be on us. I do, my work as a dramaturg is to say, one more minute, I am not your author. Well, shut up, and I'll make you go. Okay, I'll just stop now, patience. Sorry, my timer's fine, I know it's going to be. I'll come back at this time. Sorry, give me one more second. It's to take the authority away. It's to change the structure of storytelling. In my community, storytelling is a communal enterprise. So the elder begins and then expects us to participate, take on to witness fully and then participate in the telling of that story and the making. When a creation story is told, it be creation, re-creation begin anew in us. We become the agents. We are not just passive spectators listening to a fictive or finished action. We are continuing that action. And if this is an action in Canada, this moment of quote, truth and reconciliation, an action in Canada where these colonial bastions will change their ways, where the walls will tumble down, where access will truly be inundated, then it is with whose the cellular faculty here, the cellular staff here, the cellular students along with the indigenous faculty students and staff and indigenous community members to come in and begin to do that work together and to make commitments, public commitments and on the public stage, on the stage that is part of the national stage. So that's being a dramaturgy instructor. That's it, sorry. Guess that means I'm going. So I don't usually identify what I do as crypt dramaturgy. I'm coming around to the term crypt, but I haven't quite used it yet. I think so that what I'm interested in doing is really centering the perspective of disabled artists through our conversations in this group that there are a lot of similarities between the disabled community and the indigenous community. When we're talking about like hypervisibility versus invisibility and how our work can be kind of trendy sometimes. And we need to be careful and unpack what is going into it and who's doing that work. If it's kind of a cultural appropriation, I would say when someone who is not disabled is not involved in some way because disability does have a very specific culture and it's important to recognize their perspective, the perspective of disabled artists. So I think that working in this group we're starting to see how we can build the cross-community solidarity. We're excited to keep going with these conversations and talking about how we can and so on. And one thing is I think that talking about access needs sometimes we think about accommodations first and that's not exactly what access needs are about. It's more about not assuming that everyone else is the same as I am, has the same realities. So I think that unsettling access needs to be a practice that comes into all spaces, like rehearsal spaces because rehearsals are so ableist for practices and just talking about access needs completely changes the atmosphere. So I think I'm going to keep rambling if you keep that microphone there. I honor that we're at 540, 440, 340, 240 wherever you are in the world, 40 after, which is how long we suddenly would stay together. So I don't feel the need to enter the conversation. We can have conversations one on one here if you like. I want to honor that people probably need to go get their needs met like food and like a rest. But I want to give great gratitude to my collaborators for being willing to expose parts of our practice, parts of the ways that we come together to groups of strangers both in this room and who are tuning in on how around or who will tune in on how around in the future where this will live forever online. And if you'd like to talk more about what we're up to, please don't hesitate to come and chat with me. And again, I will email out the questions that we were addressing today and I'm happy to share other aspects of what we're up to. So thank you all so, so much for sharing this time and space with us. And if you feel so new, do connect with your buddy and have a moment, even a moment of reflection. Maybe it's not today, maybe it's on Saturday. Maybe let it percolate, what else? Yeah.