 Group number one will be a National Deaf Advocacy Organization. Ryan and Wayne. Alexandra, give us the cue, if you could, when we're halfway through to help us manage the time. Are we ready? All right, hi everybody. I'm Ryan, Ryan Schlett. And we talked about establishing an effective pipeline for a National Deaf Theatre Advocacy Organization. That's not a name that's set in stone, it's a working name that we've come up with for now. The idea is regionally throughout the country. We know that the economic situation varies and the amount of talent available varies throughout the country. So, one thought was to have representation regionally and those representatives would be members of a group, a nationwide board that would talk about the needs at the local level regionally throughout the country. They would participate at the board level and the representatives would have three basic areas of focus, arts, education and business and they would be responsible to keep track of making progress in those three key areas and to have some cohesive efforts going on nationally by having this type of structure and to report back on what the efforts are in each region. So, board members would be involved in an EDI group, Equity Diversity and Inclusion Group. So, that in three minutes or less are the key points. It would involve development of workshops, trainings, programs, regional initiatives, database for deaf talent, awareness building and regional arts groups. So, I'm going to hand it over to Wayne to talk more about the funding and how we plan to support this vision in multiple ways. Alright, so now that you know about the ecosystem, right? So, we're talking about an ecosystem and outside. It doesn't really pertain to that. This is deaf business and the deaf community. How is it that we in the theater field can develop our own ecosystem? A private corporation owned and run by volunteers, et cetera. There are different services and an ecosystem that would serve, you know, nationwide. So, how do we support that when it comes to theater? You know, many of us say that we get sponsorships. We get donations. So, and I'm looking at business. I'm looking at where the money is coming from. So, I'm going to have to work hard, you know, to develop that ecosystem, to be equivalent to what's out there in the business world and then donate from my own money. So, we're looking for a way where the ecosystem is self-sustained. Time's up. Thank you. Nice job. Great. The next group will be in the area of advocacy. The advocacy group. Mervyn? Mervyn, if you could please come up. Please let me know what is the best way for us to communicate about time? Do you want to cut off? Do you want a finger? Do you want a hand, a flag, a wave? And I'll give you that for when you're halfway through your allotted time, okay? We'll make those agreements. What we're going to do is start with an advocacy group. Oh, by the way, I'm Kayla. We want to build an advocacy group that essentially at its core has a staff that is ready, enabled to travel, to be mobile, to educate, create workshops. And I'm blanking. Hello, I'm Mervyn. Yeah, Mervyn will take it from here. Oh, yes, a festival. We're supposed to host a festival. We're supposed to be quite mobile, collaborative, supportive. And we're to get to a point where we actually create a structure to provide and disseminate resources nationally of deaf artists, deaf talent and what have you. All the deaf artists and institutional resources should no longer be isolated, but we need to find a way to disseminate resources beyond our core. There are individuals who are deaf, deaf artists, deaf producers, deaf administrators. We create a pipeline of disseminate that information, and that pipeline is a pipeline of alliance, a pipeline of allies. That way we create an alliance. Yeah, I think that's a good enough explanation. I agree. Wait, you're here. Now we're going to demonstrate the frame, reframe, reinvent and represent. Power. And we're done. Thank you. And I appreciated the clarification for all of us about the specific focus in terms of advocacy. It's a very broad topic, so it would be helpful to have more specifics. Have you talked about that in your group? My question is, have you decided on any specific focus in terms of advocacy? You talked about deaf theater. The idea of a database has been tossed around. If you have any other specifics, please let us know. And watch the other groups, and by the time we're finished with this, if you have anything to add, let us know. You did a great job, but it was a little bit broad. I'm looking to know if you have anything more specific, so that might evolve. Now BFA, MFA, programs. Andrew. Yes. Yes, that'll be nice. Yeah, just give me a signal. The one minute sign as his warning. This is, I'm kind of emotional about this. This is our last day together. What we want to do is piggyback on the social media movement, the hashtag movement, deaf, deaf, blind, talent movement. We want to find all the producers, directors, artists, those individuals who are struggling to find people to work with. There are individuals who are practitioners who have the talent, and they're ready to emerge. Where is the pool of talent? How do we get all of these individuals together? Everyone is so isolated. We want to actually emerge and develop together. So we thought that the way to collectively contribute to the pipeline is to create programs, academic programs, BFA program and MFA program with some very specific targets. I think starting with a BFA program with three specific tracks. One, the acting track, another secondary part of that, a performing track. The second would be a production track, and the last would be the education track, the theater education program. So all of that will culminate in a BFA program or training, and that the training then becomes a toolkit for all artist producers, et cetera, in this program that we're establishing to have toolkits or resources. Now where can that be housed? Who knows. Any one of the liberal arts institutions associated with the deaf community, Gallaudet, to C Center, what have you, as long as we get those institutions identified, and ideally we'll have a roadmap toward a BFA program or an MFA program in the near future, and that's a wrap. By March 2020, and we're looking to recruit. One minute warning. This is Alexandria. Sorry. Yes, Alexandria here, back on stage. I just told Andrew that he has one more minute still remaining. He went through it so fast. Okay, the next group is the writer's retreat group with Michelle and Natasha. Okay, first the ritual. I'm Natasha. I'm Michelle. I'm Sabina. I'm Kaelin. I'm Amy. And I'm Nikki. There are many, many shows. The words stream. The words flow. We flow. We sip. We float. We create. We dance. We create. We consume. We innovate. We poise ourselves. We model. We dance. We breathe. We create. We dance. We move. We create. We consume. We create. We innovate. We dance. We move. This is about a writer's retreat. A six week or full one month program. Here's what's involved. It's a two week writer's program. We have five different writers in one space full time. The objective is to write a 90 minute or full length play. And we need to make sure that we're on track with our tasks in creating that body of work. Further into the program, we would involve dramaturgs, dazzles, directors or artistic sign language to work and revise our work. We'll be involved in an extensive editing process. And toward the final three days, we would invite artistic directors, other directors of institutions, deaf theaters, producers, what have you. Other business stakeholders like Convo. As well as hearing stakeholders, as non deaf stakeholders involved in the process as well. Toward the final three days of our writing workshop session retreat. The idea would be to document the whole process of this entire creative effort. And to create a product at the end. And then we have Wayne from Convo as a key person that we'd like to have involved. The reason for documenting this is we want the world to see our work and what we're doing in the world of deaf theater. And then the idea is to submit it for a fringe festival. Before this one month retreat, there would be a pre-retreat session. So that at the time the retreat actually begins, there would be a theme in place. And we'd be ready to roll. And this is going to happen by 2020 next year. And the location could be some place rural, like a farm where we have open space. We need big spaces for this work. And we want to be able to work visually and have all kinds of posters and things that we create visually to support the process. I thought it would be sponsored by Convo! Convo! No pressure. Thank you. Okay, now this is the sign I've been told is the next group's topic. Am I right? Did I get that right? We have Robert representing that group. Hello. Hi. I'm representing the group that is establishing an organization. And this is the sign we came up with for the name of that organization. It's based on the comedy tragedy masks. And it's called the National Deaf Theater Society. And that's the sign for the organization. The purpose of the organization is multi-fold. So we know we need more research for best practices. And we need to talk about what access really means. And there's a need for education and experimentation. So looking at all of these ideas, we came up with the idea to create something for people at all levels. Children, professional artists, funders, the entire gamut. So the plan for how to make this happen is to create online content. And the three-year plan is to host a festival to actually bring people together face-to-face for a learning opportunity. So of course, any startup effort requires people to get involved. So we have a short-term plan and a long-term plan for this organization to take on efforts having to do with deaf theater and creating almost like a lab space, eventually, for this to take place. So the first step is to use that startup fund, $250,000, to get it started and create online course content. And that would in turn become a revenue source, a revenue-generating opportunity so that we could feed those funds into retreats that happen two times a year. And the first retreat would have the purpose of determining and establishing the structure of the foundation, the organization, creating bylaws and domain names and all those logistics. And then the second retreat would have to do with creating content for the courses that would be offered. And brainstorming for future development and growth. So we'd like to use that initial $250,000 for the startup process and then it would generate revenue and we could sustain it and offer these retreats two times a year. And $50,000 could be put aside to run educational programs and partner with universities and colleges for degree programs, MFA, BFA degree programs, and that we could really focus on education and development. We'd also like to see festivals be a part of this organization. And that would also be a source for revenue to continue to grow our National Deaf Theater Society. Thank you. Wonderful, thank you. Last but not least, we have our group on activism. EJ, come on up. We'll begin with a ritual. Your hand, my hand, our hands. Your hand, my hand, our hands. Your hand, my hand, our hands. I am EJ Albert Joseph. When you think of ballet or traditional ballet in the poses, when you think of hip-hop, you think of two different traditions and sometimes the traditions don't marry well. Sometimes the vibe for space, this is my space, this is the tradition of ballet. Some may say this is the tradition of hip-hop and we don't get along. We don't have to get along. No, we have a lot of things in common. No, you don't know anything about hip-hop and the dialogue between these two different traditions go very differently. We talk about what your time is and what my time is, as if we're in totally different time zones of dance. So we need to take time to think about what common variable we can put in between us to bring us both together. Perhaps you can bend your tradition a little to the left and the other can bend their tradition a little to the right to meet nicely in the middle. Now that's a metaphor for hearing and deaf theater. Deaf, visual, spatial, gestural language, spoken language coming together as one united front. This is the future by March next year. St. Patrick's Day, next year. 2020, not 2019. Keep it straight, keep it straight, keep it straight. Okay, a year from now, two years from now, any year from now. The point is that we believe that we should not be as fractured because there are expertise in each place, in each space. There's a collage of people that can be learned from and that can learn. We want to lead ourselves to creating a larger deaf advocacy organization in which one entity can be the watchdog of calling entities out for not doing what they should do and doing the calling in for entities who want to do the right thing, to lead to a larger vision of a deaf advocacy organization that's strong and vibrant. Deaf Theater Advocacy Organization. Alexandria back. I applaud you all, nice work. Thank you, this is so exciting to see all six of these presentations. I know time is short. We're starting to feel the pressure. That's okay, let's stay loose and what we're going to do next is stay in the same groups and think about boiling it all down to one sentence. If you had the opportunity to get back on stage one last thing or show your ritual whatever it is you would like to do with just one minute, one last minute this is the opportunity for that. Is that clear? If you feel satisfied and you don't have any burning desire to say one more last thing that's okay, but if you do this is your chance. Lights please, lights please. Just for good luck one more time. Thank you. This group represents the National Deaf Advocacy Organization. We're starting with the ritual. Advocacy Advocacy. Let's look at resources. There are grants that are available, sponsorships that are available, donation opportunities that are available but how many Deaf business entities are there who are owned and operated by Deaf people nationally? It's a big question. Research needs to be done about that but we believe there are approximately 3,000 businesses. But how many are theater based? Little to none. So we have to look at our ecosystem. Let's look at the ecosystem to see how many grants or funds are available to be contributed toward very specific businesses. How many business entities are available to do these contributions? How many banks are involved in those? How can we expedite the process to make those connections? Convo as an example is a nationwide service and we do want to sponsor entities but there are so many opportunities in entities to sponsor. How can we do some things in a sustainable way that is a larger, wider impact? If there was an affiliate organization designed or set up with the commitment to engage very specific partners that partner with Deaf companies that reflect the demographic that we had spoken of before, the 3,000 plus entities that are out there to be kind of a senate of sort of collaborators. To magnify the impact and make it more sustainable whether it be in hospitality services or other kind of direct practitioner professional service provisions there should be some kind of reciprocity again from Deaf-based organizations. Now we don't have to limit it to but limit it, expend the opportunities to make them available to entities beyond our Deaf ecosystem but the resources are to be used within our Deaf ecosystem. Advocacy. That group. Come on up. To build knowledge and awareness of who we are as a Deaf community we would also provide programs such as workshops and theater database and provide educational opportunities, mentorships. But like I said, the only way we can do this is if we do it together. BFA, MFA degree programs. Come on up. Andrew speaking. A few things to add to clarify our ritual. We want to focus in on not just high school students or the elementary age program but to expand it toward an academic space as well. We want to partner with VR programs. There lacks support generally in that area for the arts and we want to see students encouraged to pursue the arts through VR as well as additional sponsorships. And now it's time for our ritual. BFA, MFA. A, program development. Scholarship development. Build, build, build. Recruit, support. Take down Deaf barriers. Deaf power. Alexandria here. Some clarification is being asked for. One moment please. Michelle and Nikki, did you want to come up and talk about the retreat? The writer's retreat? So a few things to talk about. We need a location space, some geographic space is needed and no iPhones, devices are allowed. It must be a completely unplugged environment with low tech, high touch kind of materials around. Sustenance should be provided so that we can keep on moving and keep on working. Literally feed ourselves, defuel ourselves. Chefs that are Deaf would be hired to sustain us and we would like to see sponsorship by Deaf owned businesses. Specifically you Convo. We're specifically talking to you to support us, inspire us and archive the process in some kind of a media format so that it could be broadcast to the larger audience at some festival, some other recognizing entity. Oh and that's a good thought over there. Right, right, right, right, right. Getting back to the play writer's work. You're keeping me on target. We have new work. Regardless of whether or not we have a Deaf theater company to produce this work or not it doesn't matter. It's a new work and that's what's needed. Robert with the NTTS group. NDTS. Okay, let's go ahead. NDTS. That's it, short and sweet. NDTS. Just a final comment about our group. Deaf space design is also a key element of this. We would like to see a true Deaf space that we know this is new terminology. This is something that rarely exists. We have Deaf people walking on Earth means we have Deaf space and we can leverage that we know what it is in our gut but we need to create something physical to share it with the world. And we can either continue to be unrepresented or we can speak out and be represented. And it's not just... I just want to eliminate the need for the term Deaf space. Deaf actor, Deaf writer. And that it's an organic commonplace. And lastly, the activism group. EJ, do you have anything to add? Fred will be speaking for that group. Again people, your hands and my hands become our hands. Your hands and my hands become our hands. The message that we're trying to get across here is that yes, there are so many barriers and so many issues out there about ad nauseam, yes. However, with all those things in mind we can open doors to let in the crowd of Deaf people and other allies who want to be educated about us, what we're doing here. That's fundamental. That's fundamental activism 101. Working with the core group, the media, working with the community doesn't have to be a shouting match or a poster carrying event. Activism happens daily. Yeah, so when we speak about creating a space for DeafBlind Theatre I'd like to have them have an opportunity for Yasha and Jasper to speak and say something. Okay, they're going to have three minutes to explain what they envision in terms of what they're going to do in three years, five years, and fifty years. One year. Okay, the stage is yours. Hello everyone. Obviously we're all tired, aren't we? Yes, we are. I'm exhausted. There's so much information, so much to think about. There's been a lot going on. You know? You know, especially in DeafBlind Theatre, business, all these things. We're still new. We're in our infancy when we come to DeafBlind Theatre ourselves. And what we've seen from what you people are doing, we're learning so much, and we're partnering. And that's so great. As a foundation, I want to thank all of you for your unity and the things that you have shared this weekend with us. And your patience. And we are envisioning a path of where we're going in the next few years. Why don't you take it away, Yasha? I envision a future with more collaboration with a wider range of people who have the opportunity to share their story, their community, their experience in a space that is kind and caring where everyone is valued. And we can participate together equally. There's so much opportunity to continue to build what we started. Making more films and creating more work together. And also, if you happen to think of something, you know, why you're in your own line of work, training, or whatever it is, always keep in mind, you know, think about all disabilities, not just a specific disability, but how it applies to everything and applicable to the DeafBlind. We are a resource here, we are a resource for our heroes and resources ourselves. These are skills that we all have. You may not have all the skills, but we're all working together, looking for a journey to find how we can involve more DeafBlind actors. We are here to, you know, provide that support to you as well in your endeavors. And so I'm looking forward for one individual. Who was it that we were saying? The guy with the beard from Chicago? He was very informative, too. He looked to us specifically for specific resources. There are DeafBlind actors, writers, designers. We're out there, too. Keep in mind, opportunities need to be developed for DeafBlind people, too. We want opportunities for training and roles and involvement. And I'm really sad that this three-day endeavor is coming to an end. Yes, we've learned so much. We feel you. We're still excited to continue learning and to remind you to include DeafBlind actors in all areas in your work going forward after you leave here today. And now I'm looking forward to seeing the different space makers, the space creators for people of color. Thank you so much. My heart, you have touched my heart. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for that synthesis of so much work. We're going to have a 10-minute break. That's not 10 minutes plus 5 seconds. No. No extra seconds. A true 10 minutes. Then we're going to be wrapping up for the day at noon. It's 10.25 right now. Time is drawing near. So a true 10-minute break. That means come back at 10.35 on the dot, ready to work. And we will detail what's happening next. So grab some coffee, a little to eat, and be back on time. And you can just sit wherever you need to sit.