 We're going to begin our panel discussion so you can move closer if you'd like. That's not just, that's the last speaker. That's the last speaker. Hello everybody. I'm Bruce Allardyce, managing director of Ping Chong and Company, and a member of the board of directors of the Network of Ensemble Theatres. Looking forward to talking to you today about some of the work that all of us here have been doing. Each of these artists and academics, scholars, have had relationships with Ping Chong Company over the years, as well as incredible work that they've done on their own, and we're going to try to get to all of that. First, I want to just say this has been an incredible symposium weekend here, and I want to thank the new school for hosting this. Amazing, amazing. And so, let's get started. So, starting on the far side is my dear friend and colleague, Michael Rode, who you've heard enough about. This is Stephen Hitt, who is the managing director of LaGuardia Performing Arts Center at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens. An incredible part of the CUNY system, where we've worked with him on, we worked on one project five or six years ago, and our working Ping Chong Company is working on a new project, which we'll talk about. This is Yuko Korohashi, who is a professor at Kent State University, and was one of our, was our academic partner on the Blindness Project, which Michael co-wrote and co-directed with Ping Chong. And she is also one of, she's also a leading scholar on the Ping Chong Company's undesirable elements series. So, I'm going to start by telling you a little bit about Ping Chong and Company. So, Ping Chong Company's 42 years old was founded by Ping Chong. We're an ensemble of, we create work in an ensemble process. Ping is one of our, is our principal artist, was our founder principal artist. We also work, Sarah, we also support the work of Sarah Zatz and my company, Talvin Wilkes, in the past with Michael Road and others. The, I would say the thing that most defines Ping Chong Company organizationally is that we do not have a theater of our own. Therefore, everything that we do at one level or another is a partnership or is, involves making a connection with another organization. The, and the work that we do is incredibly varied and it, there's two major streams of activity. The creation of interdisciplinary performance works and these can range from large-scale puppetry works to dance performances to multi-media productions. And then the other is our community-engaged social justice oral history project, the undesirable elements, which is where we go into a community, we work with those, we identify people in that community, speaking who and interview them and put their stories on stage told by them themselves. And we've done this for places in productions all over the country. So one of the things that we do, what this means, and I was very inspired by Liz Lerman to talk about going from this to this, we've been in this state for a very long time because in any given year we could be working at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival or and at, and at La Mama, and at a university, Syracuse University for instance, and at a community center in the Bronx. And we try to bring the same artistic rigor to each of those organizations with the understanding that the resources frankly are very different. But the artistic intention, the artistry, we try to bring to each of those projects. So I want to talk, show you some examples of some productions that we've done that have roots in, that have been done through working with universities. And the first one I'm going to start with is Truth and Beauty, which actually was Michael Rode was one of the principal instigators of that project. And we met him when Ping was teaching a workshop at the co-festival. And Michael and Jeff Rose, another actor, presented 10 minutes of material and Ping was inspired to ask them if they'd be interested in continuing to develop that work. Can I just say so short, just like, so we take a workshop with Ping Chong and at the end of the week he comes up to us and says, I'm really interested in what you did. Would you like to work more with me on the material? We were like, sure. Yes, please. And then figured we'd never hear from him again. But we did hear from Bruce. Yes. You heard from me, but Michael was with Virginia Tech and they invited us in and really made the production happen. So Truth and Beauty is really about an investigation of kind of the dark soul of America influenced by media advertising, gun violence and tracking through this story as a... It was sort of inspired by Columbine, happened prior to the horrific gun violence that's beset Virginia Tech a couple of times since. And the piece also... We made the piece at Virginia Tech with designers from Virginia Tech, Randy Ward. Randy Ward became one of our principal designers moving forward, doing productions with us all over the world really. So let's move on to blindness. And blindness was a piece that we made at Kent State University and it was a kind of... There's a funny kind of story about that. We were the first of the Roe Green visiting fellows, visiting director at Kent State University. And Roe, who we didn't know at all, but apparently she heard Pink talk at some place at Seattle Rep or something and they asked, you know, well, thank you for this wonderful, you know, bestowing this directing chair. Who would you like? And said, well, I don't know any directors, but there was this nice man I saw in Seattle. So they invited us. And one of the things I want to say about when we... When the Pink Chon Company works in universities, it's very important for Pink that we work in stories that have resonate academically. They resonate historically that they're educational in some way. And blindness is about the colonial exploitation of the Belgian Congos at the hands of King Leopold. And it combined elements from... It combined elements from Heart of Darkness, which was performed on a puppetry track, Shadow of Puppetries, and live actors. We brought in, for that production, which Michael was involved in, you can see him there. It's a funny mustache. We brought in, I think, four professional actors, some from Sojourn, some from that we knew. And again, Randy Ward from Virginia Tech came in to do the design and worked with Kent State actors and student designers. And I think that at the... And it was a large show. I think that over 50... These are two performers who were at Kent State. I think that when we... I think that over 60 people in the university community worked on that production. And then we were able to, through circumstances, allowed us to bring that entire production from Kent State to La Mama and perform that for three weeks in the Ellen Stewart Theater, which was an experience that was, well, transformative for these young kids from Ohio. So the next project that I'd like to talk about is Cocktail. And Cocktail was... That piece is about the international pharmaceutical industry and AIDS treatment. It was about a Thai chemist, a person that we met interviewed Dr. Kishantu, who developed a low-cost AIDS treatment regimen for an ingratitude for her work was kicked out of... Essentially kicked out of Thailand and is now doing this work around. And we made this piece at Louisiana State University. We brought some actors from New York and again worked with many, many students on that production at multiple levels and worked with both student designers and staff designers at Louisiana State. And one of the things that I've learned from working in universities, one of the ways to get them engaged in your work is to create creative experiences for the professional staff because that's what we're all looking for and what sometimes rarely happens. Sometimes it seems like that doesn't happen in university situations. So that was Cocktail, which we did at the Swine Palace. This is a very different kind of engagement with the university. The cry for pieces of performance from the undesirable elements series. We were asked by the Office of Arts Engagement at Syracuse University if we would work with the community of Congolese refugees who had been relocated to Syracuse. These were people who came from East Congo. They had been all experienced the terrible, ongoing violence war there, mineral war there. And they were from different ethnic groups and tribes. Some of them had been child soldiers. Some had been conscripted into sexual servitude to the child armies. And in Syracuse, they were trying to heal their community. And it was a complete honor to be asked to come and work with this group to create a piece that they could use and take to their community and to other Congolese communities around the country. And I have to give a shout out to Nancy Cantor, who was the dean or president of Syracuse University for making that possible as part. And her vision of that university at that time was to connect the experience of the student to the community, to the world. And she saw that in this project, the possibility of doing that, this piece we also took ultimately to Georgetown University and to LaMama for performances. And they are performing this piece still on their own. And if any of you know Georgetown University and Syracuse, you know that they're rivals, the basketball rivals. So when we brought the piece to Georgetown, that was actually a harder negotiation with the alumni offices. And to get that project done than anything we had to do with the Congolese community. So that piece, which this piece, no, the Congolese piece, we developed that over three years being in multiple trips to Syracuse. So now, Inside Out, Inside Out is our undesired relevance production featuring the stories of people with a variety of disabilities. And we actually, we started that production and went to an organization called VSA Arts Disability Arts and asked to work with them to develop this because Ping was interested in this subject. And after a long time, they said, yes, you should do it, but we need it to happen at the Kennedy Center, first performance at the Kennedy Center and you have to do it, make it in New York. And my rehearsals facilities are not accessible. I'm ashamed to say they're not really accessible. So, which began us looking for rehearsal facilities and meeting Stephen Hitt, who came and made LaGuardia Community College available to us to rehearse the show. It was an ideal situation because it was accessible and it was familiar to accessoride and all of the various other things. Let's go on. So then this is a project that we're working on now with Stephen. Flash forward a number of years and we're working with Stephen on a project called Beyond Sacred which will be looking at the differences of culture and historical experience of Muslims in New York City. And these are images that are from our recruiting effort which is underway now, which we're doing in a multiple ways including outreach to community groups and we were in Flushing Town Hall last week at LaGuardia and this piece will premiere in April 2015. It's not cast yet, so if you know anyone please that are interested to contact us on the information on our website. And then I just wanted to just show you something that we're working on now which actually premieres Friday at University of Maryland which is a piece of the pings doing that's really inspired, it's called Kaleidoscope Adventures in Pre- and Post-Racial America and it's inspired by the events, by our anger over the events of the murder of Trayvon Martin and the violence directed at African-Americans, Native Americans, Chinese Americans, all of us and he and Talvin Wilkes are working with the students there to, what they've done is gathered text, archival texts from the kind of long history of race in America which they're collaging, some of them are being done verbatim, some of them are being used as launching points for improvisations, some are being, they've written some material inspired by their own things and this piece is all working with the designer with student designers and I have to say we're just not out by these young designers they're doing an incredible job, these are early drafts and that's the, one of the dilemmas we had with this project was we didn't actually, Ping and Talvin didn't write the script until the summer but they already needed to be in production the shop needed to be building so the first part was an engagement really with design so those are some theater productions that we have done in terms of universities, we also have an ongoing training program which brings us to universities regularly later this year we're going to be at Meshaw State College in Georgia and an ongoing relation with Amherst College which provides us kind of space for our training, some training labs that we do occasionally, annually or semi-annually so that's pretty much how we have done, the question is really why does the Ping-Chong company want to work in universities and there are multiple reasons one is to be totally candid is financial that there is resources available to support us that is greatly appreciated but the other is also that Ping finds that there are subjects that he can't explore really in the American theater outside of their academic situation like about the Belgian, the exploitation of the Belgian Congo like about the AIDS drug, pharmaceutical industry and AIDS and there's resources to be able to create productions at a certain kind of scale that isn't always available it's hard for us to achieve on our own so that's the kind of 10-minute Ping-Chong story and I'll call him when we get off today that usually means I should call no no, he said it's really going well that means he's had a good time it doesn't necessarily mean the show is going anywhere he's had a great time on this project we'll say that so I'm going to introduce now Yuko Korohashi and she actually, and I didn't know this until this panel started she made a documentary on the blindness project and we're going to show you an excerpt of it but you start this is a wonderful symposium I just can't find words I was stunned by the artist's dedication and contributions to develop the bridges, many bridges between them, other artists and universities and other educational venues and we need to continue this kind of dialogue that said when Bruce invited me to this panel well, sure, 10 years ago, sure but I have this documentary film I made would you like to sit, you know and then I didn't know they would like it and one of the reasons I never shared this beyond the Kent State University and my students were a little bit shy about my documentary film because I never made a film and I had no idea what I was doing I was a drama tog I was a researcher I was a teacher and I'm still a teacher at Kent State so I was helping students helping my girlfriend Bruce and that was my primary role while doing that well, maybe someday I will make a film that's what I have so I had some challenges I didn't plan to make a documentary film correctly so I didn't have enough footage for some scenes so kind of compensated by using rehearsal or the audition scenes kind of compensated that way but amazingly it captured how we got there from the beginning to the result and especially the students I think that the responses were very, very valuable to be documented and my film is actually 19 minutes so Bruce asked me could you re-edit it to down to maybe four to five sure and I did it three days ago so that's what I'm going to show you by Leopold II of Belgium prior to the rehearsal period the cast and crew were given a chance to conduct their own research and to discuss the play and its historical complexity in a two month workshop conducted by Professors Charles Ritchie and Yuko Kurohashi to investigate the historical background to blindness Professor Chris McVeigh from the Pan-African department also participated in the workshop and provided the students with insight into Afrocentric and Eurocentric views of the world the script for the play was not completed when rehearsals began it was created as the actors rehearsed the stage manager Courtney Golden videotaped improvisational scenes during the rehearsals and then transcribed the materials the movements used by the actors playing the force publique were also not choreographed prior to the beginning of rehearsals were created based on movements developed by the students during the rehearsal process and that's actually one of the best parts of this whole process is that we all created these things and they kind of got whatever they liked and so half of the rifle piece is stuff that I created and that's on stage now and that's so neat to watch and so artistically fulfilling in the force publique it was very hard for me to get out of the ballet mode and stop being pretty I think the difficult parts for me as well as for a lot of other people were learning things and then having them be cut and learning things and having them be cut and watch your character get smaller and smaller and smaller I think one of the newest discoveries is that you can go into a project with great minds without a script and keeping the confidence and the focus together so creating the script I was really scared at the beginning because I thought it was just going to be okay you're on stage now go ahead improv do whatever I learned that I need to work with an actual script it's a different process that has I'm one of the chorus members you know force publique and I also am one of the boom rock cool puppeteers I think the biggest challenge was the fact that there was no script and we had to go up there and do a lot of improv my improv is okay but not excellent so the improv part of it like playing characters that we didn't have any script for just based off the books that we were in when this production started when I first found out I was going to be in it I was terrified and Michael was like you know Grace like what's wrong and I kind of told him no he said Grace you need to leave that thought behind right now and I'm asking you to leave that here today it's not so much a psychological approach to character in rehearsal that happens my own work it's more about movement patterns and rhythm of a character in the context of a scene and then also layer on the context of the play Kim Cox props master explains how she created a tree of mutilated hands and a whipped African for the floats these are fake hands that were purchased at Mr. Jones and some of the message sleeves on them and we ripped them off and put the inside the batting on the inside to make the kind of really nasty part trying to harden it now so we can paint it and one's the smaller guy right now we're using wood for the arms and legs and this articulates this goes and actually kind of gives the impression of whipping on the back wall the following words are projected the tragedy of the Congo is its embarrassment of riches coltan is a mineral used in cell phones and laptops around the world the Congo is rich in coltan war and poverty keep today's Congo and chaos chaos keeps coltan cheap on the world market at this very moment coltan is making its way from the Congo to your home and mine to my co-presenter today fortunate to have this donor supporter Ms. Roguin my name is Steven Hitt I am the artistic director of LaGuardia Performing Arts Center at LaGuardia yes, yes and so that enabled us to work with different directors and that once a year and I think this is going to continue another 10 years and more from this conference symposium I learned the importance of doing the service as an ambassador in a small capacity at a small level not going to be maybe the big director of the series I cannot invite the people like you but I can certainly talk to the different area heads or area faculty members and artists in my department to work or come up with some idea to do some small scale workshop blindness was a big so it's coming up with this scale project is a lot of needs a lot of preparation however if each of us becomes an ambassador to make some smaller workshops and projects happen to build and develop a bridge between universities and theater companies that will be just that will help the next generation current generation and all kinds of artists and students in the future. Thank you. One thing I think that was so interesting and so important about the blindness project was the academic component that was built in advance so that there was a real grounding on the material that we would explore on stage there was a real grounding of that in the academic community ahead of time Professor Kurahash took was one of the leaders of that I know that Michael and Ping also participated in that and that class was also became I believe became part of the funding structure for the production which was had provided academic credit which academic credit has monetary meaning in universities and so that they were able to justify putting more resources because as she says that it was a very large production that the students came out of this work with particular academic credit and for participating in this project Michael do you want to add anything about that experience that you wrote it in the morning and rehearsed it at night? No I think you covered it I mean I would say I guess one thing I would add is I'd highlight what an important project I think it was for Ping that it was a subject matter that I was wanting to tackle at a large scale for years and it was really hard to find the resources and context I think to tackle it at that scale and the relationship with Kent State allowed him to do the research devote the time spend the time on the ground find a way to get it to Lamama his frequent home here so I mean I know he describes it as a transformative project for him as an artist in terms of content and the kind of work he was doing and the opportunity So Steven Hi Do you want to introduce your the video? Sure I think even before I go into the video I'll tell you a little bit about the Performing Arts Center itself and how we work a few years ago I was fortunate enough to stumble upon the best job in the world and came into a college that was looking for a director for Performing Arts Center and so I run the professional theater within a college within a university and the first thing that I did was come in there and the president of the college said I want you to create an actually known Performing Arts Center and you have my full support you just don't have any money The incredible gift that we do have though is I have a staff that's paid for through the City University of New York and space that's paid for by the City University of New York so I have amazing resources around there but not being able to hire artists and the first thing I did was work with my assistant director who came out of the Lincoln Center Director's Lab I came out of the Broadway world and the concert dance world and we all started calling at a theater do you want to play and so we started a program where works were created and made there on our campus and then moved out into the world and that's when we first started working with Ping and he came in and did inside outside inside out and so that was an amazing thing because the Gordy Performing Arts Center didn't have a name the area didn't have a name but we were able to work with artists that did have names put them in and give them the space to create work and then our name traveled to the Kennedy Center to start moving our name out into the world as well so it really was a marketing piece as much as it was a way to start making work and developing it around there and it suddenly realized that this was an important mission for us within the City of New York because the most expensive part of making art in the City of New York is the space to do it the City of New York University CUNY owns more theaters than the Schubert's and there are 24 campuses each of us have one, two, three theaters on each campus so there's a lot of space there and we also each of us have our own egos so we can't all work together in doing this but I believe for myself that I was a Broadway performer I was very lucky I made a lot of money doing that it was something that I burned out on because it didn't get me a chance to have my own voice and more and more what I watch happening in the Broadway world right now is star vehicles that are very, very expensive and revivals of old works because people can't afford to take chances on new work that's being written and made right here in the City so the off-Broadway houses are now having to do what the Broadway houses were doing when I came here 30 years ago so I think our responsibility in the off-off Broadway houses is to provide the space to make work we'll invite an artist and at this point and they might be there for two years writing a script, choreographing a piece trying it out, coming back workshopping it, developing it and then we get it to the point of where we'll produce it and then try and move it where you have two right now that are ones moving to New York Theatre Workshop and the other ones moving to Drama League at the same time I have a facility where I can make my own work what I didn't anticipate coming in here also was a wealth of within the student body of the college there and people who had amazing stories but didn't necessarily know how to tell them so we started working a lot with the idea of combining professional actors and organizations who had the skill to tell story and working with the students who were learning how to tell their own stories and they started teaching each other and that's part of what you'll see in this piece coming up here called Unpacking Home and I think I'll show that and then we'll go from there My name is Steven Hitt I am the artistic director of the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center at LaGuardia Community College The idea for social justice is an important aspect of the Performing Arts Center Stand up stretch, shake out job take everything out now sit back down through this entire process we're going to be transforming ourselves into volunteers we're going to be amazing people another six weeks when we finish this whole piece I think art particularly theater is a powerful tool for change in society started off as a Broadway musical theater dancer to entertain people in a way to help them escape and then I think I became more socially aware of issues that were going on in the world and how powerful theater could be used to tell a story that's how it remained you got to do what you got to do the picture in theater is still because we're still doing the shows from the 1950s it's still that 1950s America so it's the responsibility I think of those of us who are running the awful Broadway theaters and training the students to find work, make work reflects the reality of what our population is and also teach people skills that will help them make their own work and take their own voice out into the community and out into the world so if I can do that with a piece like this I'm kind of packing it home and then start a conversation that goes beyond that it's a great gift that we can provide to the city twice the love and twice the vibe they're not hearing you over here I'm not a larger scale I invite you to live with these questions to see yourself through our exploration of what it would feel like to be without LaGuardia and LaGuardia is in sure we're probably in the most diverse community in the entire world and our student body is made up of students from 190 different countries they speak 119 different languages and that's not just one or two people but it's like walking through the halls of the UN when I first got there it was just amazing that this sound and language that was floating around me and to our students it's just the people they hang out with they grew up with many of them are immigrants majority of them are first generation going to college even completing a high school GED getting a high school degree and coming to college there if any of you are familiar with Queens the 7 train that runs through there is LaGuardia we have 18,000 full-time students we have 50,000 adult and continued education students going through there we just started a theater major two years ago and have just a little over 100 majors there and I I produce along with the professional shows the student shows and work very closely with the academic side and then teach as an adjunct on the academic side as well as being the director of the performing arts center so I'm around a bunch of kids that give me energy and give me life every single day because they inspire me because their stories are amazing when we did this project unpacking home and we started talking about homelessness the idea was that we would get a group of students together because part of the mission of the college is to create socially responsible students and citizens of the world so we thought we're going to have students volunteering in shelter systems working in the shelters and then devising work based on their experiences around that our very first meeting one student after another started saying well when my family was in the system when my family was homeless and you started discovering the richness of their own stories that were right there in the room with them combined with I had four actors who had recently graduated from NYU who had impeccable skills but were sitting there saying why do you have me here what am I supposed to do but as they started growing and learning and teaching each other it was an amazing thing to watch it was quite beautiful and four of us facilitated this dialogue to say there was not one director on the project itself we took the students through a simulated homeless situation not knowing at the time when we put this together how many of them had actually lived that already but it was a way of getting them involved in it to the point of we were down by Trinity Church Wall Street to help post this for us in their facility so we were outside the church which is right by the World Trade Centers with a lot of tourists going through and one of the first things I remember is having students out on the street and they were panhandling and they were singing and this one man was walking by his wife and said God there are a lot of homeless kids around here but it was a fascinating project and it's a model that we want to keep working with we're spending this year now looking at Muslim identity we have a large Muslim population within the the college itself and within the community finding them and getting them on stage to tell story it's been an interesting adventure so far we're working right now with Max with the theater pressed NYC to develop a community forum that will be launching in this next week and we're taking the dialogue out into the community to talk about it bringing it back on the campus into academic panels and then looking at it through another performing arts piece so we're using the lens of the performing arts as a way to have a discussion about Muslim identity and the stereotypes that we carry about the people who practice Islam so it's so far been a fascinating year and we'll culminate the season with Ping's work coming up Yes and I just want to say that the Beyond Sacred project is the whole project at LaGuardia is being supported by the Building Bridges program of the through arts presenters through with the support of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Doris Duke Foundation and the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art and the two of them Yes, absolutely thanks to all of them but I think it's an incredible testament to, does anyone that work with arts presenters know that that represents when LaGuardia got this grant they were competing with the largest university arts presenters in the country for this an incredible testimony to what Stephen has accomplished in how many years? Six Six years so I think that we should hear more from Michael Rowe I want to hear more from you I'll be really quick what do you think, 10 minutes because I want to make sure we get to it so I'm going to do like a thumbnail 10 and then let's do some conversation I'm going to put this on my timer so I will make sure they don't go too long Wow, you've done this before, huh? I don't know so my company Sojourn Theater which I talked about a little earlier has done a lot of work with universities over the years and I just thought I would give a small snapshot of one particular project so the context is actually I need to say before I say that it always bears mentioning being at a panel that is in conversation with Ping Chong and company and Ping and Bruce what an important organization has been globally and nationally and certainly here in New York for young artists for generations but in university settings and out of university settings to learn about a particular kind of rigorous adventurous art making alongside really meaningful social justice values so I'm really lucky that I got to know Ping as a mentor and eventually a friend starting in the late 90s but there's just many of us I'm sure some in this room and lots and lots out there will go to the work of Ping and Bruce and everyone at the organization so I just want to make sure that gets said in this session so thank you to Ping and Bruce Sojourn Theater I teach at Northwestern University and it's really actually great to be in conversation with the project you just described as you described having the situation where you wanted to do this piece and you thought okay we'll go out and do volunteer work and research the students that we're working with bring in some experiences so I had a very kind of funny counter experience sort of which was that the theater department where I teach several years ago said we're going to do a themed season next year on our main stage we're going to do a season about poverty and they never had a devised show on the main stage I've been teaching there since 07-08 and they said oh we'd love you to do a piece for next season and I said I think I might be able to do that schedule wise but what are your thoughts and they said well we figured you could devise something where the students go out and talk to people learn stuff about poverty and then perform their stories and so in my head I'm like okay but we're in an institution of privilege right working not entirely but majority with students who come from experiences and backgrounds of privilege I'm not sure that proposal is the best idea for the main stage season for the subscription audience at this particular theater nor sort of ethically for the student population or for lots of reasons you know where I'm going so I said that doesn't sound like a great idea can I pitch you a different idea and they said okay so I came back a little while later and I said I would like to pitch an idea that as opposed to being a representation of the poverty of others is actually inviting audiences into a conversation about poverty in our communities and the way I'd like to do that I brought in the title how to end poverty in 90 minutes with 199 people you may or may not know I think what's the next image okay that's an image from the show itself anyway what we did was I got the school oh no let's keep the I'll be able to talk for a minute thanks I got the school to say that they would commit a significant portion of the box office of every performance to basically a glass bowl of money that would sit on stage for every performance at least $1,000 a show and I proposed to them that the plot of the show is the audience of 200 people having to decide in 90 minutes how to attack poverty in their local community with that $1,000 and at the end of the show that $1,000 will be spent in the way that this audience has collectively decided it should be spent and that's what we did we did 12 performances and we gave away $12,000 but more important than the money for me is that we used theater to activate a space of discourse and what I'm going to do in like a minute or two right now is just describe for you the process in the university context that made that possible in a sort of nuts and bolts way which was once the school committed to it I cast the show with and it was a collaboration with my company Sojourn I cast the show with 18 undergraduate performers more than a year before the show was to go up which is very unusual at least there normally you would cast a quarter or two ahead of time but I said the only way this can work is if we cast early I give summer assignments and then I get to teach a fall course around the issues of the show not concerned with making the piece theatrically but we need to learn we need to invite community experts in to become partners on the project we need to be in conversation with them and we need to develop the facilitation tactics that are going to allow us to create a satisfying piece of theatre a safe piece of theatre but not always a comfortable piece of theatre So fall of 2012 we had a we do quarters not semesters we had ten weeks the course was like 30 people students, faculty members including hilariously Todd Rosenthal Todd Rosenthal is kind of one of the he's like a schmancy scenic designer like Broadway, London, all over the world and we've been looking for a way to work together and I can't really afford Todd but he was like I want to do that so Todd is like working with the students really engaging in this material and in the design of the show alongside a collaborator and then company members from Sojourner also coming in and working on it we do the course, we partner with departments of sociology, economics business, education social change, community engagement all these partners on campus we also partner with shelters and social service agencies in Chicago as well as Evanston we have people from the city of Chicago the city of Evanston, just all these really interesting conversations that we're hosting as a part of developing the project and then we get to the end of the fall and everybody feels a little more grounded in sort of at least how to have a conversation that is not a naive conversation about poverty and race and class and city and suburban and rural and that was really like that was, we couldn't have done the show in a responsible way without those 10 weeks and that was just tremendously exciting oh yeah, that's Kira so go back one slide if you could please so this is a moment I wanted to show, so then we rehearsed it for seven weeks including tech we put a show up I want to say though, in the rehearsal process not only did we build the show but two two people, two student assistants full time job on the project was what we'll call audience design meant for four months and this is something Sojourn does for every project we were not going to like market the show and hope an audience comes that was interesting because what we like to say is if a show involves dialogue within the dramaturgy of the piece if you leave the complexity of the audience to chance it is as if you are casting a mediocre Willy Loman right? you need a nuanced sophisticated awesome virtuosic Willy Loman to bring the drama and humanity of that piece to life if you have a show based on dialogue you better have complex humanity in the room meaning let's not have a diverse audience yes, let's have a complex audience that represents ideological diversity generational diversity, life experience diversity cultural, generate all these things so we dedicated as much energy to a complex audience as we did to making the material every night of rehearsal a portion of the acting company in the show would get sent off with the assistants and they would spend that rehearsal online on the phone meeting with people partnerships all over the area so that literally 25% of the 200 seats at every performance had to be filled with human beings that would help complexify the audience that otherwise might be a suburban North Shore or Chicago theater going audience and that was really important to us and was fairly successful and as we've done the show in other places which I'll briefly talk about, that continues anyway, we made the show and it's a combination of sort of epic events and then next slide please this kind of moment where the audience is broken up into 10 groups of 20 and this is a this is a 500 seat, maybe there have been to use the Barber Theater, it's a 500 seat sort of thrust theater but we only sat 200 people in it and they're split in different spots around the theater so that there's a performer that is the host of each group so that the show is basically like 65% performative, you're witnessing and 35% exchange dialogical and you're participating and the performers are literally like jumping in and out between like I'm in a scene, monologue, I'm singing I've got this movement thing, I'm right with you guys and we're talking right now and we have to figure this thing out and we have 5 minutes to look at these 5 things and figure out which one feels most interesting to us and which one feels like not where we want to put our focus so these were the 5 approaches that eventually the audience was voting on and at every performance there were organizations that had self-defined as falling under one of those approaches in the Chicago area and when the audience finally did their vote at the end of the show whichever one they chose from there was an envelope under the stage that every night had different organizations on it and nobody knew except one assistant who did this, an actor would pull out the envelope after the big vote she'd say tonight it's making opportunities and that is and they'd read the name of the organization and usually people from the 5 organizations were in the house sometimes they'd get the money or the money would get written into a check and sent to that organization the next day if no one was there so the idea was move from public discourse into action in a symbolic way but also in a real way, for many of these organizations a thousand dollars is not actually a small thing for a small not for profit doing the work they're doing so it was the stakes, the stakes were that decision which the dramaturgy had to sort of build up and help kind of accumulate over those minutes that we had together next picture please so also Louisiana State University brought us in because Sojourn had such a great time on this project that we wanted to keep exploring it so we sort of just kind of put the word out a little bit and Louisiana State University reached out to us and we ended up with the template of the show which is a score and a structure of facilitation and an intentionality as Morgan said earlier that now goes and gets remade in locally specific ways and we did it with LSU and that is Jack who's a public defender in Baton Rouge who in this moment is a cameo expert amidst the action of the show there's four slots for cameo experts from community members during the show he's being asked a very difficult question he was awesome you see a performer host up there who's asking him a question that comes from an audience that was written anonymously earlier in the event of the show so as a result of kind of us figuring out this score in university settings the show will open at its first regional theater in Portland this winter Portland Playhouse where we'll do like 22 performances and give away $22,000 in the Portland area and then it goes straight to Montana to a performing arts center where we'll give away $5,000 over a few days and then it's gonna go probably to Vanderbilt University in Tennessee after that next year so I am really interested right now as one part of Sojourn's work not all of it but one part of it how are we building templates that have an aesthetic and engagement and process rigor but also have the space to be remade locally while maintaining their shape and while maintaining sort of the the dramaturgy and intentionality that we bring to it so there's portions of it that remain the same at every place including the soundtrack which is gorgeous by a pretty big Chicago composer sound designer named Rick Sims and there's a facilitation kind of track but some of the material will get kind of made locally my friend Nick Sly from New Orleans saw the Baton Rouge version back in February and he's luckily not shouting something terrible about it he's nodding nicely, which is nice it was very, that's right talk to Nick after the session and I'll just stop there that's how to empower 90 minutes and that's a project Sojourn's working on you guys should, yeah back up so we're going to I think open this up now, we have about how much time do we have? 20 minutes? so let's open it up for questions yes hold on, do we need mics here? why don't you pass it back to me and I'll run around with this I have a question for Steve and I'm interested to know whether the president who said you have my full support at the beginning is still saying the same thing after the work that you have been doing and whether that work has been in that president's kind of whether that president thought that was the direction you were going to take I don't think she thought that was the direction I was going to take when she first hired me and brought me in there because I didn't know that it was the direction I was going to take my vision and my own artistic belief systems I think have changed a lot this changed me even more so but I will say when I got this grant from and came to her and said we have this large grant to look at my identity through the arts she said well you know six years ago you told me you were going to do this and I said yeah go do it and kind of laughed but you're actually doing it so she's very she's very very supportive of her faculty and her staff and that's a gift that I have that I pray daily that she doesn't retire and so I think she's been a great supporter yes well what we tend to say is if you're having a conversation about an issue who would normally come to your venue your setting just because they come and who would you really want to be in the conversation to have it be a surprising intense and productive conversation so in the case of this project we might say well we need to make sure there are people with lived experience of poverty not just people who've read about in the newspaper or never think about it we need to make sure there are people who've worked around it and have expertise so that we're challenging stereotypes and assumptions am I getting out what you're asking it's a great question some projects we've done focus on those settings this one we did invite them but that wasn't the focus that the university was interested in it wasn't the focus we were interested in the first time because the feeling was often when you get them in those settings at first if you're not constructing it specifically to disarm them you're dealing with their sound bite and they're sort of I'm on stage presence so we were a lot more interested in the short answer is we didn't focus on them for this project we did in Louisiana and they were there and that was really interesting it was a more intimate space we won't in Portland we probably will in Montana it depends on the context I think so if it's a university context if it's a university context it's student focused students as the core ensemble and if it's a professional regional theater as it is in Portland it's sojourn cast so it sort of depends on the venue and the interest of the students calling on people does that mean practically put the word out like when you said you wanted to sort of spread the word about the project do you did you target certain colleges are there places you have relationships with I'm just actually just curious literally like what you sent them and how you were able to introduce the project yeah it literally so far it was like I'm posting just saying to a couple of friends at conferences this is what's happening we do not have the infrastructure as we are to do a push so we've been working on like honestly it's one of the reasons that I talk about it here is because maybe somebody will go yeah we should do that sometime so this is what I mean by putting the word out I was wondering how are you hello are you creating this reproducible structure is this something you're originating yourself are you basing it on like practitioners like Bowell or Arvind Singhal and stuff like that where is the structure it's us I mean certainly I'm influenced by Bowell always just because he was a mentor but like no it's an original structure and an original dramaturgy well a lot of them come from his interests but a lot of them also develop out of dialogue with with potential partners our organizations now the for instance cocktail which was we did at Louisiana State that was a that was that project was generated by a collaboration with a biochemist playwright who is there who we've worked with many years before at the University of Minnesota and Ping and he dialogued about it was kind of a well why don't we do a project about science it started there and they talked about that about various things Vince Lakata who was that playwright he wanted to get real science on stage which he felt wasn't really done but Ping is actually not a very science guy he wanted to get real humanity on stage he wanted to put that so they found a story that they could both do because within the text and within the projection score there's actual chemistry being discussed the mechanisms by which you combine drugs and to make to make pills basically so it comes from a lot of different ways like mostly I'd say we can't we never do anything that doesn't excite us creatively the Ping Chong company is an arts organization first and foremost our work is intended to is intended to we want our work to have social impact but we as artists we have to be jazzed by the subject and the circumstance to do it so that's how that's how it's done I just think that teases out this really important conversation about universities and ensembles and particularly sort of what are the values and intentionality of ensemble where it's experimentation social change, community impact and sort of like I think sometimes mushy sense of ensemble pushes students away when they first arrive at school and it is sort of an example for instance of Ping Chong company and the breadth of their work and the breadth of sort of aesthetics amidst a very clear purpose that I think is really useful to help and there are other companies represented in this room that are that as well but that are necessary otherwise I just feel like people think they have to make a choice in a way oh if I'm doing ensemble I guess it's these values that I heard about over there or it's this kind of avant-garde thing that I heard about over there like how are we really giving them access to their own purpose and practices that are really flexible so the question is why did the Congo come up and how did that relationship happen at Kent State University doing a work on the Congo for a long time and he read a book about Cambodia yes oh I feel terrible there's a very famous book about you know what I'm talking about someone say it out loud yeah Philip Corbett what's the book called too much I think we don't it's a video for people I can't remember people who know too much of Cambodia or it's part of my documentary film we'll find the part we cut out and then I just thought I cut out and then also Adam Hart shows the about the book on the play for the second yes and 2004 as you know the 10th anniversary of the genocide of Rwanda and you know all that were fleeing the country Rwanda to the Congo and just we don't have the divisions we created am I right there if you go there we have no divisions just people in and out and then the chaos continues and then we are benefiting from that that interest in the Congo was the primary I think the reason why Pien wanted to do work and then why can't state I the director at that time and then also we talked about the possibility of who is going to be the first director series an artist in residence and then they chose Pien Chow and for in terms of the continuation that was the opportunity came at Syracuse University actually because we've been at Syracuse Stage which is connected to Syracuse University before working there Tim Bond another long time collaborator and friend and because Nancy Cantor and that program knew our work when this community this was really the desire to heal the Congolese community to work for them to work together and to create a vehicle for which they could reach out to other communities because these are literally people who in the Congo might have been killing each other from different tribal affiliations but the wanting the desire to get beyond that was that was their that was their thing and I give all props to them and we were just asked to come in and be a vehicle for making giving them a tool to use that and they have been doing that and you know it's it's this tools and what Michael is talking about tool the ending the property is a tool you know and that is how that's kind of how we approach it too which to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our family stories for one and working with and then of course one of the major sources was King Leopold's ghost and and I think also what I should say that the blindness was about both the colonial exploitation and we focused it on that period partially because the campus the community in there wasn't like a lot of liberal arts college arts programs it's not the most diverse it was not the least diverse I promise you but it wasn't the most diverse so we focused it on the colonial thing but also on the there's another part of that which is the rise of the human rights movement that led to the to the really the taking away the Congo from under the private the private the Congo colony was King Leopold's private bank and he just exploited the people viciously could I ask Steven a question I feel like the conversation that started earlier today about ensemble and the meaning of it I feel like you might have this really interesting experience of it because you said that your background is musical theater and chorus line posted up there I don't know if that's a show you were okay so I think a lot of people sort of I don't know my chorus line well enough I apologize I think a lot of people would say oh theater ensemble chorus line what a great sort of example of the kind of original company idea when it first kind of in a meta way became a part of the storytelling landscape of American theater and now you've moved into creating this amazing complex diverse ensemble and sort of set of practices so I wonder for you in terms of your journey from one kind of ensemble experience to the one you're in now how do you think about the idea of ensemble and what it means to you that's a very good question and correlation and I would say that a lot of what working with Mr. Bennett's work Michael Bennett's work was able to do because he brought a bunch of dancers into a room and said tell me a story and then he took those stories and they molded them and they put them together are you one of those original dancers? not, I'm not quite that old okay I just didn't want to not know that if that was the case it was interesting though and quickly with that is that a lot of those original dancers ended up being in Bob Fosse Chicago and not being in Michael Bennett's chorus line because they wanted the sure bet of the job instead of doing the workshop for the performance but it was a way of working with the public theater to have the space to develop a work and create that ensemble that became an amazing story about really adolescence and life and change and growing up and the passion of what you want to do for the rest of your life and all that stuff feels connected to the kids you showed us on here and it is very much connected to that and I think the ability to be able to put it together in story and have that story go out however you're going to put it all together and I was even saying this yesterday with Liz Lerman and some of the people I struggled identifying myself as an artist for many many years because I was raised as a singer, did an undergraduate work and a graduate work and dance so am I an actor, am I a singer am I a dancer, what am I and I became, in my eyes a performer and I see young artists today don't label me, do not label me do not make me be an actor, don't not make me be a dancer and so I think the idea of what is being created is an idea that we train the body with skills and then let the story come out and I think the thing is true with form, with the form that you're talking about the form that we used as far as volunteering in the system and letting that come out and to a story is amazing to me and Judith Melina yesterday God what an amazing time that was said first discover what it is you want to say and then discover how you want to say it and I think if we try and force a story into a model which I'll tell you quickly working with Max with Theatre of the Press in NYC right now, we force this idea on Theatre of the Press about Muslim identity but then didn't have the people in the room to tell the story correctly right there but an amazing story has started to come out that does identify by trusting the process, letting it all happen and at the same time letting that ensemble take care of itself and so it's messy and it comes through and I'm saying well I gotta have the funder it's gotta be about Muslim identity so what does ensemble mean to you now working with these students? Ensemble to me means a group of people getting together and saying what do you want to say and then let's look at it do we have any musicians in the room that want to do it this way do we have dancers in the room that want to tell the story this way do we have other people in the room that want to write about it and tell about it and then how do we bring that message out and on top of that then it's a way for me that's important to facilitate dialogue in the community because that continues the ensemble then becomes the community that you're speaking with and I think that's a major part that I consider a big part of my work so nice you guys found each other absolutely and it's been a great partnership and we're gonna it's gonna continue and hopefully we have some other things that we're talking about for down the road as well and it was I know personally for me and for Ping being able to partner in Queens was very important because Manhattan isn't what the city that he grew up in and it isn't the city that I came to 30 years ago it's this this building was just beautiful but all around us is this luxury and it's growing up and up and up and the community that we had that kind of youth so spoke so much about that isn't here anymore there's some remnants of it yes it isn't here but it is in Queens and that means a lot I'm very very lucky to be right in the middle of that and I just can't say what I get to do and the people I get to be exposed to on a daily basis and how that informs my own work and how I get to facilitate other people's work because of it great so I'm going to I'm going to end up there just because we're at time however I'm sure you all have some more questions please keep the conversations going I don't know how you guys feel if you want any closing remarks or anything but we are at time just so we're aware I want to give a shout out to Christine Barre who for helping us I want to give a shout out to our Sam man thank you thanks everyone thank you guys