 So I think we're actually now live streaming, we'll wait for a second to record this session and then we can start. Maria or Chloe, will you please hit record? Perfect, we're on. Hello, good day everyone. Welcome to session two of day two of the virtual conference. This is Hot Topics and this session posted by Jane Barnett will be presented in English and Spanish. So remember, we have oral simultaneous interpretation. You can download Web Switcher Pro on your phones or gadgets and the volunteers will introduce the token on the chat box. Hello everyone, welcome to the second session of the second day of the virtual conference of LMDA 2021. This session, which leads Jane Barnett, will be presented in English and Spanish. So remember that we have oral simultaneous interpretation through Web Switcher and that one of the volunteers will introduce the access token on the chat. Jane, thank you very much for hosting this session. The floor is yours. Gracias. Well, welcome everybody. Hello, it's an exciting moment because it's time for Hot Topics, Hot Topics, Hot Topics. So I'm going to go over very quickly how this works, get you jazzed for what's about to happen and then we will just hear from our speakers one after the other and then while you're listening, so you don't have to wait while you're listening, please begin to formulate questions, thoughts, provocations, and drop those into the Q&A or the chat either way. If you are live streaming, you can also tweet your question. You can use the hashtag of course, LMDA21. You can also use the hashtag Hot Topics21. All right, we look forward of course to the conversation. The whole purpose of Hot Topics is to have the conversation afterwards. So that is our goal. We are excited to talk to you about these subjects. My name is Jane Barnett and I am very excited to be the Vice President of University Relations. So it is my great honor to host this event that I've always been so excited to attend and sometimes present in. I also want to acknowledge that I live and work on the ancestral territory of several tribal nations, including the Col Osage and Shawnee Peoples. At this point, I would also like to invite participants as well as attendees to go ahead and acknowledge the land on which you are streaming from or from which you are streaming. Yeah, because that would be lovely to see that in the chat. That would also be lovely to see that on Twitter if you are joining us via live stream. Let's all acknowledge the land on which we stand. Yeah. So the way that this goes, our speakers have five minutes and five minutes only to do their provocation, their speech, their sharing. They will, as they speak, give a quick link if they wish to a bio in the chat that you might want to follow. If you would please, panelists, also go ahead and close up your chat when you start so that you will be able to see that one minute warning that you will get. And as a reminder, we will and we can mute you if you try to go rogue and go over five, five, five minutes, none of that. All right, sound good. We have an agenda that Chloe, if you wouldn't mind dropping into the chat for everyone who is with us here on WebEx that you can also follow if you wish. And with that agenda, the first up is Ms. Karen Jean, Martin's son. What are we doing and why? These are the questions I repeatedly asked myself during this past year of virtual theater, perhaps while I was sitting in rehearsal on Zoom or while talking with a mentee on Zoom, or attending a performance on some digital platform often first recorded on Zoom, or participating in a post-mortem on Zoom. And of course, I know the answers that we kept telling ourselves. We're innovating. We're making sure that our students get an education. We're offering a sense of normalcy in a strange time. We're creating art despite the pandemic. Damn it. And also, we're charging tuition. We're salvaging our seasons and our classes. We're pushing through and getting by. But really, what were we doing and why? And how was it that our best intentions and our favorite adages led us so far astray? As I reflect back, I offer you three cautionary tales and a few lessons learned. Cautionary tale number one, let's put on a show and the dangers of toxic positivity. We began our virtual season already behind because remember lockdown was only supposed to last a few weeks. As the seriousness of COVID-19 set in, we realized that we had to pivot and transfer our plans for in-person theater to fully virtual theater produced under strict safety protocols. But we're plucky resourceful folk. And so we dreamed our big dreams of making live theater that could move outside the Zoom box and into a fully physicalized virtual space. We spent money on compositing technology to make this happen. And we were sure that we could do it. Sure, even during endless nights of tech where it didn't work. Sure, despite the concerns of our directors and actors who saw that we were losing what was most important in the storytelling. Sure, right up until we had to admit that no, it wouldn't work. At which point, painful decisions had to be made. One student summed it up with incisive clarity. We ended up with 50 people and a boat that held 30. 20 of us had to drown. Cautionary tale number two, leave it at the door and mental health. We ask our students to set aside the frustrations of the day when they come together for focused ensemble work. But what happens when the door is virtual while the physical rehearsal room is also their home, which is also their office and their classroom. And when the problems that they are asked to set aside include the existential dread of a global pandemic. Our students faced profound feelings of isolation coupled with a sense of invasiveness made worse by a lack of clear communication. Especially during tech, they were expected to sit alone silently with incomplete information until it was time to be on. Actors said they felt like set pieces and problems to be managed. While designers said it was like asking everyone to run a marathon, then right before the race starts, we put a rock in their shoe. Students also felt they had to suffer their traumas and silence for the good of the show, which leads directly into cautionary tale number three, the show must go on and relentless productivity. Perhaps the biggest mistake we made was in barreling ahead, taking on insane workloads and churning out our season in a manner unsustainable to our physical, emotional and mental health. Though we learned from each show and made adjustments to our processes, we also repeated similar mistakes across multiple productions. Students were stressed and frustrated and reported feeling overwhelming pressure to prioritize this over all other commitments. They also felt that big decisions were made without their input or consent all so that the show could go on. So what have we learned and how might this impact our future work? We should keep the technological gains we made and the accessibility they created. Noted one student, we are reaching audiences who never have been able to see our shows due to mental, physical and emotional limitations. We should not get rid of distance theater, but rather perfect it. But technology must work in support of the pieces we stage and not as its own good. We also learned that the most important value we can build is that of empathetic rigor. We must center the whole human, celebrate the individuals who come together in collaboration and make theater that reflects the values and aesthetics they collectively hold through a process that honors their humanity. And finally, we learned too late, as it only came with the end of the semester, the importance of a pause. We need to build these into our processes so that when we find ourselves asking, what are we doing and why, we can find and determine better answers by giving ourselves a moment to stop, breathe and reflect. Thanks. All right, Jack, you are up. All right. Hi, everyone. Today's topic is can film dramaturgy be created in today's entertainment industry? The short answer is yes, but there's a lot that goes into that and there's a lot of ways that it can be created. As we know, dramaturgy is an important tool in the theater world, but it's unheard of in the film business. Why does the TV and the film world not use dramaturgy? How can we create this field of entertainment industry? I hope this topic today, it starts exercising your minds, opens your eyes and sees how this can be done. A dramaturgy is defined as, and I want to read this, a literary advisor in theater and film. So think about this. The definition of the word dramaturgy includes film, but that's not done today. When researching film dramaturgy, I came across a great quote, and that quote is, there's no such thing as film dramaturgy, and this is true. That makes me ask, why not? Why isn't there? I've been in the entertainment business for over 35 years, starting in theater as an actor, writer and stage director for 20 years, then it evolved into the film business, where I've been a filmmaker for over 15 years, and I'm now currently a founder of a film festival in Angeles. And I can tell you from experience, there is no such thing as film dramaturgy in the film business. This is an important tool that needs to start being used in film. Last year, when attending a theater conference, I discovered dramaturgy. And over the last year and a half, I've taken dramaturgy courses. I did my first play as a dramaturgy last fall, and the whole time that I was doing that, I was thinking, why can't you use these tools in the filmmaking process? You can take any element of dramaturgy and apply it to film. As we know, the dramaturgy is the philosopher in the room. Movies can use a philosopher on a film set and also in the project to help everyone. Every film tells a story, just like a play, and it relates to any kind of film. It can be a comedy film, drama, narrative, documentary, short film, feature film. Every film tells a story and can use these elements that we learn about. And as a dramaturge, we want to tell a story with its maximum impact. So just imagine how this can help movies that are being made today. I can totally see dramaturgy being used on a film set. Knowing the business of film and TV, if TV and film shows had a resident dramaturge for their projects, the film dramaturge could be used through all stages of the filmmaking process. In the film world, there's five different stages. There's development, reproduction, post-production, and distribution. So it's easy for me to see how... Let me look at my notes here. It's easy for me to see how a dramaturge can be used in every stage. I can... We can talk more about the different stages in Q&A, but I want to have you think about this. A film dramaturge can be a researcher through an entire project. They can sit on all production meetings. They can be on the set during a shoot. They can be an assistant and an advisor to the director, the production team, and the actors. Why isn't this being done today? Personally, I think it's a power thing. People in the film business, they're afraid of giving forms of control to a person. They don't understand a dramaturge would be there to help them not take control of a project. The philosopher is there to question things, research things, help and advise with things. Why wouldn't you have a researcher consultant, an advisor, a philosopher for a project helping the director put everything together and then sharing their finished project with the world? It makes common sense to me. Think about all the things a dramaturge does. Why can't you use that with one person with all five processes of film? Take the example of a protocol. Why can't you do a protocol for a film? We can talk about the different things that a dramaturge does and how they can relate to filmmaking. It's hard to get in the film business, so I hope this topic has opened your minds and has woken you up to a dramaturge style that most people don't know about. On that note, I'll say thank you. Renda, you are up. Thank you, Jane. Hello, everyone. My presentation is titled, The Eye of the Dramaturge. What is dramaturgy? A dramaturge could say that dramaturgy is everything, which is why it is so damn difficult for someone outside of her field to understand what dramaturgy really is. In Mexico, a lot of people haven't even heard the word dramaturgy, and most English speakers have never heard the word dramaturgy in Spanish. It is dramaturgismo, and the word for dramaturg is dramaturgista, which ends with an A, but it is not related to gender. A woman is a dramaturgista, a man is a dramaturgista as well, and I didn't pick the word. Someone else did. I don't know who, but someone told it to me because someone else had told it to him and so on and so on. Very much like things happen in Mexico. But since almost no one has ever heard either of those words, dramaturgismo, or dramaturgista, I constantly get asked the same question. What is dramaturgismo? I laugh to myself knowing that if I answer, oh, dramaturgismo, it is everything. I will not be taken seriously. In her book, and then you act, a compilation of mistakes about making art in an unpredictable world, and Bogart wrote, watching over demands passionate presence and availability, and absolutely no desire for any one thing in particular to happen, but plenty of will to stay present. Like a hunter in wait for the appearance of a wild animal, the waiting is dynamic. I cannot think of a better way to describe the doings of the dramaturg in the creation of performing arts. The dramaturgista is the person who watches over the process of making things happen, and the way we do that is with passionate presence and availability. We do it with attention. Sometimes our presence in the room will be noticed and required. Some others, it will be quiet and receptive. But the presence of the dramaturg will inevitably affect the outcome of the piece. In social sciences, physics, and experimental physics, the observer's paradox is a situation in which the phenomenon being observed is unwittingly influenced by the presence of the observer or investigator. The dramaturg is a person who watches over the process of creation. The dramaturg is there to observe with attention. I know that you're probably thinking that I am trying to explain what a dramaturg is to a room full of dramaturgs. But what I am really trying to do is to explain what dramaturgismo is to a room full of dramaturgs. In 2015, on her thesis titled En busca del dramaturgista en México, in the search for the dramaturg in Mexico, Gabriela Paricio wrote, El dramaturgista ayuda al filósofo a estructurar sus ideas. I love that definition. El dramaturgista helps the philosopher to structure their ideas. When she wrote about this, I am pretty sure that she wasn't trying to say that the dramaturg helps the philosopher to structure their ideas. But to actually say that el dramaturgista, the one who is in México and works in México, and deals with life in México, el dramaturgista mexicano, helps the philosopher to structure their ideas. One thing that I have noticed while working so close with the community of FilmDA is that the dramaturgs who are based in Canada will practice dramaturgy in a slightly different way to the dramaturgs based in the United States. United States dramaturgs tend to do more research and structure language. While Canadian dramaturgs tend to make more questions and use examples. That is because dramaturgy is an interdisciplinary process, one within many things that the dramaturg pays attention to is a context. The context will determine many choices that will affect the phenomenon of creation. When I speak of dramaturgismo, and when Gabriela writes about el dramaturgista, we're already conceiving a slightly different notion of dramaturgy, in which one of the most evident differences is the language. En México hablamos español. Dramaturgy, and dramaturgismo, while meaning the exact same thing, they also mean entirely different things. For the past two years, I have been working with LMDA and the team of Mexican dramaturgs to host a conference in Mexico City, with the parallel goal of connecting Mexican dramaturgs with each other and examining what dramaturgismo is in Mexico. On the 28th and 29th of June, we will finally gather in person at a theater in Mexico City, and I know we all have one question. What is dramaturgismo? In words of William Labov, who gave name to the Observer's Paradox, the aim of linguistic research must be to find out how people talk when they are not being systematically observed. Yet, we can only obtain this data by systematic observation. All of us watching from the seats of the theater in Mexico, or through the live streaming from somewhere else in the world, we will be the observers in this paradox. Our presence will inevitably influence the phenomenon. When inviting you to observe what the dramaturgismo is in Mexico in 2021, I ask of all of you to do it with passionate presence and availability, and absolutely no desire for any one thing in particular to happen, but plenty of will to stay present. And if you haven't joined the conference for Mexico City, there's still time. Don't you all want to see what it looks like? Thank you. Amazing. Yay. My next presentation is about Ghostlight. Hello, hello. Okay, I go first. So, hello. We're here to announce the publication in Spanish of Michael Chemister's groundbreaking book, Ghostlight, an introductory handbook for drama-charging, which is forthcoming with esenología. This book originally came out in 2010, and it is now in its second edition. It is one of the few handbooks available for dramaturgies that clearly delineates the process that our craft entails. The significance of having a translation into Spanish is a monumental contribution to the formalization of dramaturgy training in Mexico, where we are, as Brenda just said, starting to incorporate this area of study into higher education as a profession on its own right. Here we have the author and the translator, Marta Reralazo, to dramaturgs that clearly understand the process of dramaturgy as one of collaboration and creative possibilities. They will quickly discuss the intricacies that have gone into the process of creating this translation. So, Michael. Gracias, Analola. We have all come a long way since Ghostlight first appeared more than a decade ago. Then I was a very young professor of theater history, and I did not think of dramaturgy as a viable career choice. In fact, I initially turned down the opportunity to write a book on dramaturgy for Southern Illinois University Press. Something made me change my mind. I wrote the book. The whole point of the book, as Analola just said, is that dramaturgy is an appropriate subject for study in higher education. And my collaborators and I feel that it is a role to play in the solidification of the profession of dramaturgy in the communities that have found it useful. That's all of you. So thanks to you, dramaturgs and teachers, because of your support, the book is currently being taught not only in the U.S. and Canada and the U.K., but also around the world with editions now available in Korean and Farsi. Now, I'm thrilled to as forthcoming from SIU Press and will be available later this year. It is a substantial revision, which gives much stronger attention to issues of dramaturgy as it pertains to race, gender, sexuality, and ability, particularly in light of the Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the murder of Floyd. This new edition also contains a copy of the current LMDA bibliography as compiled by a team of LMDA scholars, led by Jeff Pearl, and including Ariane Van Buren, Shelley Graham, Jordan Hardesty, Jess Kaufman, Catalan Trisheny, Emily White, and myself. And it gives me supreme pleasure to announce that this edition will be translated into Spanish as Luz Testigo by the Mexican Dramaturgan scholar, my friend, La Asambrosa Marta Herrera Lazo. We were introduced to one another by Dr. Lazo, who recognized that the book may yet have a role to play in the ongoing profession of the dramaturgista, as Brenda said, in Mexico and other Latin American countries. I am honored beyond words to have this opportunity to work with Edgar Ceballos, Erez and Logia, and to collaborate with Herrera Lazo, and I will now turn it over to her. Marta. I have been in conversation with this book, Ghost Light, which we decided to translate as Luz Testigo, for many years now. Now that they have invited me to translate the second edition, I must say that this collaboration has been deeply enjoyed. I have the opportunity to dialogue with Michael, both through his written words and through the many, many, many, many questions that have arisen in the process of accompanying this text on its journey to the Spanish-Mexican universe. If we miss our conversation, we have our Ada Madrina, Ana Lola Santana, who appears when we call her to help us find our way. Así como esta traducción es el resultado de muchos diálogos, espero que tu querida lectora, querido creador, continúes esta colaboración más allá de su publicación. Por favor, cuando leas y trabajes con esta traducción de Luz Testigo cuestiona mis decisiones, dialoga con ellas, y colabora con las tensiones de la traducción. Activa Luz Testigo más allá de su dimensión escrita. Llévalo a nuestro trabajo como dramaturgistas dentro del salón de ensayos, dentro del salón de clases, en México y hasta donde quiera llegar. Muchas gracias. Hola a todos. Yo estoy aquí para compartir. Yo creo que soy el siguiente. Sí, eres el siguiente. All right. Just making sure that all things are aligned. Okay, here we go. I'm here to share as those of us from the University of Puget Sound, proud home of LMDA's archive, occasionally do, a blast from the past. My topic today is the National Theater Translation Fund, the NTTF, a project LMDA helped sponsor in the 1990s. There are two reasons I wanted to share about this archival material this year. First, I wanted to connect to the exciting border crossing work that's being considered during this conference. There's a translatorial urge at the heart of Dramaturgy and it's powerful to document its many manifestations. Second, it's a fun story to tell. Let me set the stage. In 2014, my department took all sorts of LMDA files, records and ephemera from our understaged storage area where Jeff Pearl had put it during and since his presidency and moved them to the newly established archive. All that remained was one file cabinet and one blue Rubbermaid bin marked LMDA Jeff will sort. Five years later, when he retired, only the Rubbermaid bin remained. Now it was labeled LMDA for Sarah. And what was in this bin? Scripts. Commence a cataloging of scripts by our research scholarship student, Caster Kent. There's a script of Sabina Berman's Yankee translated by Joe Martin, a version of Ostrowski's The Wise Fool by Kurt Columbus, a David Kroemer and Annabelle Armour version of Vedakin's Spring Awakening, a translation of Chekhov's The Seagull from Tori Haring-Smith, and Charlotte Harvey's translation of Medea's Children and an adaptation of Maria Vargas-Losa's Kathy and the Hippopotamus from Joanne Pollitzer. There are translations from Lawrence Sennelik, Royce and Coppinger, Raul Mancada, Karadad Svitch, Heather McKay, Zara Hausmund and texts that found publication in Phyllis Natland's series Estrenios Contemporary Spanish Plays. Catalog complete. I wrote to Adam Versenyi, whose Mercurian journal publishes theater translations and asked if he recognized any of the material named above and much, much more. He said, this much be the NTTF. Aha, that started the next phase. My research student, the next one, the excellent Gabby Marlar, and I went down a path of communication to understand the provenance and requirements for our treatment of these NTTF scripts. Did they need to be returned somewhere? Luckily, the call for submissions in 1991 specified, materials will not be returned. No one had been waiting to get what was in that blue bin back for 30 years. Where we are now is that Gabby and I wrote to the translators and updated them that the copy of their script was being added to the archival holdings for LMDA. Some of them gave us permission to forward their script to Adam for consideration by the Mercurian if it had not already been published. We're depositing the materials in Collins Library this summer and retiring the blue Rubbermaid bin. The NTTF, already noted in LMDA's archives, will have a stronger presence among the records and the scripts will show in the searchable results once they are catalogued. We are also getting to add some narrative from Ann Catanio, Kerry Perloff, and Royston Coppinger to the archive since our email inquiries prompted them to share memories about the project and the state of the field in the U.S. at the time. Do we call it oral history when people share memories over email? In any case, it adds such richness and a sense of dramaturgical context to the records. For instance, I can see the information in the review that the NTTF was initiated because of an urgent sense that stage worthy translations of plays into American English would stimulate interest in theater from cultures around the globe and that it was started by the classic stage company with funding by the Pew Charitable Trust and administered by LMDA with the goals to award translation commissions, initiate other programs to identify theater translators, and set up a database and manuscript repository. For three short years, the NTTF pursued these goals, but it ended before a database or repository were accomplished. But here's some of what Ann Catanio wrote me about the history of the project when I was asking if she had any concerns about us putting the scripts into the archive. And this is replete with more personal detail, a sense of the energy for the mission. And it also gives the reasons that the project faded after 1994. The NTTF was an initiative of Carries, which I signed on to immediately, wrote Ann, and offered LMDA as a natural headquarters for the project. Carrey was then at the CSC. I was LMDA president. Carrey raised a nice chunk of money. Was it from Wallace? And through some stuff we were doing from the director's lab, I had access to some French money through the Société des actes de la dramatique. And the francophone world is large. We hired Rusty to run the initiative, which he did brilliantly. And then Carrey suddenly went to SF. Rusty went to CalArts. I adopted two children and everything remained in the LMDA office. I had even had meetings about starting a second translation project devoted to African theater, but it never went anywhere. So that is my cue that I'm almost done. But I do just want to say that Ann said that she's thrilled the material still exists, though the initial hopes were that this would just be a beginning. And in my experience, as a historian, educator, and dramaturg with justice, representation, and border crossing initiatives, we are also often in a place of beginning again, again and again. But archiving repertoire from the NTTF to the exchange begun in 2006 that we heard about in yesterday's keynote to this conference, LMDA is both continuing and constantly beginning again, the effort to expand theater, circulate plays, and honor playwrights across languages and geographies. Thank you. Wonderful. And next up we have La Ronica. I want to begin by asking all of you to think back. Oh, can you all hear me? Yes. Thank you. I want to begin by asking all of you to think back to the undergraduate theater history class or classes you took and whether the class was five, 15 or 50 years ago to think about what memories from those classes jump out of you. Keep those memories handy for our discussion later. Beginning with a question is appropriate because this is a presentation of questions and not unfortunately of answers. During last year's hot topic, I spoke about teaching theater history as a dramaturg scholar and confronting the canon with my students for a course I taught on 20th century American drama, beginning with suffrage plays. And I quoted Ciara Jones who argues that quote by refusing to reimagine not only the canon, but also the theories and methods of every single discipline academia is choosing to remain complicit in upholding white supremacy as its core value. I have taught theater history in some form again and again at a few different institutions for the last nine years. Generally, as the course has been structured by the department curriculum requirement, it's a semester spent in some chunk of time, units broken down by periodization, mirroring my own undergraduate to semester coursework, Greeks to Renaissance and restoration mid 20th century, often using a later edition of the same textbook I used as an undergrad some 25 years ago. And the class I spoke about last year was a good introduction to why I'm not satisfied with this. This fall, I'm teaching what is essentially theater history one origins to the 18th century. While I am trained as a theater historian and performance study scholar, as well as a dramaturg, this timeframe is not my area of expertise. I am as Amanda Dawson commiserated during her presentation yesterday, not the expert in the room here to deliver clear answers to my students questions asking the questions is the work. In a feat of productivity, I will never again be able to repeat I wrote the syllabus this spring. I've switched out many play scripts for others with a focus on firing that cannon. I don't begin with the Greeks. I've ditched the Wilson textbook. I've broken down the assignments into basically five things read, engage with the reading, present something, perform something and write about something. I find this simplicity makes for greater accessibility. My syllabus does I hope a lot of the community building I think is necessary for the classroom. My attempts to decolonize my syllabus are ongoing and I hope over within the document. I've emphasized the ways in which learning about theater history is also learning about critical thinking, information, literacy, good research practices, collaboration, problem solving, all of those skills any students need from their education and that we're told over and over again is how theater stays relevant to the business majors of the world. I've drawn on much of the great work discussed during the sessions I attended last summer through a Folger Institute consortium graduate students series where we spent much of the time discussing the work of those decolonizing western theater history particularly the work of early modernists. But it is not enough. I know it is not enough. There are still so many white men in my early theater history course. I want more ways to reimagine not only the canon but also the theories and methods of what I teach. I often recall a conversation I had a few years ago with a senior scholar in the field when I told her I was presenting a paper on some of the changes I made to course I was teaching as a graduate TA. She said something to the effect of good. I'm glad you're looking at that because we have to figure out why we're teaching these classes. That has stayed with me. Something about the why and how and the who what where. What do we teach theater history for? Who do we teach it for? Why does it matter? How can we continue to decolonize the teaching of early theater history? What do students particularly undergraduates including those who come from outside the discipline take away from theater history? Will they realize all that was left out? How did my theater history professors who were not dramaturgs grapple with these questions? As dramaturgs we are especially suited to the task of asking these questions and strategizing ways to teach theater history in U.S. higher ed and to investigate why we are teaching it at all. I'm going to make a big assumption here that most of us were intensely curious in our theater history classes especially if like me you were in school when dramaturgy classes and programs were few and far between. But those of us in higher ed also know that the theater history class is long to ride it by many as a boring requirement for a degree in theater. An academic distraction for acting, directing, and design. The theory practice divide persists. It's also where dramaturgs exist. I'm not just posing questions of theater history's usefulness. Plenty of people already ask those questions. But rather proposing that we use our dramaturgical sensibilities to continue to dismantle and reassemble university theater history courses. We must continue to do this or as Joan says we are choosing to remain complicit in upholding white supremacy as its core value. And we are teaching courses that may not have the impact we want. Unless our courses are active tools of dismantling systems of oppression, then they are actively part of those systems. We must be curiosity and perseverance, dare mighty things. What will my students remember about my course in five, fifteen, fifty years? What do you remember? Thank you. So many thoughts. Wonderful, wonderful. Next up we have Fabian. Fabian will be joining us in Spanish. So if you are English speaker, you might want to get out your translations. Se me escucha? Sí, sí. Ok, voy a empezar. Durante mi trayectoria académica, artística y personal, he's ido consciente de las consecuencias del no pertenecer a sistema heteronormal, cisquienero y patriarcal. A toza de ello, parecíese que diariamente la resistencia y la resilencia me gritan sobreviviendo a la violencia, defiéndete de la opresión, actúa desde el trauma y lucha contra la invisibilización. No niego a me habitar en un mundo violento, tampoco disimulo que dicho sistema me descrimina y agrede y mucho menos ignoro las vidas a rebatalas que el odio producido por dicho sistema ha provocado. Sin embargo, he aprendido que desde la crítica y la emancipación de mi cuerpo, puedo resignificar la violencia y el odio que cotirán a mente matraviesa. También he descubierto que desde la pertenencia a una comunidad que comparte los mismos problemas, se pueden generar estrategias y acciones para empoderarnos individual y colectivamente. Gracias a ciertas personas, me he portado de respuestas y acciones contra cualquier poder que atente contra mi integridad. Por esas razones, hoy mi cuerpo es más fuerte y también puedo presentar esa reflexión. Considerando mi deseo de autorrealización, la dignidad de pertenecer a la periferia y la autodefensa individual y colectiva en contra de la violencia, encontré en el arte drag mexicano un territorio para resistir, existir y crear. Pero ¿qué es el arte drag? es el arte discriminado, juzgado y malinterpretado. Es un medio que habilita la crítica y la protesta a toda ley moral, implícita o explícitamente. Es un medio que habilita el drag y da y proporciona herramientas artísticas y políticas que desestabilizan desde el juego y la transgresión, la moral social. Arte drag es un arte vivo porque se instaura y se manifiesta desde los cuerpos de quienes lo ejecutan, produciendo personajes con identidad y caracteres autónomos para la creación y ejecución de espectáculos que transgreden a las normas de género. Es el arte que cualquier persona puede hacer sin importancia sexual y biológico, género, género o expresión de género. El único requisito que podría existir para hacer drag es que para crear y protesta hay que jodiar. ¿Qué es un personaje drag? Son activistas sociales que concuerdan o no con el carácter del artista con el cual comparten cuerpo. Posendo una naturaleza transformista y transvesti que transfere de toda normatividad corporal en función de la creación de otro ente diferente al artista, implementando en sus cuerpos diversos elementos que exageran y transforman sus proporciones humanas. Siendo así que la diferenciación física entre el personaje drag y el artista no hay posibilidad en su relación y la necesidad de protesta al vivir y compartir violencia discriminatorias. ¿Por qué este arte es contestatario? Es una autodefensa ante las persecuciones, discriminaciones, invisibilizaciones y asesinatos que sufren la comunidad LGBT y CUA. Como respuesta, activistas y artistas y ciudadanos que conforman dicha comunidad crearon y habilitaron espacios seguros para convivir y apreciar su arte. ¿Cuáles fueron esos espacios y en dónde se encuentran en la actualidad? Son los lugares en donde las y las artistas drag generan su mayor fuente de trabajo. Los bares y andros nocturnos LGBT y CUA. Es por ello que considero el arte drag como un arte contemporáneo, porque cuando hoy veo un espectáculo drag, recuerdo que crees a todas las protestas pasadas, hoy en día todas, todos y todas, podemos crear y combatir desde la fotería y el emanchinamiento. El arte drag que se produce en México no atiende o por lo menos intenta no atender a los estándares de belleza agrocentristas. En su ejecución implementa explícita o implícitamente discursos de protesta. Los discursos que se producen en los espectáculos contienen traumas y reivindicaciones individuales. Al ser presenciadas por sus espectadores, desde la empatía y el goce, el show drag se convierte en una protesta colectiva. Gracias al vestuario extravagante, las grandes pelucas, los exagerados tacones, la exposición corporal del artista y la jotería con la que se actúa, el drag se convierte en un espacio de valor y fortaleza, donde todo es posible y donde se puede accionar contra el miedo y el rechazo. ¿Qué suceden del acontecimiento drag? El artista drag construye, comparte y enseña a sus espectadores el superpoder de resignificar el dolor desde una exposición transgresora transvecientes sus cuerpas, cuerpes o cuerpos. Es por ello que en el drag todo es posible y la jotería todo lo puede. Este arte, el arte marginado discriminado y horrorizado por la moral, es el arte que muchas personas les ha brindado una posibilidad de performar sus vidas y resignificar sus violencias desde la performatividad consciente de sus cuerpos. Lo que ha aprendido con el arte drag es lo siguiente. Los cuerpos deben ser performados por el usuario y no por los demás. La jotería es inónimo de fortaleza, libertad y de posibilidad de ser uno mismo, sin miedo al que diran. Y que es necesario tener los procesos creativos, las hipografías de duelo, trama y fortaleza que conforman a las, les y los artistas. Os se conciente de que son necesarias las artes, disciplinas, espacios, artistas y seres humanos que habilitan la protesta, la crítica, la creatividad y la transgresión desde los cuerpos del usuario. Y también sé que para demoler cualquier sistema de opresión, el usuario puede hacer uso de la jotería para potencializar su discurso y el mismo, porque si yo con el drag, quien contra mí. Gracias. Hello. I feel a bit underdressed after that. So my presentation is called recognizing the gaps. And in fall 2019, my university season opener was a production of Lucas Nace the Christians, a show which centers on the question, is there a hell? And more specifically, is there a Christian hell? In approaching this theme, the audience is asked to reflect on standards of ethics and moral code all through this Christian worldview and through the eyes of the pastor and the members of a midwestern Christian mega church. While the show poses these really interesting theological dilemmas, it does so solely through a Christian morality, which bears the challenge of how does one make this production engaging to non Christians and even more so to those who aren't religious at all. These audience members whose ethical codes do not depend on the question of whether or not a Christian hell exists, or audience members who may even find discomfort sitting through a production and tended to make you feel like you're actually attending a sermon of a Christian mega church. These are the questions my peers and I asked ourselves when when assigned to research and design the lobby display for the show in our drama churchy class. Working in pairs, we came up with specific questions relating to the production we felt needed to be explored or context we thought needed to be given. Each group was then assigned an area of the lobby to fill with interactive and informative content for audience members to view before entering the performance space. While so much amazing work came out of this project for the sake of our very limited time, I'll focus on two of the lobby displays. So my partner and I focus on the questions. What is the etymology of the word hell? And how has the depiction of hell changed over time? And then in turn, how does that influence our understanding of the concept of hell? For our display, we built a hellmouth that audience members could actually go inside of and in there, they would find different images of hell and art mapping of the hell etymologies and art historical commentaries on those artworks. These etymologies and art histories were well removed from the theological themes of the show. So our display became a space for those audience members perhaps feeling disconnected or unsure of a production called the Christians to find an end of sorts while they watched. On the flip side, another group focused on big ethical questions like why do we do good things or do we do good things because we believe in an afterlife? Their display was a series of voting booths in which audience members would choose colored pom poms associated with different answers and vote. The goal was to engage audiences actively with the central questions and themes of the production before they watched it. But the difficulty lies in that the work and the difficulty of this display lies that many of the questions and answer options did not consider the non-Christian or non-religious individual. For example, one booth had the question, should people go to hell? But there was no answer of I don't believe in a hell. Leaving off those options on display, which arguably gives the most direct interaction with the show's themes, emphasizes that the show may not really be for that audience member. So when they're sitting and watching the production, they are left even more alienated and disconnected because one of the first things they interacted with in relation to the show they're about to watch was something that excluded them as well. So here we find a display that does the work of recognizing these gaps in this production for its audience and another that falls a bit short. In reflection, I have challenged myself and now challenge you all to consider every time you work as a dramaturg, especially if you are working directly with your audience, ask yourself where do the gaps lie and how can dramaturgy recognize and more importantly fill them? Thank you. Wonderful. And last but definitely not least, Nicola. Thank you. Hello everyone. This is digital rehearsals lost and found. Reacting to the social distancing mandates of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools across the United States made a massive overnight shift from learning and connecting in a physical classroom space to a disembodied virtual space. Simultaneously, Arizona State University's theater program followed a similar track moving from in person to online productions. How do we create new cultures and communities in a digital environment and what community building rituals and social connectedness are lost or gained there? As a former high school drama teacher who served as dramaturg for ASU's virtual production of machos in October 2020, I'm passionately engaged in an investigation of what was lost and found in the digital rehearsal spaces of machos and what implications that might have on theater making moving forward. We felt the first loss immediately. At our first Zoom rehearsal as the group silently waited for rehearsal to start, some cameras were on, some were off with just names in a black box. We were missing the community building chatter, hugs, introductions that a cast typically engages in prior to any rehearsal. Renowned drama teacher and academic Dorothy Hethcote defines drama unequivocally as an art that depends on the creation of cultures and communities. Although that pre-rehearsal engagement never robustly occurred on Zoom, we did find new ways to connect and build a rehearsal culture by centering ensemble. Tatral Luna's artistic director and macho's guest director, Alex Mehta, sought to dismantle the ideas of the sole genius with everyone else existing as helpers with the more inclusive focus that we are greater together. It required focused intention and extra work to design virtual rehearsal spaces that would immerse actors in each other's worlds and create connection. Alex used check-ins at the start and end of rehearsal, music and various digital real-time engagement platforms to enhance the actor's ability to cultivate empathy for each other and build meaningful connectedness. Though initially we lost an authentic awareness of each other in the digital rehearsal space, eventually we were able to engage in the authentic online. Our next loss occurred as we moved past table readings and into blocking and choreography. Macho's is a physical, musical, vocally rich production which explores the topic of toxic masculinity through vignettes, monologues, musical interludes, and a gallery of overlapping voices as a framing device. And Zoom at that time had a persistent lag in video that did not allow two people to speak at the same time with any fluency, let alone an ensemble group of eight. We lost the ability to speak in a group voice. Over time with David Olarte, our award-winning salsa dancing choreographer, we began to discover ways to use choral lines as musical cadence to perform mostly together. Though it was nothing like merging voices in a live performance space, we were making headway until our next loss occurred with the privileging of new technologies that ended up leading to a complete erasure of ensemble performance. Digital performance author Steve Dixon points to the root of our problem here saying, in discussions about the use of technology and performance, there's often an over focus on technological tools. Dixon calls it a fetishizing of technologies. Without regard for artistic vision and content, privileging the latest technology in Macho's led to a profound miscalculation in the capacity of actor home Wi-Fi systems, insufficient time to optimize operation of said technology, and ultimately to cutting all of the choral, group, dance, and music sections, which severely limited the artistic vision of the director and eliminated all of the choreography and movement work that was created by David and the cast. In this final loss, we found it necessary to mourn the production that might have been. From my artist educator perspective, I continue to investigate the disembodied reality of rehearsal when it moves exclusively to a digital realm where traditional understandings of embodiment, participation, and ensemble no longer apply. In the classroom, drama educators are invited to actively help participants interpret and derive meaning from digital experience. In the world of rehearsal, I hope to continue to explore digital practices to avoid, as well as rehearsal practices that enable theater makers to find one another again, both online and live. Thank you. Yay, wonderful, wonderful. So I would like to invite all of these incredible hot topicers to show your video again, if you would, and be prepared to unmute yourself so that you can join the conversation. I have been, as I said before, to so many of these different hot topics, and each time I'm sort of have this moment of, I don't even know what to ask, I have so many thoughts and it's so much information, and that, my friends, might be exactly how you're feeling if you're in the audience, right? But this is truly the reason for our sort of moving so quickly was exactly for this moment for getting your feedback and your sort of questions that you might have. I want to start with a question, if I may, for Jack that came up pretty early on in the chat section, and this will get us started maybe. Jack, it looked like there was sort of a little bit of a pushback or a question at least about whether or not dramaturgs are simply called consultants in film. I mean, clearly we all know that dramaturgy always happens whether or not there's a person who's technically named a dramaturg, right? But that's not just what Jack was getting at, so I wanted to give him an opportunity to talk a little bit about that role in film that is the consultant, the research consultant that might be sort of like a dramaturg. Sure, I'm glad you brought that up, Jane, because I noticed that comment as well. In the film world, consultants can deal with all different types of subjects with a film. You can have a consultant, for example, if you're doing a war film, you might just have a consultant that just like has a military history, and that's their background, somebody who served in the military. So most of the time when a consultant is used on a film, it's not necessarily a dramaturg. They're like like a certain field that's like a reference for the production team. So that's where I really see a difference between a consultant and a dramaturg. As we know, a dramaturg is a person that's always questioning everything, a person that's always there for everybody, not only as a researcher, but in different ways. So from my film experience, I've learned that there's really not somebody like that in this business, and that really surprises me. I think if you had somebody during the process in the film world, it would just bring a totally different thing to the project. I hope that answers the question. Yeah, I think it does, and it also does exactly what hot topics should do, which is to perhaps provoke even further conversation. I've seen a lot of conversation on Twitter about why Netflix needs their dramaturgs, Netflix, and so on and so forth. A couple of questions coming in that I also want to address and kind of uplift. One that is sort of for Cassandra, but also for anyone who might want to speak to it about this question of lobby displays that are trying to bridge a gap for audiences that aren't represented in a play. And we see that happening with, as Cassandra was saying, with the Christians and Lucas Nath. But now I kind of open it up again to Cassandra or anyone else here of other examples when you've worked as a dramaturg, and this question of representation. How have you perhaps used a lobby display, a website, other kinds of means to ensure that your audience members feel included in the conversation? Or are there times when that perhaps is not actually appropriate? I can start it off. So another show I worked on was a production of The Wolves by Sarah de Lap, which I'll actually talk about at the in-person conference in Mexico. But in it we, yeah, it's very exciting, but in it that in that show our cast was nearly all white and it's a show about like soccer and right soccer is a very international thing and a very not-white thing except really in kind of like competitive soccer in the US. And so I wanted to give space to kind of comment on that with my dramaturgies. So my lobby display, I created a Hall of Fame where it included and I was very like particular in choosing soccer players from around the world and how and like commenting on that internationalism of soccer. So that's another way like a lobby display can kind of key in to maybe where the show's lacking and then kind of provide a counter commentary to it. Yeah, I often call it intervention dramaturgy. Nicola, did you want to add something to that? Yeah, yeah, if you don't mind just really quick. I think it was just what last year, I can't remember, time gets so lost in the pandemic. But anyway, we did a show Indian school about the Indian boarding schools and just the complete cultural, linguistic everything erasure of the native nations like youth. And we have also at Arizona State University a really large white population. And so we were really tasked with the idea of how do we, how do we help them understand, you know, what this did to the people. And some of the things that we did with our lobby display is we're very much around like felt theory, helping them to really understand the emotions, the deep trauma of the First Nations youth. And so we used a lot of photography, we used a beautiful poem that talked about running away from the boarding school because it was such a terrible place to be. We also used stories from various people that we knew that had maybe attended or their mother had attended the Phoenix Indian School. And so I think those were really great ways to help connect the audience to something they might not be familiar I personally applaud and I'm so glad to hear people talking about dramaturgy that's not just about research and words, but also about feelings and trauma experience, things like this. Jack, you may have seen we have a follow up for you, but I actually want to pivot just for a moment. So if Jack, you want to take a look down in the Q&A and prepare yourself for that one, if you can open that up. But in the meantime, Chambers et al, the incredible team behind Ghostlight, the translation, we're wondering if loose testigo will be available in the United States. Now can you hear me? Great. I do not think that it will be available in the United States. You'll be able to order it probably through Esenología. And but I don't think it's going to be sold in the United States. So you have to be in Mexico or in another Latin American country to get it. And Brenda, do you have a good way for someone to a reason that someone might want to come to Mexico City maybe next week sometime to, you know, just prepare for that purchase? That sounds great to me. That would be perfect. You can get, you can get my friend Marta and Michael Chambers and Annalola. Yeah, come to Mexico and discover what drama he's moist also. Marta, Annalola, did I cut you off? Did you have something else to say? No, I'm so excited. And also, especially I think the second edition sounds like it's doing some very important work of taking this introductory dramaturgy book and addressing some of these crucial issues that many of us have been encountering for quite some time, but especially I think palpable now after the death of George Floyd, but also after the pandemic and the kind of outpouring for Black Lives Matter. So, Jack, did you get a chance to see this question? Do you want to quickly address it for us about creative consultants and if that's sort of what you meant? Sure, because I noticed in that comment before that Melanie had mentioned that she knows somebody that a student filmmaker that's working with a dramaturge on a documentary. And I that that kind of goes in what my my way of thought about how you can use it in any type of film documentaries are great because documentaries just just think about the research you can do and how they they can help the whole team with that process. But as far as I can read I think that's a good example of what I was mentioning earlier about how consultant there's all different types of consultants. If you have a creative consultant then they might be dealing with one form of the production that that needs work on the creation of it. It might be they might be creative like in the early stages in development and pre-production and helping everybody getting ready for the film. They might just be used later in the film after it's shot. How do we how do we put these things together for the other? I think a creative consultant is like a good word to say different different ways that that dramaturge could be used but it makes me wonder why can't you just use the word drama why can't you just have something yeah what what's wrong with the word I mean I mean if you're if you have the word consultant for all different types of things why not just have the word dramaturge in a in a crew category and that dramaturge deals with all forms of dramaturge with the production you just don't see that so uh thank you does that help answer that yeah I think it does and I think it's going to continue to be a conversation we will have so Veronica and by the way I've seen a lot of conversation on Twitter about this too so really really provocative presentation so important and a question about how you use your performance assignment that that is in your class to help counter the canon. That is a great question and what I will say is that previously it has been the group project where it it is generally generally what I do is that students have to choose a scene from one of the plays we read or from a play that we haven't read and stage a scene and it's important for them to answer the why this play now question which was a question that came up so wonderfully in the Canadian Mexican dramaturge conversation yesterday. I will say though that I'm starting fresh this semester with this theater history class and I'm trying to reimagine it I've like I said I wrote the syllabus I haven't yet written the assignments so I'm looking for different ways we are theoretically going to be in person but I'm also thinking about what happens if we have to go virtual and I'm looking for ways to reimagine what that part of the semester looks like in terms of really focusing in on students who may or may not be theater majors giving them that experience of getting something on their feet which I think is just it changes the conversation in such an important way so I would love suggestions actually of what folks are doing in their classes and I also want to add on that I was speaking very U.S. college centric because I live and teach there and I have little idea of the core structures beyond our imagine borders so I actually would love an exchange of conversation about what this class structure and content is like in terms of teaching theater history beyond the U.S. Thank you. What beyond the U.S. KJ I think I saw your hands did you want to try and yeah I have a couple that have worked really well and the first one was taught in sort of the the you know I punted it was my first time teaching theater history so it was very much in the way that Laurent like this is how I learned it so this is how you're going to learn it but what I did we did a unit on medieval mystery plays and we really looked at what are the key things in it and so we talked about the the the fact that the sacred and the profane were right next to each other the fact that it used contemporary language the fact that it wasn't meant it had to have humor in it and it was meant to be for everybody and so my students staged their own they created their own and this was when I was teaching at Chicago State University which is a predominantly black institution so it was really fun to see like what are what's your language and how does that get valued and some of the the the one that always sticks out in my mind they came up with Netflix and chill in the Garden of Eden and it was great like they really did amazing work and it was about like these texts aren't actually sacred they're about bringing a religious understanding to people you know and doing it in their language so that worked really well another thing that I've done in both there and at Arizona State is I do a sort of performative historiography review so like it's very open it's like talk about the semester and what you learned but do it through performance and that's worked really well too to see what they come up with and what what threads they pick up to use and it really shows you what what they're walking away with so that's been good and then finally I'm actually incorporating in my graduate seminar like a hot topics model for what I what did I miss because we're you know you still know regardless you roll over a lot of history so they get five minutes to talk about what they miss and though that's not a performance I think these hot topics are very performative and so it brings an element of that so those are a few ideas I always get I'm sorry if I if you need to move on but I would just want to say I always my students always are so creative when it when I ask them to perform something and really think about why they're doing it now and maybe change up you know not not think about placing the script within its time period but think about why now I had one class one group one time shortly it just a few years after the murder here in Baltimore incorporate that into their their interpretation of antiquity and it it was just it was amazing so getting students up and performing I think is really important in theater history classes great I'm going to turn to Marta or Maria and Fabian you may also see it in the chat now translated but I'd love to hear it out loud a translation of the question that we got for Fabian yeah I'm happy to help let's see Fabian let's see let's do this collective exercise and it seems that the performance or the representation drag in the United States more and more is commodified and commercialized for example it's very interesting to see branches help the lunches the lunches as well as the lady of the brunch eh no bendidos por toda la ciudad ozap con digo a este públicos que la en realidad están muy alejados de la cultura raíz drag no y entonces la pregunta es que si en tus círculos ha sido similar o y como o sea que si este fenómeno se ha dado en tus círculos también y como crees que el arte drag puede responder a esta commodificación y esta comercialización bueno pues es que creo que también hay como una diferencia muy fuerte en la territorialidad de de la manifestación drag porque en sí en en méxico existe como esta resistencia urgente y necesaria hacia las personas que pertenecen en el colectivo LGBT más no entonces eso hace que por por la cuestión como necesaria para crearse como no necesaria sino como natural o espontánea que el artista drag contenga un discurso político de protesta hacia hacia la creación de su personaje no o sea sin importar si se presenta en fiestas en bares en reuniones familiares para crear un espectáculo del pertenimiento etcétera el simple hecho de crear un personaje en méxico implica el tener que decir algo en contra de algún sistema no este con eso no quiero decir que tampoco en otros territorios en otras en otros países etcétera el el arte drag no tenga el valor o lo que sea no o sea simplemente creo que también como aquí existe el teatro comercial existió el teatro de revista existió la pantomima etcétera o sea creo que cumplen diferentes propósitos y están a acorde a las necesidades que en esos momentos surgen o sea creo que también es muy necesario que también bueno creo que es necesario también explicar que aquí en méxico obviamente y del de lo que más sale en cuestión económica de los artistas es crear espectáculos es para no es proporcionar un momento de diversión por medio de baile por medio de canto de show de magia de acrobacia etcétera proporcionar es un show entretenido para que los espectadores las espectadoras pueden disfrutar no tomando una cervecita comiendo un pastel echando la plática no pero simplemente o sea sin importar el hecho de que pues y por por cuestiones de que discriminatorias el arte drag en méxico no ha podido ser como llevado otros a otros territorios artísticos pues el hecho comercial es el lugar donde también encaja en méxico pero como ya lo expliqué sin importar ello en la creación del personaje que es como la base fundamental del arte drag para poder presentarse ante los demás ya contiene en sí mismo un discurso político que podría diferenciar a otras naciones o de otras concepciones expresiones del arte drag en todo el mundo muchas gracias morta muchas gracias very very interesting and i caught some of that thanks to my parents teaching me spanish way back in the day we do have a question that has come in on the chat that has come in in spanish that i was also trying to translate and that i cannot do at the same time so i will ask our bilingual truly bilingual individuals to take a quick look at that and perhaps someone could be ready to to ask that question to the larger group in the meantime sarah question about your bio actually someone's very intrigued by dramaturgy and the poetics of space could you tell us just a little bit about what the heck that means okay i just tried to write this clearly so i could say it clearly i don't know i have to say it all right all right dramaturgy and the poetics of space is a book project that i'm working on that explores a theory of form that is a poetics right a poetics is a meditation on what is artful about a medium and how that artfulness impacts the human consciousness right it's a theory of form right so it's a it explores a theory of form for contemporary hybrid dramaturgies that treats text-based theater with the same sophistication that we treat performance art live art and all the forms of experimental theater that have challenged drama in the last hundred years right because my argument is that contemporary playwrights are fully embedded in an artistic and cultural milieu that has assimilated the insights of a century of formal experimentation in literature the visual arts and theater the techniques of ochre directors and the processes of ensemble creation contemporary plays are part of the same scene they are not the opposite of that scene right and so space is the concept that drives my exploration of how we can better discuss the reordering of theater's expressive elements in contemporary plays and their staging i draw on gaston bachelard there and i i have a little bit of a conversation about the spatial turn in theory which is is sort of focused on the politics of space which is not absent right when you talk about a poetics of space but i'm really working on a sort of dramaturgical question right like what are the expressive elements and how do we talk about them in sophisticated ways for contemporary playwright that's that book itself sounds fire i mean fire i'm so excited to read it to put it on my shelf and to assign it prepare students absolutely do we have anyone who is ready to sort of help share the question from bruno just so that the the panel can kind of be on the same page yeah um marta or maria uh or brenda anyone it's okay if you don't hello yes i can try the first part um so bruno is saying hello i've loved everything that's been shared and i'm so excited for the translation of ghost light um fabian have you thought of strategies for joteria so i'm going to translate that as drag performance for queerness uh so for joteria to be a creative detonator or an expression that allows us to feel safe in our own work spaces so i'll start with that first part of the question if you can have thought of some strategies so that joteria is a creative detonator or an expression that allows us to feel safe in our work spaces and of course i think the most important thing and i wanted to address it a little bit in my reflection was that both creative processes and investigation and both educational in any area forgets the body and the geography of the of the user of the human being not in the creative processes normally when a man a person of biological biological masculine has to interpret a father for example house of dolls al al chico pues se le pide con una cierta actitud no de que tienes que tener una voz gruesa un porte muy recto ciertos movimientos muy precisos pero qué pasa cuando naturalmente una persona no comúnmente como se le llama quien mexico tiene movimientos amaneados porque así es una naturaleza y porque así es expresión y porque es válido se le imposibilita trabajar desde ahí no implicando que estamos en el teatro se manifiesta o se trabaja en una ficción desde esto no es real vamos a crear algo imagina que parte de la imaginación hacia el hacia el escenario pero y utilizando tu cuerpo no pero qué crees como esos movimientos amaneados esos comportamientos o esa voz delgadita no puedes utilizarla porque no lo requiere el personaje no entonces qué sucede te están auto cancelando no te están si pues si es una una cancelación no de tu voz de tu ser de tu esencia entonces creo que el empezar a abrir espacios de la misma comunidad o simplemente que no pertenezcan a la comunidad lgbt sino otras comunidades a otros otras compañías artísticas este instituciones artísticas el habilitar espacios en donde se considere el cuerpo del artista como principal eje creador creo que va a permitir una visibilización más amplia de la reivindicación de los cuerpos y la necesidad de decir eso yo y con eso trabajo no similar al arte de performance que utiliza el cuerpo del usuario como principal eje de creación y qué es muy importante lo que el cuerpo quiere manifestar no el mensaje que quiere decir su voz como artista no que es lo importante y no se censura ni se calla ni se ni se implementa otro personaje ficcional y no es el mismo creador creadora que se está manifestando entonces creo que bueno para cerrar la respuesta creo que el arte drag es como el principal terreno artístico en donde sin importar quién eres qué gustos tienes su preferencia sexual tu expresión de género puedes crear sin demora ser juzgado o reprimido no o cancelado del del tienes vos pero tienes movimenta manerado no puedes no sabes donde existe aquí en el arte se puede porque es importante el cuerpo de la persona y del creador well that there's so much more i want to talk about with the drag art in general and i don't know if you know this about me fabian but i love makeup and anybody who knows me knows that but i do want to turn to another panelist just to make sure we have coverage because brenda there's been a question for you about given that observers paradox that you talk about then how would you describe what it is that changes when a dramaturg is in the room i see question really everything i i wanted to dive in or like deepening that observers paradox and what it really means but with five minutes i couldn't but i think that the impulse of putting that in my say is for everyone to understand that in between what looks like things there's not an empty space there's a universe in that and one will inevitably affect the other one and the other one would inevitably affect the first one and that science and that social science and that's experimental physics it's not me saying it so i think that when anyone pays attention to something that something will change and i think that what drama is for the success of the piece or for the artist to be able to say what they want to and for the audience to understand that so i think just by paying attention and by looking at a thing it will change how i i would have to to have like an hour and a half to to maybe try to for to explain it to myself but let's talk about this in one of the conference bars maybe a drink will help everyone i 100% support that and i also just want to say that to me what you're talking about that notion of the will of the dramaturg being in the room and the desire of the dramaturg to have the playwrights work come to fruition to have the director's vision more clearly understood i'm very interested in that and i think it's very close to spellcasting if i may i think there's a certain kind of magic about it i think it has which is why i think not only would drinks help but also that it's so difficult to explain that we can't see it that it's something you know as we say in the south in the american south it's woo woo right um but in any case we've got a couple of these observations coming through if you haven't seen them in the chat also in the q and a about people's memories of theater history classes um and uh laronica i think that's such a wonderful question and honestly could be its own book how you remember being taught any kind of history because you know we're right at that moment uh certainly in the united states i i suppose probably many other places in the world about this question of who gets to teach history and how it's taught um but uh kj has said it's also about the way that the dramaturg watches yeah yeah because yeah there's a different kind of attention that we bring to the room and i know just also from directing there's a difference in when i'm playing the role of director than when i'm playing the role of dramaturg i look at things very differently and yes you better finish that dissertation first laronica you heard it from me um good uh questions coming through uh do we have any remaining questions i've been sort of soliciting for nicola um i know that nicola you've already had a chance to sort of chime in on some other things but also kj you know i don't know if you saw them yet caron gene but uh there were some great comments on twitter about what you were what you were talking about and i was personally really drawn to your your use of toxic positivity and i wondered if you could just take a moment to unpack that that definition what is toxic positivity i think i know but i'd love to hear sure and i'd actually love to invite nicola into this because the where it manifested most was on machos right but this idea um first of all like oh i think we absolve ourselves and this is rooted in white supremacy as well right um we have great intentions like we're going to make this cool thing happen and we allow that to um you know outweigh the impacts and the very harmful impacts that are caused and then specifically with this year it was like oh isn't this great we're learning we're doing all this cool stuff and it's so exciting and i'm sure we're going to figure it out and just never acknowledging the reality right that we're not getting there and it's a great idea but at a certain point you know we can't keep telling ourselves it's somehow magically going to work if it's not going to work so nicola i don't know if you want to add on to that yeah i'd love to just with a really specific example to illustrate really what i think you really said perfectly um but in in machos when it was finally revealed to the cast that you know that the 150 plus pages that they'd memorized and been working on were going to be cut down to i believe it was like six or seven monologues in a scene um the the the the leadership that that sort of explained it to the to the actors said we are thrilled that we're able to present anything we just want to celebrate the fact that we're putting on something and and we're just going to be happy with whatever we can do and almost immediately following that all the actors we usually kind of did a little check in at the end of the night with with the director and then of course i was there and almost immediately when we got into that space it just became heavy and sad and finally i just said you know i think we just need to mourn like i this is kind of like a funeral we just buried a show to some extent like we will be doing some but it isn't really celebratory and then the actors and you know everybody was just talking about how we can be glad that we were able to present something it was such a strange moment but at the same time really being able to mourn what what went away what was gone and was not taken because it wasn't good but simply because it couldn't be done technologically what a what an appropriate way also to kind of take a minute to put a bow on this session and thinking about what it has been like for so many of us in the university settings and beyond for theater i'd love to see awake for the theater that could not be right to sort of turn it into something perhaps celebratory as well right but still be able to grieve still be able to mourn we as usual this happens all the time with hot topics we've gotten so excited that we've actually kind of gone over time so uh i apologize but i do want to take a minute to thank the panelists this has been an extraordinary privilege and pleasure to to work with you um thank you so much for your very hard work to get all of these ideas moving and please if you haven't done so already uh to the panelists and attendees especially keep reaching out to us if it's at a bar or if it's over the twitter or email any other way we want to continue to hear from you thank you and i'll see you at the next lmda session and certainly um at the next lmda conference uh as we move to mexico city and then to philadelphia yes gracias hasta luego