 Let's give them a welcoming round of applause. Thank you. I thought I would just, in introducing the panel, just say briefly, Theater Without Borders is a volunteer network. It's just like the Lady's Sewing Circle at your local hardware store. It's nothing more and nothing less. We have no office, no telephone, no funding, no funders, no money comes through. We wrote www.theaterwithoutborders.com but we didn't know what the comm meant. We should have written more or net or something. So we really are literally just a grassroots group of volunteers. And you are welcome. We're hereby honorary members of the Theater Without Borders. We welcome you. So I wanted to say that some of us wear many hats. Many of you wear many hats. I do too. I sit here as I work for the Sundance Institute Theater program. For 10 years, we've been doing exchange in East Africa. We are starting to move north, which means to North Africa and to the Middle East. And now we just move back from a trip to Jordan, where we're reaching out to do peer-to-peer artistic exchange and exposure between United States and artists who ridden with other countries. I also sit here as a co-founder of Theater Without Borders. And because of that, a person very involved in something we call the Acting Together Project. And I just wanted to share that in relationship to what we're doing. I have a quote to share, which has motivated a great deal of the work that we've been doing in East Africa and continues to motivate the work in the Acting Together Project and Fulbright Ambassador. Fulbright is a program that is focused out at the United States State Department to create exchange between the United States and other countries. But this is the motivating quote. And it comes from N.A. César, who is a Martinique poet and political theorist who was very involved in the creation of the Negritude Movement. And this is what he said. It is a good thing to place different civilizations in contact with each other, that whatever its own particular genius may be, a civilization that withdraws into itself atrophies, that for civilizations, exchange is oxygen. When I was having a conversation with a movie Watyango, who was one of the great thinkers, journalists, writers in Kenya, he quoted N.A. César. And then he said to me, but that only works when the two civilizations that need each other need as equals. Because otherwise, the power differential can completely destroy that encounter. So he set up in my and our imagination for the Sundance program that the oxygen that one can gain from intercultural encounter can be both incredibly nurturing, but also potentially explosive. And that if the meeting is not carefully and ethically reflected upon, that there is danger as well as potential constructive impact. The Acting Together Project comes out of the Performance and Peace Building program at Brandeis University. And Theater Without Borders, as a network of artists, was adopted by Brandeis, which is based in Waltham, Massachusetts. And Roberto Morea, who's here and is part of the previous panel, is a co-editor of this book. It's a two-volume anthology of case studies around the world, or 18 case studies in the two volumes, of artists who are working in conflict zones. There's a 55-minute documentary. And as this says, Acting Together join the conversation. It's a community of artists who are working within conflict zones, who are working within a cycle of violence, whether it's repression and resistance, whether it's re-humanization, post-conflict, or whether it's reconciliation. And recognizing that that cycle of violence can include all those aspects. It's not necessarily in fruition of violence. It can also be in a period of repression, or occupation, and what do artists do in those contexts? What do artists do when there is violence in the media? And what do artists do post a violent context and are trying to re-humanize and reconcile the differences? So I have a little bit of slides to share. I'll just ask if we can go quickly. Oh. My part is the part. So this is Theater Without Borders. We welcome you, www.theatrewithanr.e, Without Borders.com. That's our welcome. And just go on. Just like you go. Toran asked me to mention something that Theater Without Borders has worked with Golden Thread Productions and with Vibrant Theater Works on, and with David Dynato from MAMMA on. And we have been doing a Theater in conflict zones presentations and exchanges with intentional emphasis on bringing people together who are working various conflicts. This is the Alhuga Theater from the Sudan. They work in the Darfur region. They're made up of artists from over 100 ethnic communities in the Sudan. And Ali Madi Nouri has created what he calls a theater of festivity, where the goal is to go into the Darfur region and actually create a party. Where by the end, everyone is dancing together. You can go on. Just like you go. We had a wonderful happy meal together. There's Toran, and me, and my husband, and Wali Shamil from University of Baghdad, and Amir Al-Azraqi from University of Basra, Shamik Nadeem from Ashoka Theater in Lahore, Pakistan. Oops, from Yale School of Drama. Ali is a student at Yale School of Drama. My husband and me, it's there. And we can look forward. We were having a meal together. In 2011, Goldberg University of Theater without borders brought Wali, and Amir, and Shahid to the United States to attend the TCG conference. And we had an event. David, who joined us. We can kind of just roll through these. They attended the TCG conference. There's Heather Raffo, who is the writer and performed with nine parts of Desire at play about Iraqi women, post the war. And this is Katrin Thieu, another founder of Theater Without Borders. This is Juan Lee, actually got his PhD at UCLA. So he's there. Having a reunion with Michael Hackett, who is the chair of the Theater program at UCLA. And Michael Rajar, who is a graduate there. And he was not teaching. This is a picture of the continuation of that project. Jessica was telling you that she was just in Basra at the University of Basra. These are photographs from her trip. So she's here with Amir. And the next four or five slides, here she is with one of her students, I think. Yeah. Because you did a workshop with that. And this is the audience that attended. This was an Arab World University Theater Festival. And Jessica was invited to be one of the jury panel. And they're going on. There's Ravi. There's Amir. There's Amir. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And these are some friends in your hotel. Yeah. So we can keep going on. The from Basra on to Hollywood is actually part of the original Climax 11. This is Catherine for you, who went to a women's international conference in Erbil, Soleimania, just this past week as well. And she's doing a presentation about the African Theater Project. And we're going forward. Here she is with some of the women who are part of this conference. It was created by Adolet Garmiani, who is Kurdish Iraqi and who created something called Art Road. And his commitment is to exchange with Iraq, the UK, and the United States now. And that's Petrine. And you can see the meal. That's the Sarah Sundi, who is a director from New York and who was also one of the guests. And Sarah's doing a presentation. And I said, I believe it's Petrine. Her presentation. And this final thing is the Acting Together Project again. And that's the end message. So I want to thank, because really what does exist now is David has traveled, David Diamond has traveled to Iraq, to Erbil, Soleimania, and I believe you invited Dr. Fadil Jaff to come back to the La Mama Umbria Symposium in Umbria, Italy. And Walid has been to Georgetown University. There were students from Baghdad University. So what we have been able to accomplish so far is just building up some relationships. And there are some university supporters that are helping to make that happen. And what our understanding is, is that the US Embassy is very excited now to apply more funding to cultural exchange. So useful or not, depending on whether or not people want to participate in US Embassy funding for their projects. So things are beginning, and our thanks to Golden Thread for initiating that with us and to Hygienic Beauty Works for making that trip to New York possible. So our panel addresses the kind of work that artists are doing here in the United States, as well as internationally, to create that oxygen when cultures come together and meet. And they're going to share with us challenges as well as successes, reflections upon their work. And we have some amazing case studies, so I'm excited to introduce them to you. So we're going to begin with Hugu Kain. Hugu is an interdisciplinary artist. She does site-specific work. Her areas of interest are memory, identity and culture. She was born in Cyprus. Her family fled the violence that was taking place there. And so she grew up in London. She's now living in the US. She teaches at the University of Minnesota, and she teaches theater directing. And she's going to give us a case study about a project that she's developing and working on. Thank you. And thank you so much for how I need to present and share my work with you. I'm located in Minneapolis, and it feels so wonderful to be in a community of people who are talking about things that I'm passionate about. Can I have the first slide, please? Great. Oh, nice. So I am just going to do a little bit of... I'm going to talk about a project that I'm currently working with colleagues on the big side of the island, and you probably don't know what I mean by that same review, so I'm going to have to back up a bit and share some history with you so you can understand that. But that's where I'm going to be focusing on later on. The project is in progress, so I feel very much in the mess of it. So it's been quite a challenge to try and get my thoughts together to make a coherent presentation for you. And I'm going to probably end up with more questions than answers in this conversation, so please don't take notes and ask me questions. Anyway, so backing up to the history, I am... So the history. Behind me, obviously, is a map of Cyprus, and on the upper right-hand side, you will see another map with a line across it, essentially the DMZ in Cyprus. The DMZ was created in 1974 after Turkey invaded the island and illegally partitioned it. It's important to note that Cyprus has been in a state of conflict before 74, that in fact Cypriots have experienced some sort of war-related conflict over 17 years. Since the World War II, the islanders have struggled to control their own political destiny, and violence has been an important factor in that struggle. The words to describe the nature of that violence vary depending on who you are and what you believe. The words terrorism, resistance to occupation, intercultural warfare, military coup, civil war, ethnic cleansing, invasion, reoccupation, partition, propaganda. All of these words are relevant to the Cypriot condition. As a territory, the island was occupied by the British from the late 19th century, and it suffered from policies that emphasised ethnic control and cultural division. These divisions went deep into the culture of islanders so much so that when the British finally left in 1958, the islanders did not stop fighting. They turned the guns on each other. And I have a British accent because I left the island as many people did in the purely violence. Next slide, please. So I create site-specific performance. Next slide. The focus of my book is really around violence and its impact on landscapes and communities. Site-specific performance is... The idea of it is that it's artistic work tailored to non-interlocations, and I'm trying to bring the power of theatre out into non-interspaces. My training is in classic stage work, but as my ethnic origins, we didn't have theatre when I was growing up. I'm an educated hilltribe, so to speak. So for us, theatre was a known event. So therefore, when I encountered theatricality, for me it made more sense to leave the theatre, which seemed to be an innovative field. So I walked into non-thater sites in order to create room. Next slide, please. So since 1998, I've been engaged in creating body work called Self-Portrait. Next slide, please. And this work involves stories about the war. This is clearly number one, which was staged in Minneapolis. Next slide. The next one is the orange rose, and that was based on the migration and the population exchange that happened as a result of the violence in Cyprus. Next slide. And this is also an orange rose. And stories from the DMZ, which bring me right up to their current time. As I mentioned, the DMZ partitions the island, and there are areas of the DMZ which are very wide and areas which are very narrow. And in 2003, the borders were opened, which allowed people to go across parts of the island and actually visit those spaces that they had abandoned during the population exchange. But back to the artwork for a moment. Can you please play on it for me? So orange rose, I'm just going to keep talking through this. There's no sound. Orange rose was based on interviews. A lot of my work is based on collecting interviews from family members from Cypriots because part of the issue of dislocation is memory. The idea of memory and post-memory, in other words, inherited memory, traumatized communities often experience this kind of hanging onto an event that was clearly important and then how that it gets passed on through generations. I was very young when I left Cyprus and my family did not speak of the violence. In fact, I felt the violence through their actions and through their indirect comments. So for me, the act of performance was to reclaim and understand my family's own responsibility and part of the violence. Orange rose was actually a work that focused on their migration. My family migrated from one side of the island, from the southern side, where we originate to the northern side. In order to survive. And then we ended up migrating from the northern side to England in order to survive. The exchange itself, there are many stories about suffering because of the population exchange but there are many stories about abandoning spaces because of the population exchange. Part of sighted work involves engaged research into the location in which the work will be tailored. This particular location is in Minneapolis and it's in a bomb site manufacturing complex which is located in Minneapolis. Now, the interesting part about locating work that's about one part of the world and the other part of the world is that you discover links or connections to violence through that research. So Minneapolis has a strong history of developing sophisticated weaponry which end up in parts of the world such as the Middle East. And for me it was an attempt to return back to the American community some aspect of violence that they were responsible for and start a conversation. Can you stop the video please? Moving forward, so in terms of the field research can you move one forward please? I returned to Cyprus in 2005 after the borders were opened in order to re-engage with my family's history. I went to the DMZ and this is in the area of Barosha where I was born and this entire area is actually within the DMZ. Next slide. I also went to my home village on the Greek side went to those areas where my family's stories were from to discover that our village was being used by the British military base which is over the valley there as a target practice. There are still bases on the island that are owned by the US and British military and so some of these abandoned spaces end up being places where strategic targeting happened. Next slide. I also visited sites on the Turkish side that were abandoned by the Greek community. Many of these sites kind of caught to us because they remain unresolved. Some of the work that I do engages with culture geographers and with people who are working in the area of social work and culture geography and we engage in this kind of investigation of landscape and an understanding that empty buildings such as the one behind me are buildings that are unresolved because the narratives cannot be resolved behind them. The decisions can't be made to move them forward and that's sort of how I think about the issues that are psychic within conflicted communities that our narratives are not resolved so therefore it's very hard for these communities to move forward and engage in a vision of what could be in the future. Next slide. This is an image from the DMZ itself. I ended up inside the DMZ because I happened to meet the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research. As my research involved interviews I also happened to then encounter a group which were doing the same thing. The AHDR is an engineer that's working within the DMZ with UN support and their work is engaged in collecting stories and memories from both sides of the island in order to find a way in which to resolve their conflict. Because of our division on the island the narratives that exist on either side are in conflict. I have found that the Turkish side focuses on a particular period of history which is 63 to 74 which was a time of great suffering for the Turkish community. The term ethnic cleansing started on the island because the community itself was being encroached upon by the majority. And so the political infrastructure uses this narrative in order to justify the mainland Turkish occupation to say that mainland Turkey is here to protect us from the criminals across the way there. So we want to keep this division. On the Greek side the focus is on the period post-1974 and onwards because when Turkey invaded the island they inflicted, their military inflicted its own violence and some of the Turkish community joined in with that violence also. So many would disappear as a result of that. And so the Greek dialogue is everything was fine and then Turkey invaded and we suffered. So that's the dialogue, the narrative that continues on the Greek side. The effort of the AHDR is to actually look at multi perspectives in history to understand that we can be suffering we can be communities that have experienced violence but we can also own the violence which we have inflicted on others. So the AHDR attempts to bring balance to that conversation they do that by training teachers to re-educate history. So what am I doing with them? Next slide please. I'm going to stay on that for a while. That's an airport behind the DNC. The AHDR has developed a home in the DNC. Instead of treating it as a problem they're looking at the DNC as an asset. What they've done is renovate a house that happened to be owned by Armenian secretes and they have called it the Home for Cooperation. The Turkish side of the division is actually illegal so it has no international standing which means that it's very hard for anyone on the Greek side to engage with the Turks in any kind of constructive or legal dialogue. So the Home for Cooperation is an attempt to have discussions under the guise of neutrality because the DMZ is a liminal zone which is the zone that is empty. It has no status. The UN currently has troops monitoring the DMZ but essentially nothing happens. It's held in time since 1974. One of the things I like to talk about is cars show and it's filled with cars from 1974. Sit there covered in dust. People's newspapers sit there with 1974's news on it and so piles. So this kind of warfare doesn't exist or it doesn't exist as much as it used to I guess. So anyway, the attempt that I'm working at in the DMZ is to collaborate with the HDR and engage with the Home for Cooperation to work with artists from both sides of the division. I have met theatre artists on the both side and the Turkish side willing to engage in a dialogue. The Rooftop Theatre, led by Elada Evangini and the Municipal Theatre of Nicosia led by Aliye Olamal are willing to talk with me. So when I arrived in 2011 to witness the opening of the Home for Cooperation began a dialogue and these two artists had never met each other. My arrival allowed them to do that. We have been having a correspondence online for over a year trying to understand how we are to work with each other and I have to emphasise that's actually quite tough. I arrived on the island thinking that I was going to make a collaborative performance much like the work that I had done and I was quickly slapped away by my collaborators to realise that the state of pack of propaganda within which they live in this kind of cold war makes it impossible for them to imagine collaboration with me and then along with each other. So therefore we had to back up we had to decide how are we going to move this forward and one of the resolutions we recently came up with is we simply going to have a short period of time and show each other what we've got. In other words, we're going to show each other what are you doing in theatre, what are you doing theatrically. We're trying to use theatres and mutual territory in order just to be in the room together because first of all it's very hard to be in the room together since our past really influence our presence. We cannot seem to have a dialogue because language itself gets in the way or whether you're calling it a freedom struggle makes it almost impossible to have a conversation coming to a close. Alright, so society practising the DNC what does that mean? I have to say that I don't know, I'm still trying to find out. I have learned that there's another aspect to this which is the diaspora that I come from I have the privilege of coming in and out of the discussion I have learned that do no harm is very important within these contexts because I have witnessed artists that have done work that have done harm because it's been used by one side or the other to justify the division and I have learned that theatre practice above all does allow people to engage in some kind of common understanding regardless of the context within which we find ourselves and I'm going to leave you with the next slide and the MP3 that I heard Thank you The MP3 is based on some interviews I did with artists while I was on Cyprus and this gives you a little taste of some of the work that I hope will come out of this collaboration It's a crime against humanity not that it's a great crime it's a crime against humanity understanding that to be honest when I started working on it it didn't even bother me in which community it came from it's too monastic unless I found out that we are barbarians we are also barbarians we are also barbarians as Greeks so I took my comrades as well and did it, you know I wasn't like when I went first people didn't want me there so I'm very pushable so the Greeks, they hated the Greeks I'm not going to be how I am being you are how I have to be I'm not going to be how I am being you are how I have to be I'm not going to be how I am being you are how I am being you are how I have to be no one recognizes my identity her not being able to speak as well was frustrating and a loss for all of us and I think one of many lessons about why these kinds of collaborations are so difficult because even with our best intentions simple things like communication can have huge meanings so her absence will be something you have to carry into your project yeah you know I'm not going to question the Greeks so yeah, the issues of absence are really prominent in this project because there's obviously my physical absence I come alone although I have a presence and my family maintains a house in Cyprus so I have a foothold still on the island and my extended family still live there but then there's the absence of the Greeks on the Turkish side which we see within those buildings and then there are the absence of the Turks on the Greek side and in my conversations with Aliada one of the things that we've discovered is that you know on the Greek side she said to me recently there's a Turkish Cypriot and that doesn't we don't quite know what that means for us to encounter Turkish Cypriots and yet I grew up with a Greek Cypriot next door to me in London who also fled the virus so I grew up in an environment where I'm very comfortable with Greek Cypriots my mother speaks to a Greek with a trilingual on the island and so this idea of absences this is not printed by the memories and the absences of the other because Cypriot culture it's a unique culture it's an island culture Greek and Turkish Cypriots are rather similar in many ways as well as they are distinct the Turks on the island speak a version of Turkish that is rooted in Ottoman and has lots of Greek in it and the Greeks speak a version of Greek that is rooted in Ottoman so it's very interesting that the Greek culture that's on the island is our common bond and yet we cannot seem to even be in the room together our foods are very similar our festivals can be similar my mother in London used to help her Greek neighbour make pastries for the Greek Easter celebrations she may have to look in it so this is absences and presences are really interesting so Aladdin being here is an absence that I feel and I wish she could be here because her experience of the division and her experience of the unification through the border opening is very powerful which I could not experience I think you were great in offering us lessons that you've learned challenges that you face if our next speaker is going to talk about some lessons where Andrew Wood is the Executive Director and the founder of the San Francisco International Arts Festival and he is going to share an overview of some of the intercultural exchanges that he's helped present and facilitate here in San Francisco first I should say that the birds have brought things into kind of relief for me when she said she mentioned the theory of communication we're not members of PCG we're members of the association performing arts presenters I'm not going to focus on the philosophy or the politics or anything that everybody can talk about we're talking about economics and logistics of making projects work there's three things we can do for San Francisco International Arts Festival the first and one that we'll be talking about mainly today is the specific event we do projects with Bay Area artists that will collaborate internationally we also present artists for the part of the world we're on a shared stage with approved global artists and the other thing we do is we present artists who usually do not have international representation from other parts of the world so often it's the first time we're in this country and it's the first hundred new percents but we kind of do and the reason for the first one focusing on is that the Bay Area it's not just exclusive to the Bay Area but we were a very group incubated a lot of young people come here wanting to be artists they learn a lot about the craft of being a professional artist and they get to a certain point of their career and they wonder what they're going to do next and what time they meet so what we try and do is work with them a lot of the time not always but a lot of artists travel around the world to gain experience to meet other people and there's loads and loads of time we should work together we should work together so what we're trying to do is develop projects with artists to work cross-cultural with people from other parts of the world and there's very practical reasons for wanting to do that again, in San Francisco a lot of time you'll put up a piece of work it's theatre, it's three or four weeks and it's down to one or two weeks and then you'll never do it again you'll work for one or two years on putting this piece together and then once it's done it's done with no more money for it they've never seen so what we try and do is work with artists from other countries so at least a piece can be presented in San Francisco and that country and we can also in the best case scenario we try to make it so that money can be raised in that other country as well in fact a lot of the time you know Americans have always complained about how much money there was in Europe and Japan and I said why do you stop complaining and go and get some of it that's one of what we're trying to do is try to set up relationships where that can happen set up situations where that can happen so that the piece can be created and they're paid for it and then knowing that there might be more earning opportunities and it happens somewhere else rather than here it's basically how do you make San Francisco the Bay Area your home knowing that a lot of the time you're not going to derive an income from being here unless you're supplemented with teaching or doing something else so that's kind of what we do and things to know about international collaborations they are a choice you don't have to be an international collaborator you don't want to do your work could be based exclusively here that's great as well what we do when we talk to artists there's always one why do you want to do this and the why for me is where is this going to take what are you going to know about yourself in your career after you've been through this project or this process and the reason I asked that is because these things take a long time they're very expensive half the time they don't work you could spend two or three years of your life your professional life working on something that doesn't come from fruition or has a bad outcome so what what's the stake what's any for you to want to try and accomplish this and if you can't answer that question it's really the non-staff there's no basis for wanting to do the work and then the other thing about is we have to be able to accept a change or be open to change because a lot of the time the project's kind of meandering the different directions that you're expecting to and just being able to go with the flow because there's a lot of times that don't work and what we like what we prefer is that the artists make the connections it's for as a presenter if I'm in the business of putting artists together if something goes wrong it's my fault and I don't want that to happen I want the artists to be all in responsibility for the work and then bring the relationship to me so that's what I'm saying when you're going out in the world in your extended business you think there's something you want to work with and you really want to try that that's great because that means you're not being told to do something by an administrator who thinks this would be a cool idea so there's that it is preferable if there are institutional partners in both countries or all countries there are instances where the discussions that we've had today in some of the countries that may possibly be going to happen and that's okay as well we can work around that but it's preferential if there's a potential to raise money in both countries or in all countries and the other thing is that it's unique there's no kind of formulaic approach to this there's no one way that we'll work that we'll definitely work for somebody else again it's just being open to changing open to ideas, being open to to figuring out things sometimes as you go up but there is one thing that that we do that is required and that's there needs to be trust and understanding between all the protagonists between the producers, between commissioners, between the artists if you're in a game where nobody really knows what the other side is doing and not being able to trust each other it's much more difficult to do the work not impossible but much more difficult and these things are already logistically difficult in the first place just by the nature of what they are by the proximity when communications have become far, far more easier and for the last few years and they used to be but it's difficult traversing time differences hundreds of thousands of miles makes it far more difficult and it has to be a willingness to acknowledge and respect differences in culture, practice and approach if you go into it thinking how away is the way we will teach them you are almost certainly going to pay them there's really been that part that can't really happen so what I'm going to do is just go over some projects and I've prepared far more slides and I had time so I'm just going to skip over some but the first one and this was really the the idea for the first campaign this happened before the San Francisco National Arts Festival this happened when I was the director of the UC Theatre Jess Curtis was first of all a member of the Group Contraband in 1980s and 1990s he had been travelling around Europe and he came back from Germany saying I want to work with this company called Company Fabric from Potsdam to create this piece and he said can you help I said sure, we'll co-commission so there was Potsdam the Fabric Potsdam there was Art Brown Art Brown and Brownschwein and there was ODC Theatre and I raised about $25,000 the Germans raised about $45,000 I asked for a whole lot of money but it was enough to make the piece in community in San Francisco and in Potsdam which we did but then Jess took that piece to the Edinburgh Festival and for those of you who don't know it is a dog meat dog place there's a thousand different performing arts companies all battling it out in the fringes and anything done but Jess and Fabric got a fringe first one of 12 companies that did that piece was then performed 200 times in a different country and I just thought there's a lesson to be learned here I wasn't quite sure what it was but there was a lesson to be learned and so we thought this is how we can maybe learn about how we create those conditions which I said at the beginning how do we create opportunities for our people outside of here so that they can continue to live here and at the time Jess was an individual artist he had no resources of his own and it was how do we create a relationship that can allow him to work in both countries in both countries in Europe and in the United States and so as we began the festival we started looking for existing relationships like that so this next one is Shinichi Irohikova of INPUT he's performing with Goh Theatre from Russia and again this is something that Shinichi had created he was a journey, he was one of those people that just travelled around the world making projects and moving on wherever the next paycheck was basically and how he was created and collaborated but again he was an individual and he had no real resources and if you will determine his own destiny the journeyman part was our own necessity as much as anything else it was also a great learning curve for him and a great experiential thing but it was also how the order of business was such that you move where the money is but again how do we create an environment where he can live here knowing that he can be working somewhere else a lot of the time and so by the time we got to 2005 also Jess Curtis by this time we helped him and he had his own offices in Berlin and in San Francisco and Jess continues to work within this model so he spends part of the year in Berlin, he's funded by the Germans he spends part of the year in San Francisco he's funded by the Americans and he does his touch talk for collaborations with many of his artists from Europe that allowed him to take the work around Europe and the United States and create opportunities to keep all these people on board this was touched which was actually far less successful than before but just to show you not everything can be great but it was still a performance that we raised with Jess about $100,000 with that together and with all of Europe and the United States Continuing the German theme this is Mr. Peter Weiss he is an engineer he uses amazing light shows and technology and Peter's here because we work with him on three different occasions with two different samples of artists early involved in 2005 and 2008 and he's silenced imagery in 2010 and Peter and I are now talking about another project that will happen which will be probably 2014-2015 so it's going to be a site specific project of what they want to do and there has to be money raised for that and he's known one of those artists and as is early they've gone through the process of being individuals to becoming five or one of these three organisations so that they actually have the capacity to earn money and raise money themselves without having to be the ones that put it forward and the other thing which I should have pointed out in the beginning like we've got is that these projects take a long time like I say it's about three years between fruition and between conception and fruition, sometimes longer and it takes between two and five different non-profit organisations to raise the money it's horses for horses basically and in this country you can usually go to one foundation for one thing a year so what we do is we run different organisations so that there's always somebody every time there's a grant deadline we have a horse in the race and you might only get the money half the time and that's what usually happens is that for all the reasons that things don't happen most of it is financial we'll start with 20 projects at the end of the race there's only 10 of them left and some of them will be because of artistic differences some of them will be for other reasons but alone it's just we have to raise the money or the project is kicked down a road another year and we start to raise more money and that game has become a theme it's a very special question why do you want to do this with this very uncertain, it takes a long time so people are you received proposals from the get-go so someone would come in to you with an idea like in the year and they said ok, there's a company in Iran or Syria and I want to I'm an artist, I'm motivated and I'm doing a project in the countryside and she would make it closer to you and you would consider the range of proposals and then you would as a producer as well as a presenter we do we do a range of things there's only a certain amount of liability we can take as an organization different artists and again this is why we're talking about creating 500C3 so that artist has the ability to raise money without a response there's actually be more in control of raising the money we can raise the money with that and again, different artists require different levels of interaction with that if you have no infrastructure then it requires a lot from outside if you have your own non-profit organization you have your own staff and then there will be other companies right how much more time do I have? so this one this one with Abedah Takwera their reason for partnering with their parent organization was because the grants of the art wouldn't give them any money Abedah, which powers not to be out of concern they were a school they were not a legitimate presenting for artistic organization so in this very room at this stage we brought to their parent company and with grants of the art sitting in an audience of 300 people screaming and screaming they performed their show three months ago and grants of the art last month they've been on there ever since this one I'm sorry that's alright thank you so much thank you very much the contrast between you are an artist you're doing this because it's your life's work to address this particular place and you're helping us to understand that the artist brings that passion and yet there's still a whole series of very practical steps to get that passion and I have to say that everything you've said I completely have experienced the length of time the agility we thought you were going to do this that is all the experience of putting things not just in but that's an international field this is also a law zone and then we have the added layer in my situation in this other territory which has no funds I've tried to get funding to go but it doesn't exist I'm going to fall in the ocean because there are elements to international work that you have to deal with in which situation and you have to get skills that are nothing to do with art right so I'm going to move now to the article and to take from what you said Henry that the artist has to bring life's passion has to bring tenacity and perseverance to make sure that this happens so there's a motivating force within the artist and I think both of our next speakers have life work that expresses this passion so our next speaker is Eva Cooper she's a director or a performer and part of the artistic advisory board at Brava she is going to talk to us about the experience of directing of as she called it, persistently white universities and her example is American Mall thank you I guess we did at home a bit and it seems a little funny that I have to say that my conflict areas are Indiana and Colorado so I think you know what I'm talking about so and it could be subtitled how I got thrown out because I would say that there as I was listening to the previous panel and to I realized what do I have if there's not a real danger my life was not threatened at least I may be bringing a certain idea Indiana in particular but it seems to me that in the context of the future of this idea of how you deal with the post trauma what happens when you're post violence and post trauma, post racial as it were and you want to speak to those concerns you still feel a necessity or interposition that you are still not somehow in a zone where you can speak freely so I was at the University which is a Buddhist institution in Colorado with a local choreographer and we were thrown out of there and then I went to Indiana University and proceeded to do the same thing that I did at Naropa which surprisingly we were thrown out of there as well so I wanted to speak to how that happened so at Naropa we were women of color Mara Tabor Smith a local choreographer there were some people brought from Guinea and from Ghana to teach after dancing we were basically teaching non-white practices non-European performance practices to mostly what we thought were white students and in both situations part of the issue was that when we ended the program both times my work was anti-racist that we were Naropa called it browning the students and I said what is browning and they said well they walk into your classroom white people and they walk out in their Italian and their Colombian and their Haitian and you know suddenly so this is a I'm curious as to what is threatening about that still but here I sit before you having lost two jobs as a result of browning so in both places I worked with American Mall which is a satire about slavery by Robert O'Hara and subsequently worked with Parentheses of Blood Sonia Lava Tansi as a Congolese writer and I would say that in the case of Sonia Lava Tansi's work I worked completely without any Congolese oversight advice I was working under a very small advisement of Keith Miller and in my years I had done and the result of parentheses in Indiana was that one of Sonia Lava several of Sonia Lava Tansi's friends and supporters came to the end and said yeah this was a good interpretation of the work but I would say that I went into it because I wanted to experience it and I had no idea what Congolese theater was like and I wanted to actually see if I could unlock this translation of Congolese work despite the fact that there were no Congolese people available for me to speak to but I want to focus on American law which is an American play a satire about slavery and I chose this play because I wanted in Indiana in particular to have a conversation with the students on race and culture gender and sexuality that I saw not being talked about there were very dangerous ways not being talked about there were lots of stereotypes being put on the stage, unquestioned lots of representations that were going unquestioned and I realized the students not only didn't have the capacity to understand this probably because there was no conversation around any of these issues having incited crime despite the fact that Indiana has a wonderful gender studies program and a pretty strong history in African American studies program but in the theater department no one knows about this and later my goal became to smash what I call hierarchical paradigms that played the theater that if you want to look at like the director actor paradigm and really just bits with that as an oppressive measure and to find new ways to collaborate with the students that didn't reify those oppressive paradigms I was very aware that I wanted to reify anything oppressive in these places because that was the more and so I wanted to make sure that I smash smash smash my fear always is that in America theater so defanged in a way that we can never produce theater that will get us in trouble so one of my goals I suppose has been to produce the theater that will get me locked up and so going to Indiana was a start so American mall just because the premise of American mall is that the president to resolve an economic crisis ask black people to visit slavery once again this time a little bit better and maybe there will be some wages passed on but there was a new continent in it by Eli Whitney the fifth and this needed to be handpicked and since black people sort of had that in their DNA the president felt like maybe we could start there like we could return it to the plantations down south deep down to get the picture and like taxes it wasn't mandatory you were asked to do this but there were dire consequences if you didn't like taxes and like taxes there were some exemptions one of them being if you could prove you had enough presidential life you would have sent it from a Jefferson or a Washington or a Lincoln then you could be exempt from the way down south to pick the first and the middle and first and then so that gives you a little overview of the structure of the play of the plot of the play and it's told through two families the Franklin which is a white family and the Jefferson who lives next door to the Franklin who all get along quite wonderfully until the president's eating comes out and then they turn on each other so the play which was commissioned by ACT and I was Robert's assistant director of production at ACT is a way of addressing tenuous relations between people racial relations in the United States through the lens of farcical comedy so to put on a farce about slavery seem appealing to the administration although I am convinced they did not actually read the play I said don't do a farce about slavery they said to people okay and then we started to rehearse and we got all this pushed back Bloomington Indiana is about twenty minutes from the clan headquarters together and while I personally wasn't in any danger because I'm in the theater department there were both in Colorado and in Indiana while I was there there was a lot of racial violence taking place and a colleague of mine was a staff of time in Indiana several people were spit on and beat up in Colorado there was a level of racial violence that existed outside of the theater department the theater department was not really able to look at and so I wanted to begin this conversation with the students I felt a need to begin several students of college or two or three that were there had begun to talk to me about a lack of opportunities and this play has 42 characters so I saw a way to really populate the play with both the people of color who left out of the misfits the people who were not being cast and so I started with the audition process by dispensing with the the hierarchy of auditioning and Indiana they dress up in their Sunday dance and they become a label a classical monologue so I asked everybody to bring Martin Luther King up through a cartoon character or some kind of character that could be funny this was done to give permission for us to laugh at race we needed permission to be able to I'd be black in the room the students are white and we needed permission to open up their minds in fact that we're going to be funny about racial horror in this play so I ended up with probably five times as many students as any audition I think the word got around that I was looking for the misfits and I was going to cast the uncastable and so the first red mark I got from the administration was your audition until one a.m. and so we had students lying down the hallway and we had a student a male student short and a perm with red lipstick and glittery high heel shoes on so they came out for it and so the costume designer and I we ended the audition process and decided it was funny that everyone who was funny would get cast so we went from a cast of 15 to a cast of 30 another red mark disrupting the typical process of the production process so we ended up with a cast of 30 which meant we had to costume by size and we couldn't cast this guy as the postman until we figured out if we had a postman to record the film so that's another disrupting of what is typically done in the theater so we went into the process this way I recluse myself from being the director and dictator and the student stage each scene at least three times and as a cast we chose bits and pieces from each stage and sometimes the stage of itself and as a cast we decided what the characterizations were going to be so as we rehearsed it whoever had been one of those who was in the room we rehearsed one time through and then the second time we rehearsed it with someone else until eventually the cast decided you made the great Jefferson you've done it three times in rehearsal so the casting came really later in the process requiring that the costume designer sort of switch it around we don't have a costume to fit so can Steve be the postman in spanking we played costume Jefferson in fear so this was very very disconcerting to the administration of the university and they were really mad that we weren't just following the rules and so I had you know but I had everybody behind my back and the designers were asked to defy the professors and we came up with this really great piece of work and I just want to speak about three things that have been originally self-adjusted I think are really the possibilities of potential of the democratic process here one was that we had to create a slave scene that opens with Thomas Jefferson and I was creating the constitution while slaves get caught underneath them and they're having trouble with that little thing about them all being free that's a truth and there's another point in the theater where Lincoln is trying to do his speech and every time he says free he has to duck because the bullet cuts out his hand so I said okay who's going to be my slaves all the black people you know your slaves so get them down on the floor okay who else is going to be my slaves is anyone in here gay identified get them down on the floor and then women there were a couple of women who said as a woman I'm a slave so we interested with people who had chosen to understand slavery through their own through their own lives and ended up as slaves in the play finally and then we had a couple of scenes where we had the Ruth was a character in a play who was kind of like an Oprah figure in drag played by one of the football stars of the football teams we had one of the football teams in drag another red mark and they were up against these Christians and so the guy who showed up in the red lipstick in high boots who was very out he jumps up and says I'll be the one of the gay couple and so it says I'll be gay with you similar to the people who said I'll be slaves with you so we had many many instances of this identification where we began to dissolve the boundaries and find ways that we were all involved in this institution of slavery and its aftermath and I would say that one I feel like to say is that one of the tactics was to make the cast as angry as I was so Agro played a large part of it and I told them that the audience was you're a cage lion and the audience is your prey eat those motherfuckers alive and then I showed them we watched the corporation which pissed them off royally we watched a couple of Michael Moore films which was all the information to these students and then we watched Paul Hoonan so I got the crew in the wild and then we took over the building we took over the building and we started to play from the front door to the back door so the audience had no escape and people were forced to walk out of the play and cross right across the play stage to walk out of the play and as they were walking out there were people still playing as they walked out there were still cast members still carrying the scene on all the way out into the audience so that was a little bit of my experience do I have to show a couple of images or not no, okay yes, yes, yes I'm sorry I have my 10s and 20s so this is a slave cooking pot and there's a thousand-year-old Sally Hyman who sits at the mouth of the Jefferson Memorial to determine who had presidential wife because she knows and then you see the forefather at the top of it this is the wife family the twin brother, Smith and Wesson won the play by a class special attention they told us we couldn't do it we got to fire Marsha from a whole state of Indiana to approve the process and we're burned across on one Friday this is one of the last scenes when they run out of board The presidential white was not proven. Sally took all the stuff that they had stolen, and they weren't Jefferson, so they would sit down south of Pigeon Street to ball their clothes, and here they are, at the post office, where they had to report to the police. And here's the son of the white, the dark son of the white family trying to scrub himself clean. It's called zespally clean. You're not fully clean, this is zespally clean. And here's Julia trying to escape, and the white mob had found her, stripped her naked, and had determined what they were going to do with her, and moved to the next one. And they take pictures like all the lynchings have pictures. And then the next one is, this is a, Abraham Lincoln, whose slave is asking, am I free too? And he's going, hell no. And then one of the changes was the doctor professor, they had been capturing black men all over since now they're in slaves, and auctioning some of the good ones off again. And he was a doctor professor who had gone crazy, like someone like the sniper guy, and had found himself in prison, so the men in prison were pulled at auction on Sundays. So he was auctioned along with some electric chair to keep him alive. And this is the football player who played Ruth Petitiony and Ruth eventually at the end of the play made to deal with the Native Americans. And here's our president, it was the eve of Obama's 2008 in May, and we were just figuring out that Obama just might be a contender. And so I decided that the president in the future should not be white, and we ended up with a Chinese president, and he chose to toss for himself. This being young, he's making it easy to talk about Walmart, to pick that new topic. And then here are the people lined up to get presidential-wide to see Obama there, and Colin Powell is there, and Ruby Boulder is there, and I never knew from night to night who's gonna show up, and I think some white folks showed up and ballot ended up in the line, Christine Aguilera was there, and one night I looked up and I was in the line, and they abandoned me, and took me in the line to play with my wife. And the backdrop was inspired by Banksy and Tesla's corporate money structure, because part of the play's premise is that it's the corporation economics that really becomes a divisive factor in this country at a lot of times. Thank you so much. My working down-tempo is transvesting, and through resistance. It's not always about coming together and attempting to peaceful co-operation steps. Yeah, and it was a very cross-cultural story. There were clansmen, I later found out, they didn't tell me at the time, but at post-production, there were grandsons of clansmen who sent me letters to have a couple of them, so thank me for putting them in the room with black people, of course, and then we'll look at their history and that. That's great. Thank you. So our speaker, and it looks like we're gonna wrap up with our final speaker, Phillip Conner-Tonda, who is an artist-in-residence at UC Berkeley, teaches playwriting there. He's a working playwright and one of the seminal artists in the American theater. I mean, they're so great, they're having a great time. Great. Well, that's a hard act to follow. I'm gonna try. My area of interest has been, or one of my areas of interest has been the intersectionality of groups in America, communities, when they roll up against each other. My hope is that what I'm going to talk about has resonance, has relevance to the bigger issues and bigger themes of the conference. That's my thing. One of my earliest investigations was this idea of an interracial marriage. This was contemplating having friends who were biracial, whose mothers were Japanese, whose fathers were American GIs, African-American, and I decided to write a play about that. This was about 20 years ago, and you put the slide up. This slide is a picture of a local jazz musician, Anthony Brown, and his parents. Those things, the gorgeous photograph. And that's been used as kind of a front piece for the play. And just in that photograph alone, you get a sense of so many things happening in it. What I'm working on right now is a play where I'm taking the wash. It's an old play of mine, an old family play about a Japanese-American family. And I've always been interested in in adapting that to another family of color. So it's a classic, it's a Japanese-American play. And I ask the question of when is a classic a classic? In that you can adapt classics and it's okay. And I thought, well, why can't a family of color be a classic? And then why can't if I adapt it, instead of going to the center, rather find a community group that's also, quote, on the margins, and adapt it in that fashion and what might we come up with? So I was able to talk to Stephen Anthony Jones who is a Lorraine Hansberg Theater. And this is something I've wanted to do for a while. So we're gonna adapt that play, The Wash, a Japanese-American family straightforward play to a Jamaican-American family. And of course, the idea is you have to think through and you have to sit down and figure out what is the continuity? What is similar at the core in some way that allows this work to function authentically? So that would be taking place and I found that the egress is going to be involved in the workshop. We're gonna be doing the ACT. And then finally, I thought I talked about a play called After the War. This was a play that I did at ACT about six years ago. You can begin the slides, I'm making a cabaret, pull this kind of cloud through them. What interested me was to look at a moment in history and see if there were a moment where there was this moment of intersectionality of two communities where they were on, as it was talked about before, they're both on the margins and yet there was an equitable footing. The period I looked into, an interesting period was post World War II in around 47 in San Francisco, in the Western Edition Districts and the Japan County District. They were side-by-side. What happened in the war is the Japanese-Americans were incarcerated. They left. In the interim, African-Americans and other marginalized peoples in Western Edition, the Fillmore District, naturally moved over and inhabited what was formerly Japan County. With them, they brought vibrant jazz blues singing. So you had Japanese restaurants that were now a nightclub featuring some of the top names in jazz and blues. This also happened in L.A. in Brownsville. So the Japanese-Americans get out of the incarcerated. They come back home and they want the neighborhoods back. And this is that moment when I thought, this is an interesting time period. Japanese-Americans, at this moment, are truly disenfranchised. They just been put in prison. They don't know if they're Americans. They don't know if they want to be Americans. And then African-Americans at this time, again, making sweeping generalizations. Some of them had been working and coming to the Bay Area to work on the docks, building ships. GIs were coming home. GIs were finding that they were still treated exactly the same after they'd been up their lines. They weren't buried in the cemeteries, they were put in white cemeteries. The workers, the dock workers, were already using their jobs. And there was a kind of unrest that was going on in the community. So I thought what I'd like to do is set up a board, there's a boarding house in which this Japanese-American man has come home to take over. And it's populated at this point in time African-Americans, poor whites from the South, or Russian Jew has come by way of Yokohama and Japanese-Americans. And so the protagonist is asked by his own community to take the community back, it should be Japanese-American. At the same time, Chek has made good friends with a real worthy African-American fellow who's been inside this boarding house. And Chek has an ex-Jazz musician. And at that time, he was jazzed with segregation. So Chek has been playing with black groups, if you can't play with white groups. So as a consequence, he has familiarity sort of with the culture. And so for him to have to make a choice that he's supposed to kick out African-Americans and bring in Japanese-Americans cuts to the core. 10 minutes? Okay, it goes up a great deal of conflict. What I found is in writing these scenes, what's really tricky is how to have two characters, let's say in the different communities interact and speak in a way that is truthful, that is not kind of skirt issues, that gets to a point in areas that's dangerous, which you have to go to when you sort of discuss racial interracial issues, I believe. And so, you know, I tried to find, you had to find for me, I'm not African-American. So how was I to write a character that's African-American and give it its full due? So what it meant is workshop in a great deal working with black directors, black actors, doing my homework, and trying to find sort of the major kind of wound, the center of the characters. In a situation where, again, one doesn't have power over the other, each feels entitled to that area, contested area, and what happens in that situation when you put them at odds, what kind of conversation would they have? That is why that's my attempt to do after the war. And at this point what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have invite up some actors who are gonna read a scene, two scenes from the play. So I'd like to invite up, I'm gonna get the names. Leon Tien, Imbele, Imbalm, and Peter Callender. And we're gonna read a scene in which Peter is gonna play Earl Worley, and Leon Tien is gonna play his sister-in-law who's visiting after boarding house. And we're having this discussion about the Japanese-American characters at the boarding house. I got supper for you. Cooked up turnip greens with some pigtails, sweet potato pie you like. Now this feels like home. I like it Leon, I like it. Amen. I'm gonna have more time or cook up some collards for you. Well I hear they're hiring down at St. Pedro. Thinking maybe I'll go down there and see what's going on. Maybe you can see after Bernice, if I do. You're not gonna let them force us out, are you? They can't, as long as we pay the rent, they can't kick us out. We were here before them and then they get let out and come back here and force all us colored folk out. No sir, it's not gonna happen. And they can't charge us more for me staying here. I talked to Mr. Monkawa and told him. You talked to Chet? I checked with the tarot cause and they, he didn't charge them for their napkins so they can't charge us. We talked a little. I wish you hadn't done that. What? Someone's gotta talk to them, you won't. I said I would take care of it. See they was here before us. They was Leon. All over here, up and down, Webster and Fillmore too. Even over South Park. Before the war they owned the whole kitten caboodle of Japanese town, businesses, shops, houses. They got kicked out and put in those places, way out there. And then they come back after they lose the war and what happens? After they lose the war and we won, all us colored folk get thrown out and all these Japs get to move in. That's just like it always is but that doesn't mean it's right. We got a little girl to think of and we shouldn't be moving all over. Don't call them Japs. They aren't Japanese. What are they then? Well, they aren't Japs, okay? They speak Japanese, they eat Japanese, they look Japanese, they kick us out and move in Japanese. I think they're Japanese. They just got back from being locked up. You know what, it's like this. Everybody got pain they have to live with. Lord knows no one's got more pain than colored folk. That includes your Japs until friends. So they've been locked up for three or four years. So what? That's a lifetime of pain. Three, four years, that's a walk in the woods compared to our pain. Japs don't know nothing about it. You could think and feel anything you want but when it comes to this place, you don't say that word. Just like there were fools out front of a fishbowl yelling things at the chat. All this, none of your business anyway. You just busy. I can take care of Bernice myself. Give me an avatar. I took care of her before, I can do it now. And you left with Bernice. Let's not talk about best, okay? She always was no good. Ever since we were little girls and she always had an eye for the boys, all the boys, that's the problem. So she a little pretty. She has the morals of a straight cat. Boys always like that when a girl's a little light skinned. Don't matter if she act like she shouldn't. That's enough, Leo. But didn't she? Shut up, this is my place. She is my wife. She run off on me. With Leo King and Idris, thank you very much. Again, this is a cold reading. They volunteered to do this. I'm very thankful that they're willing to get up here. And then this is a CGN. So this is a scene between Idris who is playing a Japanese American woman and Leo King is gonna continue to play Leona. And Leo has come to bring the money that's sweet for the rest. See how I wrapped it in clean paper. Chris Newbills had to go down to the bank to get them. Mrs. Terrell could explain things to me. Your ways aren't so special, folks can't understand. Well, aren't you gonna count it? Yes, you were. Just going to wait till you close the door. Think somehow that'll spare my feelings. I don't understand you people. I know what you're gonna do. You know what you're gonna do. So do it. Don't worry about me. Go ahead and count for this month's rent. I picked up odd jobs. What about the last two months? Last two months? I guess we'll have to talk about that. Find a common solution. What does Earl think? I can handle these matters. Yes, but just to say we talked to him. Miss Okamora, I don't need a man to manage my affairs. Okay, all right. You said something when we came over to see television. Nothing wrong with just in case when it comes to a child. That talk about a child didn't go unnoticed. I got the feeling you might understand the situation we have here, you being so sensitive to a child's need. Bernice can't be without a place to stay. And with us being the only colored folks left at the boarding house when colored folks used to roam the place, I think. Chester's family had to borrow money to get this place back. From coloreds. Mrs. Hitchens, we need the money. Well, you really don't understand the situation. You think we're doing this because you're not Japanese. So it happens you're not. Got nothing to do with us leading the way. You don't know what I'm thinking. Believe me, you have a clue. Then tell me. Tell me your decision. You think it just happens to be that way. For colored folks, it can't be like that because when bad stuff happens, you don't just see what's happening to you right then. You see back to your mother, grandmother, great-grandmother. You got a memory of things, don't even belong to you, but connected to you. And you know it didn't just happen. What happened before and now is all connected. I think I do understand Mrs. Hitchens' decisions. Bad things have happened to us too. No, no. I've been through that with Earl. He got no sense what it means to be colored and neither do you. And you have no sense of what it means to be Japanese in this country. You don't know about me. Oh, you don't know? I don't mind everything. You don't know about me. I do know about you. You don't know about me. I listen to you. I gave you that courtesy, okay? We don't know each other, but we're under one roof now and we both want the same thing. You want to pay the rent. I want you to pay the rent. I know you'll find a job and you can pay a little extra with each month until you make it up. That's the beginning. Yeah, maybe it is. Thank you. But all of these wonderful artists and presenters who share with us will be happy to speak with you. Yeah, thank you all for all your incredible contributions to today's panel. Unfortunately, because we have to set up for tech for Room 877, we have to move the conversations out to the lobby. It's...