 Our panelists are assembling. I'll take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Laurel Green. My pronouns are she, her, hers, and I live in Calgary. And I want to acknowledge that Calgary is Treaty 7 territory and the traditional home of the Blackfoot, Stony Nakoda, and Sutina, and also home to the Métis Region 3. I want to just say, and I'm thrilled that we can arrange ourselves in this way without us having to be up here, but I did want to, again, draw all of your attention to the fact that Ramona here is capturing this conversation for HowlRound TV. How many folks here have heard of HowlRound or visited their website? Awesome. So this conversation will be logged and captured on HowlRound and you can revisit it anytime in the future after tomorrow, I think. If at any point you would like to get up and stretch your legs or want to exit the room or go get something else, we're the last session before lunch, so I get it and I really want to encourage you to do so. Please make sure those of you on the edges that folks can exit safely during the panel, but feel free to get up and move around. We now have this entire space to ourselves, which is really great. As I said, my name is Laurel, and so I'll be moderating today's panel. I brought a few questions for the folks that I've asked to join me. I want to acknowledge that I have selected a group of artists whose work I was very interested in, and by virtue of that, they are all artists who, and I don't want to make too many assumptions, but who are living and working primarily in Canada, so that's the context that we're gonna be speaking about this work in. My fascination was with the role of dramaturgs and directors, not to draw a border between those two practices, but to say how do we hop, skip, jump, trespass, go back and forth between all of those borders, how do those roles inform and infuriate each other? What is it that's fruitful about working at the intersection? My work is primarily as a dramaturg, especially focusing on new play development in a variety of forms, and recently I have begun to work more as a director, so this is where a lot of my questions are coming from. I'm really thrilled to have the Directors Lab North folks with us here today. I really wanted to apply to Directors Lab North, but I couldn't because I'm here at the LMDA conference, I'm actually the president of the LMDA Canada Board of Directors, but I just want to give a moment for Evan and Esther to just stand and maybe give us the few lines and opposites of what's Directors Lab North, and what have you been up to this week? Yeah, so we are a sister program to the Lincoln Center Lab, we've been out for about eight years, and we've been growing bit by bit, and this year we brought together 28 Directors from the UK, we partnered with the British Council to bring the UK artistic directors here with us, directors all across America and all across Canada to spend eight days with each other to discuss methodologies, pedagogy, discourse, discussions, interrogate each other and our art, and also we partnered with Luminato to bring them to a lot of the shows and then artists from those shows come and speak to us the next day about the creation of their pieces. Yeah, Esther, can you hear me? That sounds fantastic. Nope, that was it. All right, well thanks for joining us today, I'm glad that we could have your group come and be with us, and again, so that's why I say, I've convened the panel and brought in some people who's work I find very interesting and who I'm very excited to talk to, but I want to keep my talking to a minimum and also give a lot of chance for you to ask questions and to really get into the nuts and bolts of the work that we're all doing. Yes, Sarah, there you are, hello. Could you come over and join us over here, just because Ramona is capturing the conversation for HowlRound, so great, hello. So we'll start with you, and... And it's easy, first question's easy, I just love for you to share your name, your personal pronouns, and whatever you'd like to share about where you're from, and what brings you here today to the conference. My name's Sarah Garton Stanley, I go by she and her, but I contemplate they all the time. I live in Kingston, Ontario, which is across from Kingston, New York, and I work at the National Arts Center, I'm the Associate Artistic Director there, and the Co-Founder and Creative Catalyst at SpiderWeb Show. Yeah, it's great. Hi, my name is Jenna Rogers, I use she, her pronouns. I am currently based in Calgary, or Mo Kinsis, Treaty 7 territory as Laurel has already introduced, but I was born in Edmonton, which is Treaty 6 territory, also home to the Métis and to the Cree populations. Hi, my name is Emma Tivoldo, she, her. I am the Artistic Director of Playwrights Workshop Montreal, which is a national new creation development center. Yeah. Good. Yeah. I'm Bob White, I live in Stratford, Ontario, I'm the Director of New Plays at the festival, and he is him, him, his. Steven Clella, I'm from Toronto, I'm the Associate Artistic Director and Dramaturg at Young People's Theatre. Hi, my name is... Oh, he, him, sorry, I did that already, nevermind. My name is Marie Liofele Romero-Barliso, I am from Montreal, I am a Playwright and Dramaturg. My pronouns are she, she and her. I'm also a Playwriting Mentor at Black Theatre Workshop, and also the production Dramaturg for Tabla Doe Theatre's Blackout, which is coming, we're going to be produced in February about the Concordia riots in 1969. Great. So as I mentioned, what I'm interested in discussing today with all of you is where do the borders lie between our two practices of directing and dramaturgy, when and how do we cross them? What can a dramaturgical approach offer a directing process at every stage of the production? How do our skill sets, these two skill sets complement and complicate, inform and infuriate each other? I would like to explore the opportunity for this dual role and just swap some stories and strategies. So I wonder if we could kick it off and I'll ask this question of the panelists but also of all of you, how many of you in the room identify as a dramaturg? And how many of you identify as a director? And how many of you identify as both? Great. So we've got some people on all ends of the spectrum. I wonder, Emma, I'm gonna pick up on something that you said in a panel yesterday, which was that you trained first as a director, graduated from National Theatre School. And so your work as a dramaturg has actually come a little bit later on in your practice and that for you is still something that you're working on today that's occupying you to continue to strive to figure out sort of what is your dramaturgy and how do you enact that practice? So I wonder if you could start us off just talking about this first identification as a director and then what drew you to the practice of dramaturgy? What circumstances put you in that role for the first time? Right. So I came to theater really late. I was in my mid-30s. I think I was one of the oldest directors who graduated from the National Theatre School. So before that I was a graphic designer and published a punk rock music magazine. So I had absolutely no idea why I was going into theater except that I had this urge. I was very, I was kind of at a, I was really depressed and so, and I knew I wanted to do theater. So I applied to theater school and I got in by some fluke. I think it was a mistake. And then started working actually as a playwright stage manager actor. I thought I wanted to be an actor and then landed in stage management and somehow through the stage management sector was working with Peter Hinton and that sort of got me in thinking about directing and then went to the National Theatre School, graduated as a director. Sarah Stanley was one of my mentors and I would like to dispel something she said she isn't an actor, but she's an awesome actor. One of my first projects out of school was Sarah was an actor in the piece. So yeah, so I was directing and then Paula Dankard from Playwrights Workshop Montreal called me in as a dramaturg and I had been mentoring under Peter Hinton and Paula for a while at that point. So the two things kind of collided and once I graduated from the National Theatre School I was working in their playwriting program with Brian Draider who's right there and got to meet all these incredible playwrights and sort of the intersection between doing dramaturgy on new work and directing sort of became the thing that I loved and I did. So I've been working with a lot of emerging playwrights on their first productions. I co-founded a theater company where we were doing first productions of plays and translations which is also a kind of dramaturgy because you're a dramaturgy in plays and translation which obviously leads to questions about the work that you're working on. So what was the question? Just what led you into dramaturgy? So that's a great context. Yeah, that was it. Working with playwrights and being a director and the two things sort of came together and really mentorship for me was my way in. I didn't study dramaturgy. It was really about working with other people who were doing that work and I haven't figured it out. I really haven't. It's been 10 years that I've been the artistic director of Playwrights Workshop Montreal and it's been a constant struggle to figure out what I do in the room and how I do it and it changes. I feel like I'm starting to figure out how to work with people but for me, putting the artist at the center of everything is really important and is what I try to do when I try to tailor whatever process around what the artist needs or who the artist is. I sometimes take myself out of the picture. Many times I take myself out of the picture. No, that's sometimes true and sometimes not true. Thanks so much. Sometimes bullshit. Bob, I want to turn to you for a moment and just ask you about how you began working first. Was it as a dramaturg or a director and what was the moment where one or both of those roles, you took on one or both of those roles? Yeah, before I get there, just, I think the kind of distinction is a bit arbitrary. I think it's very important from my point of view to realize that dramaturgies in fact, a process, it's not a job and the dramaturgical process happens all the time whether there's a dramaturg in the room or not. That first audience is the best dramaturg any playwright is going to experience. And so all you're hoping to do I think as a dramaturg is help channel what that might be and develop a relationship with a writer to kind of help to get there. So I think that makes it a kind of, it's a bit different than a lighting designer because if you don't have lights for the show in most cases, you're in trouble. You don't necessarily need to have a dramaturg in the room even on new plays as far as I'm concerned. But how I got into it was really easy. I was a grad student at the University of Alberta back in 1970 on it and... Yeah. 60 what? Yeah. And I was doing a master's degree. I was not doing an MFA. I had done an English degree in Montreal at Loyola College. It was part of those riots in 69. And found out about this gig called being a dramaturg there. They're one of the professors that the University of Alberta at the time was a German immigrant named John Truffleut. And he of course was versed in all of that stuff in German theater in this job dramaturg. And I found it fascinating. I thought, well, I wasn't trained as a director. I wasn't trained as an actor. Here's somehow I can actually, rather than just becoming nothing. Wrong with this, a teacher of drama. I could actually be an active participant in the room. Left Edmonton in Toronto, arrived in Toronto in 1972. There I've given it away. Just when the first wave of Canadian theaters were being founded and they needed people to read plays. As simple as that. And so I went into the factory theater, factory theater lab at the time. And Ken Gassy, artistic director after I had a copy with him gave me a job as assistant dramaturg. There were two other dramaturgs for $15 a week to read plays. So that's where it started. And so I spent the first eight, nine years of my career working as a dramaturg both in Toronto and then in Montreal as a dramaturg at the direct workshop Montreal. And then made the shift through a bunch of very strange circumstances. I became artistic director of the factory theater in 1978. And had always, the work that I had done with various directors as a dramaturg up into them but had been unsatisfying. And I figured I could do no worse really as a director. So artistic director, I hired myself to direct plays. It was as simple as that. And thanks to the grace of a remarkable group of actors that I worked with over those first few years learned on the job, the do's and don'ts of creating a room for creation and sharing that space. So that's basically how I became a director was just kind of giving myself the job because no one else would. So I could do that. And that led to nine years stay at the factory then out west for 25 years and at ATP. And so that's where the directing. Sort of an outgrowth of the dramaturgical work in the sense. And that's where I think my work as a director because it's primarily on new plays, you know overlapped was sort of more or less doing the same thing except I guess wearing two different hats. But I don't really know if they were two different hats. Well, I really appreciate you bringing up the idea of the fluidity between those two roles and the arbitrariness with which you could try to draw a line between them, but when especially you're working on a new play, those things. I mean, I found it very helpful ever since I left ATP and I took this gig at Stratford where I am not a director. I'm a dramaturg in the room. Very helpful to be the dramaturg in the room having been a director and knowing, okay, I know where my rules are and how to negotiate that collaboration in a way that I think might be different if I didn't have that directing experience. One of my questions and I was very interested to throw to Jenna because you work a lot with playwrights on different stages of development of work and occasionally we'll direct that work as well. Does your relationship with a playwright change when you become the director of the piece rather than the dramaturg? Or have you ever noticed any moment where that relationship seemed to take on a new life or there was just a different way of relating? It's a good question. I actually don't, I'm trying to think, I'm like, I don't know that I've ever been asked to see a project all the way through that wasn't my own. So I don't know that I've ever actively had to switch or navigate that relationship rather than like to do a staged reading, which usually for me is with music stands. So I can say that I do feel like the jobs are really different. Like I feel like they engage different parts of my brain. That is the dramaturg. I first and foremost feel very accountable to my relationship with the writer and it is the writer first. It's about their needs and facilitating that process and as a director I know that my relationship is with my cast and it's not that I don't have a relationship with the writer but that I am paying attention to a cast and the questions I have about the script stop becoming honestly, I mean they don't but I find them to stop when I'm directing. I'm like, I don't have any really meaningful questions. All my questions are about how can I, how can I make this thing happen on stage? And so I know that there's a different part because I've observed that in the room when I'm dramaturging that directors aren't necessarily asking super deep questions. They're trying to find ways to negotiate it or something they need to achieve on stage and so I can feel that shift but I don't know that I've necessarily negotiated it from start to finish with a single playwright. Steven, I just wanna throw to you because there's a recent project that you worked on. I'm really curious to hear more about. I unfortunately didn't get to see the production but the play was Selfie by Christine Quintana and the interesting fable of the play coming to fruition was that it came out of a submissions process that Steven manages at theater, at his theater company and then you became the director of the play and moved forward with the production so I would love to hear more about that moment of deciding to direct the play what attracted you to the material and wanting to work with Christine and bringing it forward onto the stage. Sure. To be clear, it did actually have some development at another company at Texas M and Vancouver who had commissioned it and had a shorter version. So what she sent me did have a bit of support before coming in through the unsolicited process and this is the only time in over the 10 years I've been there, we have actually produced something that came through our unsolicited. I'd like to say we have a better track record but it is what it is. So I was instantly interested in the voice that she had, the subject matter which is dealing with primarily consent and the angle at which she approached it. She happened to be in Toronto at the time. I just sent her a message and said, I'd love to talk to you about this and we sat down and had coffee and I don't think going into it I went, oh, this is a play I'm going to direct. I just knew that it was something that I thought had value to our theater and something that would engender both a good piece of theater and really good conversations with our audience. So we just started along a process of writing a few more drafts, expanding what she had based on what we in our conversations agreed were shared places the play could go. And up until that point I trained as a dramaturg. In undergrad I had done some directing but I think I made a point when I learned about dramaturgy a similar way to Bob because I had actually been an English major and not a theater major and I went, oh, this is actually a way to kind of marry these two interests that I've got. So I went to University of Glasgow and I got my dramaturgy degree and then I moved to Toronto because I'd been from the States originally. And there were a lot of people, at least a handful who said to me, oh, so are you a dramaturg because you want to direct but you can't? And I went, no, no, I actually want to be a dramaturg. So I think I put up this wall where I went, I'm just never going to direct. I don't want people to think I'm a failed director who landed in this field. And then after a few years I realized that was really stupid of me to do that I was just letting other people define what I thought I should be doing. So I sort of opened myself up to the idea that maybe I would direct at some point and there were a few projects that had come along through YPT where I was going, maybe I will, but I realized that there were better choices. So I always sort of deferred to what I thought were the better matches for the project in working with the artistic director and building those artistic teams. But then there was just something with selfie, perhaps it was a style of the writing that I just instantly engage with that I sort of went, you know, I kind of, I don't want to let go because I feel like sometimes when I'm working as a dramaturg, there comes a point where it's not a handover but you sort of go, I'm not the person who needs to speak up the most, I'm kind of the person who'd speak the least. And I started going, I want to keep talking. I want to keep engaging in this conversation. And luckily the playwright was interested in me doing that. So I think after about a year and a half of development, we decided that I was going to do both roles and went from there. Was this your first play as a director? It was my first play as a director, yeah. And it was interesting for me because I got, I felt like being the dramaturg on it was really useful because there was so much that I was already immersed in when I came into this that I felt like I had a breadth of knowledge about what was happening in the play. And it just sort of fed me in a way that I would want a director that wasn't me who had taken over to have learned all these things. So that was great. But I think late in the process when I started to go, hmm, is this part of the play working inside my brain? I was fighting back and forth but whether that was the director being lazy or the dramaturg having a good point. And I left it to the playwright to decide which of those voices was speaking. It was the lazy director, which was fine. Yeah, funny that. So yeah, so I really enjoyed having that new perspective on being able to take the work further and then I'm doing it again next year as well though I'm co-directing that one just because of the nature of how it's developed. And what was the reception like to the piece and what did you learn about yourself as a director? The reception was really positive. It created a lot of conversation, not to go too deep into the play but it is about an act of sexual violence that happens. But where this was different was the male perpetrator was actually very likable. Everybody was on his side and it was in a very gray area emotionally for a lot of people because there was a strong attraction between the two characters. There was a real strong feeling that he thought this was the right thing and it took some time for her to figure out what had happened to her. So I think for a lot of the young people and for a lot of adults, there was questions of was that consent or was that not? It wasn't consent but the response was very visceral and I think there's a lot of visceral and a lot of people who wanna have that conversation. So it was received really well and I guess what did I learn about myself? I guess I hit a point where I feel like I think I brought a lot of dramaturgical sensibility towards the construction of the piece in terms of how my collaborative nature as a dramaturg informed the relationships I had with designers and the actors. But I think when I got to the end I also reached a point of this is what I have done and I am happy with it and not that it's unassailable because I'm happy to talk about it more but I'm not going to either apologize or feel too proud about it. I feel like I've reached a place where I'm quite content and it is what it is and just learning to accept that whereas I think sometimes dramaturgically I'm always looking to keep working and maybe there's like in the next iteration of the play and I sort of wanna know if this is the thing and it feels like it has an end to it for me. Yeah, it's like a really exciting way to think about your directing being informed by those dramaturgical impulses or underpinnings to you and how they can work together. I just wanna draw an interesting counterpoint to Sarah, your play Out the Windmill that is at Luminato right now and that I got the chance to see last night. And just picking up on this thread of Steve and talking about following something from start to finish you had an opposite role as the director because you joined the piece, was it almost 10 years in the making or was it, because it was quite a while there were a few other iterations of the piece. And so while I was watching the show at Luminato I was thinking a lot about what you had brought to it and having seen some of your other work noticing some of the common threads and really feeling like how they were gelling with the story that the playwright had created. So I wonder if you could talk to us a bit about what it was like to come in on the piece and bring yourself to it. Yeah, well really nerve wracking to begin with because the events that the piece Chronicles happened 18 years ago and Liza Balkan the writer and the subject of the story was and continues to be the locus, the heart, the center and indeed the person who did all the work to both be a citizen and take action on something that she saw and then do all the work of getting all of the various transcripts, meeting all the various people and with a number of different collaborators over a period of years beginning to shape a piece of theatrical storytelling. In fact, Travis Shwellness the designer was the first other to work with Liza at the very beginning at a piece at Buddies and Bad Times at the rhubarb festival that I think was like 15 minutes long in 2008 or maybe six, like quite a long time ago. And then Chris Abraham came on board with the project and worked with it a little bit with the second year students at the National Theater School and Brett Donahue who's one of the actors is still in the show. So he was in his second year at theater school in like in 2009 maybe. So he brings that history. And then the theater center with through Franco Bonnie in particular has been a huge champion of the work and of Liza's work. And he brought Chris Abraham as director and that piece into residency at the theater center. And Ashlyn Rose who was part of it at that time. She was also working at Crows with Chris Abraham. Now Ashlyn is the creative producer at the theater center and lead producer on this version about the window. And Naomi Campbell who's the Deputy Artistic Director at Luminato lived in the building that Liza was staying in when she witnessed this event and goes back very centrally to the beginning of that story. And she's been the lead sort of producer voice from Luminato. So all to say that I came on board as a director very late in the game. The last production of it happened in 2012 at the theater center. And when Luminato approached theater center about doing a Toronto based story essentially, this was the one that Franco wanted to do. And so I was asked to direct it and probably anybody here can imagine the kinds of stress that might cause given all of the various people who had been involved with it previously. But I was also charged with the question of what does it mean now? Because this story is about Otto Voss who was a 53 year old Hungarian man suffering from mental illness. Acknowledged to be who was brutally beaten to death by the cops. Since that time it's become very, very clear that people who identify as mad or don't identify as mad and are seen to be mad by the police. And more particularly black bodies and indigenous bodies for lack of a better word targeted by the complex of policing in this country in Canada we'll say and in Toronto in particular. And so it felt to Franco and to all of us that it would be irresponsible to not acknowledge in some theatrical question or way the reality, the core realities of the intersection between madness, black and indigenous bodies in particular. And so a story that was a very single focus perspective of Liza Balkans needed to find an expansion. And the way in which we did it which I really love is I've had the opportunity to work with Cyrus Marcus Ware on some other projects. He is a black trans artist who has an incredible practice most particularly working on activist portraits that he works in massive scale to simply aggrandize the work of activists across sort of North America but from a particular perspective of Black Lives Matter Toronto which is one of the, where he's a core member. And to work with him on asking the question about how we can look at the people and some of the people, the many people who have been taken down by the cops and this particular problem. So working with him and then with Lael who are an incredible local activist band who I just love and who I had worked with previously along with Cyrus on some of the work that we were doing with the intersection of disability storytelling basically and how that impacts major forces in storytelling. So I guess what I could say is coming to it that late allowed me the history of many different attempts and many different drafts and many different iterations and offered me an acute challenge to fulfill the wishes and desires of a bunch of different people in terms of bringing a story and a multitude of perspectives to a stage. So having opened it I really can't think of a more engaged personal moment as a director slash dramaturgical thinker that I've had in many moons. So yeah. Yeah. Jenna, I just want to duck over to you a bit to pick up on this notion of reinterpreting something and making it your own. You've got a production coming up at Summerworks of winners and losers, a new adaptation of a play. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about the genesis of that project and how you came to it. Yeah, so many of you in Canada and perhaps even in the United States might know Winners and Losers. It's written by Marcus Youssef and James Long, Jamie Long out in Vancouver. It's toured a lot. The premise of it is kind of two guys fighting like arguing. Yeah, they play a game called Winners and Losers in which they argue about whether a person, place or thing is a winner or a loser. And through this exploration of their own opinions that start to reveal their maybe deep held or deep seated personal truths, which ultimately are revealed to be somewhat in conflict with one another. And what toll does that take on a friendship? It was a personal play largely based on their own lives and experiences for them. And I thought that it would be really cool to adapt the play with women. And so, yeah, I think that was the idea was to do it with women. And I got a couple of friends together who are interested in working. I run a small company in Calgary called Chromatic Theater that does work by and for people of color. And I got a couple of friends together to start work on the process to play the game, to basically argue with one another in a room and see what it felt like, see what it worked. And it really quickly demonstrated to us that women fight very differently from men. There's this whole like hotel bell you're supposed to ding when you make a point and no one wanted to touch the spell. And we had to take a lot of breaks and talk about our feelings. And ultimately I wrote about this four Canadian times on the spider web show. Ultimately one of the performers that I asked to work on it, it didn't stick. I invited another performer in and we're moving forward with her. So I'm working with two artists, Valerie Planche and McCombay K. Samamba. And the production we're bringing to Toronto which will mount again in Calgary in the fall. And the process that we entered was sort of, to me it was a dramaturgically driven process really. We took the original text once we decided we were gonna do this, we took the text and we broke it down into a dramaturgical skeleton which was a series of putting post-its on the wall, like a massive wall that really tried to outline the bones of the play. So not the scenes or the content at all but the navigation through beginning, middle and end like rising action, falling action but it was actually a lot trickier. There were a lot of functions and how to pull the rug out from someone and upset someone or take a break. And then we took a month off and came back for a week and we improvised a lot and then sent away nearly 10 hours of material to be transcribed and then went away for a week, a while came back with a massive pile of text and started going through it and using that as the meat and hanging that on the skeleton. And so what we have, and I'd say it's about 85% of the way done, we have three weeks to hash it out in rehearsal studio before bringing it to summer works. What we have is now a play that is, I would say almost the exact same structure as the original but with entirely different content. Yeah, cool. Thank you for sharing with us. And just that, I'm fascinated by how that process came to be and just really driven by that central question of how would women fight and how would women play this game? Yes, and it is an examination of female friendships and it's funny because I don't feel at all like a director in a room. Sometimes they have to be like, Jenna make a choice, you tell us and I'm like, oh, oh, because I'm too interested in the questions and the expansiveness of it. And so I really think that this three weeks in July, August, it's gonna speak to your original question about navigating the difference because I have to put on, I'm going to have to put on a director hat. Maria, I want to talk to you a bit about how your career is continuing to evolve as a dramaturg and taking on some different kinds of directing projects. You were telling me about being part of a process, a part of a project story where a player was performing, actor was performing in a bar each week and different directors were working with that performer for each chapter of the performance and you were one of those directors. What was that like coming into that sort of larger process, but just with the specific view of the chapter you were responsible for? Well, first I just want to give you a little context about where I come from. I came into theater very late. I think it's very late. So I wrote my first play, I mean, first I identify as a playwright. First and foremost, I am a playwright and when I work with playwrights on their work, I'm a playwright's dramaturg as opposed to a dramaturg. And I mostly work with new plays and I only work as a director because I'm forced to work as a director. And I work mostly because no one else will produce my work. And so I've just taken initiative and empower myself and also I've lost a lot of my plays because of that because I feel like the meaning of where my work is loses it. I lose the meaning of the work, where the story is going. So I feel that I've empowered myself as a playwright and dramaturg and also as a director, directing the first workshop production of my plays. And so what's happening now in Montreal, there's a big shift in Montreal that's happening because there's so many incredible programs that are working with diverse people of color to develop them because there's a need for that. And that's Playwrights Workshop Montreal's Young Creators Unit, there's Black Theater Workshop, artist mentorship program, and also Imago's Artista. And also my mandate is to develop new plays by people of color and also to make sure that there's more work out there for people of color. So I was asked to, Lynn Kozak is a, she's not actually a theater creator, but she is a McGill professor who teaches classics at McGill and who got a huge grant, a six figure grant to work on the translation of The Iliad. And I've worked mostly on new plays. I have worked, so that was really exciting to me, but I didn't really understand what the process was until I really got into the process. And my philosophy right now is to actually take risks, to shake up my practice. But I didn't know what I was really getting into. And so Lynn was translating the piece, each of the chapters, like 600 lines of each of the chapters of The Iliad each week from January until August. And she's hired a director and the director doesn't have to identify as a director because it could be like an actor directing the process. And for me, it was exciting because there's actually, she's working from the Greek. And I'm working from different translations of the piece. And so she's translating the piece as we go. So there, like for the week, basically we go, we went into table work on the Tuesday. After she's performed the night before, we go into table work with a new director on the Tuesday and you have 20 hours rehearsal. And she basically every day, she's coming in with a new draft that she's memorized. And so I'm there trying to catch up because I'm very text based. And so the first day I had a recorder and I would go home and I would just like start basically transcribing whatever, and that wasn't working for me because it was just too much. And so getting into rehearsal with her the next day, I just brought myself and listened to her needs as what she needed to do for the piece. And so that to me was really exciting. It also made me trust myself more as a theater artist. I really appreciate what I'm hearing from each of you about sort of the moment that something about a piece resonated with you. You wanted to bring something of your own practice or something of yourself to it. And that was sort of what led you to take on the project as risky or difficult or as full as it may have been. And so I wanna ask Emma about a recent project that I saw her, a play that she directed that I saw on Calgary called Ms. Caitlyn's Grade Threes, Prepare for the Inevitable by Alayna Billye. And again, Emma, I'm knowing just a little bit about the history of the piece. I know there was another production performed before you came along to it as well. So much, but I just wanna open the door to the question. What was it that attracted you to wanna work on that project? What about yourself did you see in it? And what about your relationship with the playwright led you to take it on? So Alayna is a queer artist from Edmonton and she is a gatherer of human beings and stories and a force to be reckoned with. She's just an amazing human being. I met her at the National Theater School. I dramaturged her final piece. And I love her. I love her, her spirit, her words, her outlook, her activism, her need to change the world. And so Ms. Caitlyn had been dramaturged by Iris Turcott and they'd had a session just before Iris passed. And before that, the play had been produced by a director in Montreal very successfully. It had gone across the country in French festival and was very, very popular. I however will say that I thought there was something more to the piece. There was something more to be mind. There was a part of her that I didn't quite see in the piece yet. A part of her need to embody this character and to embody the journey of this woman and this idea of fear and what fear can do to the psyche and how it can destroy a human being and what it can do to a classroom. So the piece, she's actually sets up the room where everyone in the audience is a participant, everyone is a grade three student and she interacts with them. And so I just wanted to, she had, we worked really well together. She had wondered if I could be the person who can take the piece somewhere else dramaturgically and directorially. So we worked for a really long time, sort of mining the texts. So a lot of the rehearsal process was about what is this, who is this character and how do we fully embody her and how does she bring the audience along on this journey and how can we do it so that the audience doesn't disconnect and look at and see her as someone who has already lost her way from the beginning of the play. And so how do we carry the audience so that they can actually understand every one of her decisions to get to the final sort of tragic moment in the play? No one dies, but I think someone should. But anyway, I always think someone should die in the play. I mean that, not at all. But so that's what attracted us to each other and to the piece. And so we just watched this woman who is a really caring human being get caught up in this fear when it comes to guns and the idea of guns in the classroom. And just as the play was going on, of course there were two shootings, mass shootings in the United States at the same time. So again, this looking at ourselves, it can't happen in Canada, of course it can happen in Canada. And coming from Montreal where there have been three mass shootings in schools, it's very real. And so this idea of fear and hysteria and how do we reconnect to our humanity and figure out a way through this was a big part of that journey dramaturgically and then directorially. So we worked dramaturgically right to opening night. So yeah, the lines were really blurred. And I do think that directorially it suffered a little because I didn't have time to really think about design as fully as I wanted to or needed to. But I really loved what she did. And I really loved the way she told the story. And I was really satisfied by her connection with the audience. And yeah, I haven't talked to her since so I don't know how she feels, but we will, we're meeting in a week. I'll let you know. I wonder if anything that someone has said so far is resonating with you. Or if there was a comment you wanted to make, yes. Yeah, I am, oh, I feel like so much I'm a director and creator and I work a lot. Yeah, making new pieces with a lot of times which were also writing so they went around hey, can you direct this? And then they come in with this script which is just like just unformed, you know. That's all the kernels and the ideas are there and it needs to get figured out. Okay, and then I feel like I spend all the time helping figuring out a drama trilogy and then like, oh my God, we have like three rehearsals left and now we have to stage a thing. So I don't know, any of you guys have any, yeah, anything to say about that? Things, maybe, I don't know, rules or techniques we have before or guidelines like, okay, when is it time to be okay with this script and like be the director and just take that? You gotta do what you gotta do, I don't know. Well, I wanna highlight something that inspired this conversation. For me, it was a conversation I had with Sarah in the fall before I was about to direct a large production and I asked Sarah, we were just, I was talking to you about what maybe some of the differences were in these jobs or when as a director, do you step forward and make a choice? And Sarah said something and I'll oddly paraphrase for you. If a dramaturg's job is to imagine all the doors a play could go through, it's the director's job to pick one and lead the production through it. And I found that analogy quite helpful because it not only gave me permission to imagine all the doors, but then to say, it's okay that now we're choosing this one and it doesn't mean that imagining all those other doors was a waste of time or it didn't add up to anything or it wasn't useful. It actually, but it means that now we all, we're gonna go through this one and that's the choice and that's where we're going. And you make that decision with your team and in dialogue with others in the room and then you can lead people through together. But I just wanted to offer that and wonder again if that anyone else in the room wants to comment more along that vein, yeah. I don't know, it's interesting to hear that. I was like, what? That's not how I make work at all. To be it's like, as you're investigating all the ideas, you're investigating them in space, with bodies. So the work is made already. By the time you make your decisions, the show is pretty much already staying, like it's made. Yeah, I think that happened for sure. And it might be mine just like, that may be like my mechanic voice. Because yeah, I went the same way too. You're always working on your feet and finding it on your feet. But yeah, just that feeling of, could I have done a better job as a director if I hadn't focused so much on helping to create the text. Yeah. I think from an institutional perspective, one of the things that we try and do is get the director involved early in the development process. So not identify after we think the script is ready to go, okay, you're now the director. But having time for the director to be there far in advance. Because when we haven't done that, we find okay, the director's dramaturgical voice is now coming out as we start rehearsal. And we're juggling more than we should in not giving enough time to rehearse because in Canada, we just don't have enough time to rehearse as it is. So if you try and make that a workshop process as well, you're gonna end up short changing one or the other. So if you can plan out in advance, get them involved early so they have the chance to get that voice in the room. I think by the time you then get to rehearsal, if you're lucky and you've got the resources and time to make it happen, sure you're gonna discover new things and there's gonna be putting it on his feet that you learn about that you have to make changes. But the more you can have in advance of really getting it to the point where you're choosing the one door and going through it, then I think the better chance you're gonna have at succeeding. It feels that the role of the dramaturge over the last, certainly when I've been working so six, seven years, is actually a bit of a backlash against the role of director from the makers point of view in terms of saying, hey, I'm a maker, I don't wanna work with the director who tells me what to do. Usually the demographic of that person is has been a problem in terms of traditional hierarchies but I am interested in my work being interrogated and I am interested in that voice in the room who provokes me around form and provokes me around content and et cetera, et cetera. And there's been a bit of a shift, I would say, around how that role is honoured. For example, there's a woman, Kirstie Halsey, who directed Dramatical Encounter, who's sort of invisible really, and it's a very successful show and she was utterly entangled to its making and she very much fought for her right as a dramaturge to be in the forefront of essentially, in the press being said what her role was and she's now got an agent as a dramaturge and within Britain, having an agent as a dramaturge with a bit of a flow of mind, people are like, oh, really? Ah, there doesn't tend to be a sort of shift around, first of all, what kind of makes being, what kind of work is being made and how hierarchies and having an ecosystem that is very varied and diverse and where the dramaturge sits within that and can facilitate that and I don't know if that conversation's going on in Canada or? Well, Brian Quirt, who's not here right now, but he gave a keynote address a while ago where he talked about how this was the, if last century was the century of the director, this is the century of the dramaturge and you can get it on the Night Swimming website. It's a really, really good talk and I found it personally really, it really provoked me and yeah, it was probably 10 years ago or over 10 years ago now, but I don't think, we definitely don't have that situation yet where there's a preeminence but Deborah Pearson who started for us friends, she's Canadian and so she, certainly a lot of the ways in which she works, I would say, she situates in a very similar way. So I do think that as work becomes less institutionally recognizable in terms of how it rolls out, the dramaturge, the position, I wouldn't say power but the position the dramaturge would hold in the room, I think, will become much more, yeah. But she actually, remember, saved me and I am a director, so I'm just like, right, that's a stupid, it's really kind of like, like I did and like, why not, you know, everyone should have that equal ownership of the work and intellectual rigorousness in terms of what they're doing and yeah, it's just, it's interesting, a lot of different way of approaching what we all do as artists. I would just like to clarify something, working dramaturgically with that script, I meant more in terms of the actual dramaturgy of putting the story on the stage, uh? Production dramaturgy. Yeah, well, no, it was like, it's sort of like being a director but using my dramaturgical skills in order to reveal the story. So because the story was pretty much already written, there were changes obviously along the way that really went towards what the character needed to say and how the character needed to say it on stage. It wasn't about, oh, let's do rewrites and cut this up and move it around. It wasn't about any of that. It was really about like a really deep investigation of who that character is. So just to clarify that. And in terms of my offhand saying the design suffered, it wasn't that the designer and I didn't have discussions and that it wasn't fully realized, it's just that I didn't use it fully enough and that was a lack of time. And not because we didn't give the process enough time, it's just that I didn't give my brain enough space to take what was offered fully. Just to clarify a little bit. It strikes me that as a dramaturg, words are insufficient. So often words are insufficient and you bring up a good point, like it's hard for me to separate my identities as director, dramaturg, dramaturg director and decide which one goes first because it's all part of my practice and like the rigor that we establish over years and they don't know that. I mean, some days it does feel like I'm taking off one hat and putting on another, but most of the time it doesn't. It's just how you navigate and see the world and words don't always do a process, Justin. No, absolutely not. Yeah. Which is right. Which is right. Where do our borders lie and the territory seems to be within a plane, a script right now. And I'm curious as dramaturgs and directors how one might be working without or in different modalities so that where it isn't perhaps the script and the playwright that you were working with and from the other forms, objects, people, the design of driven work as well. And what are our tools and what are our verbs and what are our toolkits and do they differentiate between the dramaturg and the director in those spaces? And I just want to throw that out to the room. I just say one thing. Kim Pertell's a lighting designer and she's one of the best dramaturgs. Like she, Bob's worked with her a lot. She's just, you said design and so it just makes, like it's incredible what her eye and presence brings to, bringing a story forward. I know that wasn't the question you're asking but I think designers are incredible dramaturgs or can be. Well they often have such an incredible perspective and have seen so much work and been in so many rooms and watch it from a very particular place that I think like it is very true that they can be so keen, like so conning in terms of how they can really get to the heart of something. And the other thing I'll say about the blob that you're provided with is that one of the things, can't remember what's the woman who wrote your magical thinking anyway. Joan Didion. Joan Didion. I think about that a lot in that the director, I'm not sure who has to refuse magical thinking more is it the director or the dramaturg but the blob is what it is and how do you work with that rather than thinking that I'll get in there and the blob will transform into this something that it's not. And I think for me that's my constant and never learned lesson. Like never, I can never recognize that lesson but I think it's like it is and it may be a beautiful blob. If you can love that blob then that's going to be the most gorgeous blob but it still will be that blob, not the whatever you know structure or story that you think it, you wished it were. Yeah. I didn't get your name but she said that she's direct and I don't know if you'll be interested and I just want to throw it out. She said that she's the, I apologize for repeating she's directing that I won't play if no one else wants to do it. I'm a playwright, I'm the director and I really, really dislike directing my own plays because I cannot fight with myself and it's very frustrating. So yeah, I'm like a productive creative person. There is no one minus, yeah. Of course the others are there but I would, in short, I was wondering if on the website or on howl round or on the LMDA website that would be like a blog or a cup or something like playwrights and directors searching for each other and that if we can swap work, I mean I could direct someone's play and that person can direct my play, I would be, I'm from Romania and the minions have a website, directors looking for plays but I would, yeah, but I'd like to push it further because that's all, basically that's what I meant but I would very much want to have a place, a network where we can post the summary of what we are doing and offer to table, I don't know if anyone else would do that. But I would, I'd really like the dynamic of working with someone else on my screen, on a screen. I'm just gonna say one thing about that. When I said no one wants to direct my work, I think it's just in terms of the professional production. People, I just had one of my plays produced, I produced it but Sophie G directed it at the Montreal Fringe Festival. So the thing is I am also as a, because of my experience with my work, I feel that I also am extremely protective over my work. So I don't send my workout, I have had directors work with me. I mean, Emma has directed one of my first works when I came out of the National Theatre School and so just so you know that there is, it's just that I'm also overprotective over my work. Yeah, please don't take offense. I came from, for sure, I didn't came back to know all the systems in Canada, how far this could reach out. And I come from a different position. I am not overprotective of my work as a player. I am as a director, but that's a good question. Thank you. Thank you. Very interesting, thank you. I know this is not the one you want to talk. It's kind of a business question. Cool. How much, as a business of drama and tragedy, how much free advice do you end up giving and how do you navigate that? Because I've done it as a director dramaturgically just with people that I know that are playwrights and I offer lovely advice and direct to someone else. So I'm curious about that and also for my education when it comes to the dramaturgs that I know, it's a lot of asking about plays. It's a lot of men over there. I work as a freelance dramaturg in Montreal and I also, I'm a playwright mentor at the main. So it's an intercultural center. And so people, because there's a great shift that's happening with the, and it's very exciting to see a lot of the playwrights of color trying to take ownership of their work and they want to find somebody of color to work with. And what I've started to do is actually because it takes so much time and energy to read plays. And so what I've started to do is actually I do give some free advice, but at the same time I direct them to the mentorship programs either at BTW or at the May so that I can work with them. And so they also have an ownership of their work. So it's not just, there's like a structure there. And I also follow the LMDA guidelines when I do contracts. And that's helped me as well because time is very valuable and you can't always work for free. LMDA on their website. And I direct a lot of folks that ask me about things like dramaturgy fees or if I'm employing a dramaturg, how much should I pay them? If I'm working as a dramaturg, what should I get paid? For a number of different kinds of work, the LMDA has developed a template and some guidelines and they even have some sample contracts and that's available on the LMDA website. So that is a resource that I like to share a lot with folks that are curious about how to contract themselves or someone else in that capacity. For me, I'm pretty reticent to give feedback unless I have a relationship that I know is going to extend with the work. Because if I'm not getting it and I'm not invested in it long term, it actually shouldn't be my questions or my opinion that you're listening to. Find somebody who really engages with it and really wants to make it happen and that's the person you should be having that conversation with and if I'm not there, don't listen to me. Part of my work is with the Playwrights Lab program at the BAMF Center and part of that process with Brian Court is like bringing writers from across the country out and they're invited to bring a collaborator to BAMF with them and in the past that collaborator was a dramaturg and in the present it can be a dramaturg but some people choose to bring other folks with them. So we often find ourselves in situations where we're being asked to talk about a play with someone where our relationship might not extend which has been a, definitely it's a topic that I'm in constant conversation with Brian about how to negotiate that because the relationship is so important. I also want to recognize that's a job like that's a job where I'm also paid to be there and paid to be dramaturgical support and paid to be. So like if someone wants to talk to me I will sit down with them absolutely and give them time and years and a lot of the time I try to concentrate my work on reflecting back to them things that they're already saying or picking up on patterns in their work but yeah like otherwise I try to think of it also I work in marginalized groups so when I have to charge a fee recognizing the groups that I work with I often don't charge much but also recognizing the groups I work with if someone who has the capacity to pay me is asking for help then I do charge and I think of it as my time so I need time to read the play I need time to make notes about it to send them to you and then to debrief those notes and that's usually like the package of a beginning process that is rare. Yeah. This just sparked a question for me which is how often as a dramaturge do you pass on work because you can't find anything in it that excites you or that you love and how often do you say proceed with a project in the hopes that you will find something because you didn't like it? Well I'll speak to that because I feel pretty clear on it now but that's only because now I pass on everything that I can't do like what I mean is either can't do it from a perspective of schedule or I just can't do it because I don't feel that my heart can find the space for it but that took me many years to figure that out and it still makes me feel very terrible because I want so much to be able to do yeah I want so much to be able to be in a position to push as much work forward as I can which is its own terrible thing because then it's just like I become a generalist and it's like I'll just do so it's important that I come to this process and I think it's an important thing for dramaturges to recognize is that there is somebody if you're not, if your heart's on it there's somebody who will be and maybe you can be the person who can make that connection to other people yeah I might be, if anyone was at the panel yesterday I'm probably gonna, you probably heard this already but I run a new play development center that's been around for 60 years so and it was a membership organization and so we've been working really diligently for the last 10 years to try to dismantle that thank you Bob to dismantle that and we've, we're successful so that's happening, it's become much more curatorial so part of my job really is to make sure that any work I embark on is work that I can add to or collaborate with more collaborate with than add to that I am excited about collaborating with the story and with the artist and if I'm not that I'm in sort of a quite a privileged position where I do have access to funding where I can engage with other dramaturges and set up relationships between people and so that's been, that's been huge and recognizing that doing work as a dramaturge because that is your job as opposed to being in love with the work is detrimental to the art form so that has stopped for all of us and I think it's really important I think it's fundamental I think as an institutional dramaturge of course part, you know you have a responsibility to the institution and to the agenda that's been set up by the artistic direction of the company the Stratford Festival there's a classical repertory company where Newark is just a little part of that what we offer every year and so therefore my enthousiasms are sort of in two camps there is material that one that I think has a chance of appealing to the programming needs of the organization and that 550,000 people who come there every summer as part of what our offering is and also that I feel is going to somehow challenge the organization at the same time by bringing voices in that are going to provide different kinds of work as opposed to the classical repertoire that is available so you're serving in sense two masters there and sometimes you succeed and sometimes you don't obviously the most interesting ones for me are always based on the relationships you know I fall in love with every playwright that I work with and I always feel that my first duty is to make sure that their voice is heard in a way that serves what I think is their vision and so in the some cases that can lead to work that no way the artistic director is actually going to actually think that this is a play that we should produce but along the way I've been able to give them a few dollars and give them some time and all of those things but that balancing act is a major part of my job actually is trying to figure out how to serve both those needs. So I think as theater makers like we're such collectors of really unique skills and interests and hobbies and so one question I always like to ask when I'm talking with other folks that work in theater is what else are you doing at the moment that excites you? That's fueling your work? That's something you're passionate about? You're learning about? You're participating in and volunteering with? Like just something that you're busy with at the moment that you're finding some joy in as well as the work you're doing in theater. People do other things. That's my style, yeah. Sometimes. I'm actively working. Joy is where I made a face because I'm actively working to expand my understandings of different communities and intersections and part of a collective called Consent and Respect in Theater and I'm developing workshops and facilitation for safer theater practices not just intimacy direction but like about actively methodology and consent in theater but also the work is in demystifying the processes of reporting. So flowcharts like this is the experience that's going to happen if you report to the police. This is the experience that's going to happen if you call equity. This is the experience that is going to happen. It's not joyful work. And a lot of advocacy work, a lot of work I'm working with the Asian Heritage Foundation of Southern Alberta which is on this big thing about mainstreaming but the way that the cultural community and the arts community speak and work is so different and so a process of reconciling and working with newcomers associations as well as cultural organizations to bridge communication gaps. It's not always joyful. It's a little sleepy sometimes. That's why I live in Kingston because it's not a theatrical hub in the world and it's a place that I can kind of repair to and where I can be reminded that I just live in a place which in bigger cities it's difficult to kind of remember that sometimes. And the other thing I do is right now I'm doing, I was telling Don this is so embarrassing, but the keto diet, which I become obsessed with different things. So right now it's keto and I read everything Emma knows this because many different things but I do those things because they interest me in the ongoing life experiment of being alive. So yeah, keto's is pretty cool. Yeah. I have a rock band. So we're actually rehearsing in the evenings because our drummer lives here in Toronto. So that's what I do. I try to be there for my husband. I try to make sure that my day is filled with joy that I've even in these difficult, difficult times where I sort of question everything I do and around what we do as theater makers and how we're doing it and how things are changing and how at this part of my life and in my career how do I respond to all of that? Despite all of those challenges and often the uncomfortableness of the work and the difficulties of it, I always try and remember that our job is to bring joy into the world actually. And some of the way we do that is obviously creating empathy and that ultimately what we do as theater makers makes a better world. I'll give what I wanna be doing and I'm not and what I am doing right now. I feel like after the past few months which has been really, really busy, I actually wanna do something with my hands. Like we keep saying maker and I'm like, no, I wanna actually make something that I can hold and do, I'm not doing that yet. The thing I am doing right now is trying in vain to learn French. My kids are a little bit older now. I have a seven year old and a four year old so I have a little bit more time. So what I've started doing this year is actually focus on other types of writing. I started writing and having it published as well so I started writing nonfiction. But I wanna finish my novel that I started a few years ago and I'm also starting to write with a few people a web series. Sarah, I just have one more thing because I wasn't very good. I walk every Sunday if I can. I walk other days but Sunday is when I'm usually home and it's a place called Lemoine Point. It's a conservation area and I walk it usually with the same friend but not always and I do it because I love it. It reminds me to breathe and to watch how nature changes every week as I come back to it and I find that really helpful. Thank you so much. Sarah, you and I can talk about keto because I've been trying it out too. It means like MCT oils and the healthy fat. But I just wanna thank everyone for coming to this conversation. Anyone wanna go for fried chicken? Yeah. Okay, that's what we'll do over lunch. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you so much for sharing your perspectives and your work with us. Thank you.